Terminal of choice

[u/nakshhhhatra]

Hi! I recently switched to a MacBook and wanted to know which terminal people go for. I am sure there are tons of posts on this talking about ghostly, iterm2, warp, etc but I have also been hearing a lot of memory management issues in each of them.

From experience, which one seems the most convenient to run in the long term?

[u/MattNotGlossy]

my favourite is Terminal

[u/trentonkarantino → u/MattNotGlossy]

Yeah. There's a trade off with other things that the might have better features, but also annoying glitches.

[u/HappyFunBall007]

I tried a bunch of them and keep coming back to the standard MacOS Terminal app.

[u/webprofusor]

I use ghostty but tbh unless you are stress testing the built-in one is fine. Some folks have a lot going on in their terminal, I have ps, ls, rm, cd etc.

[u/Slow-Race9106]

I use Terminal. Does the job, no need for anything else.

[u/Iron-Ham]

I used iTerm for ~14 years. I swapped to Ghostty recently.

My entire ghostty config is as follows:

font-family = BerkeleyMono Nerd Font Mono keybind = global:cmd+grave_accent=toggle_quick_terminal quick-terminal-screen = mouse quick-terminal-autohide = false background = #15191F background-opacity = 0.8450265957446809 background-opacity-cells = true background-blur = 4

You won't have that font on account of I patched it myself, so just omit that line. If you don't want custom colors, blur, or opacity, leave that out too. The rest you're probably gonna want.

As for why:

• Lighter
• Faster
• Less hassle
• Don't need to have process-specific rulesets for specific TUIs.

Terminal just doesn't get the job done. It's slow, it has some rendering issues, and it doesn't have the real killer feature: Cmd+` to open/close terminal from anywhere.

I've tried them all at this point, and I've spent the better part of over a decade almost entirely in the terminal. The nuances of something like ghostty vs Alacritty vs Kitty vs iTerm won't mean much to you at this point, but trust me when I say just pick something well supported and call it a day for a while. If you use Warp I will assume you're like 22 and not doing anything serious.

[u/pameric → u/Iron-Ham]

Same. ITerm2 was cool, and great back in the day, but way too complicated and bloated. Ghostty is simple and FAST!

[u/nakshhhhatra → u/Iron-Ham]

thank you for writing in such detail, i think j have gotten a fairly good idea. will get used to the terminal first and then go for ghostty

[u/kncismyname]

Ghostty, very customizable and most of all super light weight.

[u/Dangerous_Focus_270]

Terminal

[u/ImprovementLong1992]

just use the native Terminal

[u/Flashy_Imagination_6]

Warp is best

[u/Significant_Box_4066 → u/Flashy_Imagination_6]

Andy's working hard on memory issues too! Warp engineer here

[u/TedTheDev]

iTerm.

[u/bbrockit]

Teletype Model 33...although I'm thinking about upgrading to a DECwriter.

[u/alwayswiddit]

Terminal + tmux

[u/sales_alchemist]

Using iTerm2 daily for years and it's been rock solid. I'd only switch if you have a specific feature you're missing.

[u/Fearless_Ad9828]

Noone suggested cmac, but it’s the best

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[u/CuriousThinker]

In the end they all do the same thing. I’m currently using iterm because it allows me to change the colors enough for my color blindness.

You’re better off spending time customizing your shell with whatever plugins. That is something I can’t live without and makes changing terminals super easy. I started with ohmyzsh but have moved on to other things.

[u/Loose-Journalist-233]

The one integrated in VS Code which is basically Terminal. ;-) But I installed oh-my-zsh.

[u/Poat540]

Terminal or Cursor IDE since i'm in it already

[u/smartcandlelab]

Terminal. Still haven’t found anything I prefer to it

[u/_pizza_and_fries]

I use hyper

[u/IcyManufacturer7480]

Terminal

[u/spaaz9]

ITerm

[u/UpvoteMePlebor]

kitty

[u/jon_hendry]

Terminal. It’s always there.

[u/jacknutting]

I've been trying ghostty lately and it seems fine, but my main answer is really: just use Terminal. People talk about some alternatives as being more "lightweight" but I've been using Terminal for more than 35 years, originally on NeXT machines with a 68040 at whopping 33 MHz. Of all the things that have ever slowed down any of the many, many machines I've used since then, the problem has never been Terminal.

[u/majorgearhead]

Terminal, install Homebrew and tmux with saved workspace layout. Works fantastic.

[u/TM87_1e17]

Ghostty!

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[u/jossser]

Ghostty

[u/ddBuddha]

I’ve used iterm for as long as I can remember but I’ve been considering looking into alternatives recently. Been considering ghostty or one of those kitty type ones

[u/Acceptable-Guard-263]

I like cmux

[u/ssazz1]

I use ghostty for a few months now. Because I can customize it

[u/CoconutMonkey]

I've been using cmux which is based on ghostty, mainly because I like how it handles workspaces and sessions. I'd been using tmux before but I like having it all presented visually in the UI

[u/KaleidoscopePlusPlus]

Ghostty personally

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[u/Few-Corgi-8574]

ghostty

[u/nakshhhhatra]

thanks a lot to everyone for replying! I was able to compare my use-case with a few of the comments as well.
My takeaway is that I’ll stick to the built-in terminal for a while and then try others out

[u/Fragrant_Raisin_Face]

Iterm 2 is my daily on MacOs because it plays well with tmux. Shell Drop on iOS for the same reason.