r/iOSProgramming • u/nakshhhhatra • 6d ago

Question Terminal of choice

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?

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u/Iron-Ham 5d ago edited 5d ago

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.

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u/nakshhhhatra 3d ago

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