Blessed Is My Mac
June 17, 2007 Posted by Al Castle
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Categories: Insider, OSX, Puter Stuff
As many of you know, I come from a nix background, primarily those of the RedHat base, and Gnome flavor. Having access to the command line interface is actually where I spend most of my time no matter what platform I’m on, since the two tools I use primarily are ssh and Vim. With windows I alternate between Putty/PSCP and Cygwin, sometimes I’d start a remote Xsession and fire up Gnome Terminal, but it doesn’t work well with multiple monitors and doesn’t provide access to my local system.
OSX comes with a Terminal application which has many features and settings, that I’m pretty happy with. It does not however, support tabs like Gnome Terminal or saved sessions like Putty. So last night I’m minding my own business, tra la la around the net and I discover iTerm.
iTerm is written in Cocoa the native language of OSX, and it supports the few extras I wanted very well.
- Bookmarks - or saved session, with custom shortcut launch keys.
- Tabs - which can be rearranged and even dragged between windows or into its own window.
- Hot Keys - Ctrl+T, Ctrl+W, Ctrl+# do exactly what you’d expect, including being able to cycle through tabs.
It also supports a few extra features I wasn’t looking for, but could come in handy.
- The ability to send a single command to all open terminals.
- Create many saved profiles for keyboard, display, and terminal.
- Supports AppleScript for automation.
- Supports Bonjour protocol.
- Allows select to copy (like Putty), whereas in Terminal you have to explicitly Ctrl+c
- Tabs change color to indicate activity.
- Print Screen or Buffer
- Logging
- Saving buffer to local text file.
If you’re an OSX user who needs a proper CLI application, I recommend downloading iTerm.
Comments»
After having used this for several days now I love this app. I wish I would have found it earlier.