Yeah, I recently switched my main machine from macOS to Pop!_OS 21.04 (another "install and forget" distro based on Ubuntu, so kinda similar to Elementary OS) and I miss iTerm so much that I sometimes slide my chair over to the music workstation (which is still a Mac) and SSH in from iTerm just to do stuff in the terminal.
I think iTerm is probably not just the best terminal on any platform, but also one of the best software applications ever made, period. I would looove to have something like it on Linux, but I've spent several evening beers googling it, after switching to Linux, and there just aren't any.
Random things I like about iTerm, off the top of my head:
- not only is it extremely customizable, it can sync those settings across multiple machine easily via any shared-folder mechanism (I use Syncthing, but you could use iCloud Disk or Dropbox or anything)
- infinite history/scrollback retention, even across restarts
- extremely good performance, regardless of having dozens of windows open (maybe only on high-spec Macs? that's the only kind of Mac I use, since macOS is so crazy slow generally)
- timestamps on every line, hidden by default but can be shown after the fact whenever you want (e.g. hmm... when did this script output this line of text? oh, last night at 1AM, it must be hung then, kill it)
- detaches your sessions when it updates itself, then restarts and re-attaches them
- scriptable, so each project can have a little script that opens iTerm and opens a tab that runs a local dev server, another tab with REPL, another tab with unit tests in watch mode, another tab with whatever... and so on
I think iTerm is probably not just the best terminal on any platform, but also one of the best software applications ever made, period. I would looove to have something like it on Linux, but I've spent several evening beers googling it, after switching to Linux, and there just aren't any.
Random things I like about iTerm, off the top of my head:
- not only is it extremely customizable, it can sync those settings across multiple machine easily via any shared-folder mechanism (I use Syncthing, but you could use iCloud Disk or Dropbox or anything)
- infinite history/scrollback retention, even across restarts
- extremely good performance, regardless of having dozens of windows open (maybe only on high-spec Macs? that's the only kind of Mac I use, since macOS is so crazy slow generally)
- timestamps on every line, hidden by default but can be shown after the fact whenever you want (e.g. hmm... when did this script output this line of text? oh, last night at 1AM, it must be hung then, kill it)
- detaches your sessions when it updates itself, then restarts and re-attaches them
- great shell integration (https://iterm2.com/documentation-shell-integration.html) enables useful extra features
- Instant Replay
- scriptable, so each project can have a little script that opens iTerm and opens a tab that runs a local dev server, another tab with REPL, another tab with unit tests in watch mode, another tab with whatever... and so on