Create account

DEV Community

What terminal do you use?

Hossam Mourad on July 08, 2020

I was a long term user of iTerm but recently made the switch to Hyper.

What terminal do you use and what kind of extensions/tricks/aliases that you use frequently?

David • Jul 13 '20 • Edited

Why did you switch to Hyper? I've test-driven it and found it to be quite clunky.

I was using iTerm2, but switched to Alacritty. Some of the pros:

the speed difference is perceptible to me
it is written in Rust which I'm a huge fan of
portability across different Linux distros and macOS
configuration is easy and portable (saved in a dotfile)

cons:

no tabs (I use tmux)
single instance so I must move it around (although people have figured out a way to do it w/o any additional plugins or software under the issues tab)
no status line : I like knowing my resource utilization in real-time without resorting to Mac's Activity Monitor, top, or htop (but certainly less distrations)

It's more for the keyboard shortcut warriors IMO that use emacs/vim with tmux. Hard for me to go back to iTerm2 with tabs now because I have at least five sessions open, each housing a different project or repo, employing tmux plugins like resurrect and continuum give me auto-save and restore on reboots or even connecting remotely. I wish I had known sooner how easy it was to get up and running and learn tmux. I never have to figure out how to re-open all my projects anymore when the system panics or dreading a restart