Homebrew vs iTerm2

Homebrew makes it easy for people to quickly install any open source software (that is contained within the apps repositories) for Mac.

Once installed, you control Homebrew using the brew command. You can find packages using brew search, install them using brew install and remove them using brew uninstall.

Macports seems to be able to get into a bad state where new packages are unable to be installed, or installed software was unable to be updated. This simply hasn't happened with Homebrew. In addition to not having to deal with corruption problems, Homebrew installs packages in userland. Not requiring root to install software is a big win.

Homebrew as much as possible uses already existing libraries and tools to install software thus making builds quick and requiring few dependencies.

Homebrew installs packages to their own directory and then symlinks their files into /usr/local. Homebrew won’t install files outside its prefix, and you can place a Homebrew installation wherever you like.

One of the things to like about Homebrew is that it refuses to run things under sudo most of the time. This is a great policy, but it causes issues when you want to create symlinks or install in places that SIP has changed permissions on.

Homebrew’s recipes try very hard to use the existing tools and libraries in OS/X, so they tend to build much faster and require fewer dependent libraries.

Other than being able to customize the various shortcuts, iTerm2 also lets you customize the colorscheme, font, transparency, etc.

iTerm has autocomplete features built in. It remembers your past commands and when you are writing something on the terminal, simply pressing Control-; it will show you a drop down menu of suggestions from which to choose.

Unlike most terminal emulators, iTerm2 comes with a pretty complete set of features. It has built-in search, autocompletion, tabbed navigation, Growl support and even a built-in clipboard manager for various API keys and such.

It's possible to choose a font and adjust vertical and horizontal spacing.

You can Ctrl+Click on a file path to open said file in a text editor.

Has support for mouse actions like clicking, dragging, selecting, etc.

Issues resolved fast by quality contributors.

iTerm2 is completely free and open source. It's released under the GPLv2 license.

Easy to split panes to either horizontal or vertical sections. Makes it easy to observe multiple console windows.

If an application has terminal integration, there is high probability it allows iTerm2 to be selected.

Wanna SSH your server from multiple tabs, here you go.

iTerm2 can store up to 4M of history of commands you already used. This, coupled with the built-in search features makes it possible to type a command only once and then search for it through the history for subsequent uses.

It's a perfect base to add Oh My Zsh on top of it and enjoy a lot of themes and a really pleasant look and feel.

The great mouse and clipboard support that are built-in go really well with tmux.

Using the Preferences Menu you can set up hotkeys to map virtually any action you can think of to a single key or a combination of them. This is extremely helpful as it allows you to use shortcuts to edit commands you are typing in the terminal and while most terminal emulators have shortcuts for this sort of thing, few of them let you define your own.

Many people say they use Kitty or Alacritty because they are GPU-rendered. That was true a long time ago. But iTerm2 has been GPU rendered for years now. It's so fast and smooth that you soon forget you are in a terminal.

It's super-clean and during use it gets completely out of the way, it's a beautiful canvas for your terminal work, a pure joy that never gets old.

Can be configured to work as a drop down terminal like Quake.

Very handy to use multi-tab.