When comparing iTerm2 vs rxvt-unicode, the Slant community recommends iTerm2 for most people. In the question“What is the best terminal emulator? ” iTerm2 is ranked 2nd while rxvt-unicode is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose iTerm2 is:
Other than being able to customize the various shortcuts, iTerm2 also lets you customize the colorscheme, font, transparency, etc.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Extremely customizable
Other than being able to customize the various shortcuts, iTerm2 also lets you customize the colorscheme, font, transparency, etc.
Pro Autocomplete is built-in
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.
Pro Complete out of the box
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.
Pro Fine tuning for fonts
It's possible to choose a font and adjust vertical and horizontal spacing.
Pro Can immediately open files inside a text editor
You can Ctrl+Click on a file path to open said file in a text editor.
Pro Supports mouse actions
Has support for mouse actions like clicking, dragging, selecting, etc.
Pro Active maintainers
Issues resolved fast by quality contributors.
Pro Works well with powerline fonts
Pro Completely free and open source
iTerm2 is completely free and open source. It's released under the GPLv2 license.
Pro Split panes
Easy to split panes to either horizontal or vertical sections. Makes it easy to observe multiple console windows.
Pro Supported by many applications as a terminal app selection
If an application has terminal integration, there is high probability it allows iTerm2 to be selected.
Pro Intuitive
Pro Cmd+Shift+I to Input all
Wanna SSH your server from multiple tabs, here you go.
Pro You only need to type in commands once
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.
Pro Works perfect with Oh My Zsh
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.
Pro Works well with tmux
The great mouse and clipboard support that are built-in go really well with tmux.
Pro Any key can be mapped to any function
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.
Pro GPU-rendered, blazing fast and super smooth
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.
Pro Beautiful, minimalistic and elegant UI
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.
Pro Can be configured as a drop-down terminal
Can be configured to work as a drop down terminal like Quake.
Pro Cmd+D to split plane vertically
Very handy to use multi-tab.
Pro Low memory usage
Rxvt-unicode uses very little memory and takes a lightweight approach without losing many important functionalities. A single instance of urxvt takes about 6.5MB-8MB of RAM.
Pro Can be daemonized to reduce resource usage
For those who want to lower their system's resource usage, rxvt-unicode allows for daemonization. This way you can run several instances of urxvt inside a single process.
Pro Supports terminal transparency
Changing the transparency of the terminal is allowed for in rxvt-unicode. This not only makes for eye candy but is also good for GUI usability.
Pro Minimum dependencies and simple text config
Pro Supports multiple font types
Multiple font types can be displayed flawlessly in rxvt-unicode.
Pro Handles bold text colour properly
Displays characters with text attribute bold actually as bold glyphs.
Pro High performance
Rxvt-unicode is much faster than most alternatives.
Pro Unicode support
International language support is provided through Unicode.
Pro Proper wrapping support
During selection and pasting wrapped text doesn't break into lines at place of wrapping.
Pro Fast text rendering
Rxvt-unicode has very fast text rendering, being able to render hundreds of MB of text in a very short time.
Pro Built-in Perl interpreter
It has a built-in Perl interpreter, meaning that no install is needed. Simply run urxvtperl
.
Cons
Con Keycodes are not passed through following Linux standards
If you come from a Linux terminal emulator (Gnome Terminal, Konsole...) and you rely on key-combos that are widely supported in those, porting the same functionality to iTerm is possible but will require a lot of research and configuration on your part, so account for a long painful adoption period.
Con Not quite as fast as Alacritty or Kitty
Comparing these 3 terminals on the same machine/config, iTerm stands out as the slowest of the bunch. The difference may not be noticeable to all users.
Con Way too many menu items and settings
Finding the right one is like searching for a needle in a haystack.
Con Doesn't support Snow Leopard 10.6.8
Some people still use Snow Leopard or other 32-bit systems.
Con Doesn't support RTL
Con Unicode characters that are too wide are blanked instead of clipped
If a character in a backup font is wider than the base font, urxvt substitutes the non-displayable character. A large letter space will show the wide characters, but the result is not reasonably spaced. There is a patch from 2014 that the urxvt maintainer will not merge.
Con Requires work to look acceptable
Out of the box, rxvt-unicode is not too pleasant to look at. Some understanding of Xresources is required for updating its appearance. That being said, the experience of customizing it can be very rewarding.
Con Requires work to configure useful functionality (clickable URL's, font scaling, tabs)
Con In daemon mode you can lose all your terminals
Because of sharing the same process terminal windows cannot be killed without sacrificing all other open windows. That becomes even more dangerous if you use multiple graphical managers without overriding socket with RXVT_SOCKET.
Con Unicode rendering is buggy
There are a few references to urxvt's buggy rendering, such as unicode combining characters, which bled through during scrolling.
Con Bloated
Exists because Xterm is complete trash. Although it has a lot of features, you will most likely never use them all.
Con No support yet for 24-bit "True Color"
Though this is still not available, you can download the patched version for 24bit, here.
Con Font size cannot be changed on the fly with the mousewheel
Sometimes you may need to enlarge the font to improve readability, or shrink it to have more real estate and "hawk's eye" view of data. In rxvt you need to change the configuration file or use these commands:
$ function fontsize
{printf '\33]50;%s%d\007' "xft:Dejavu Sans Mono:size=$1::antialias=false"}
$ fontsize 22
Con No option to have a "reverse color" cursor
While you can choose the color of the cursor and the character under the cursor, there's no automatic "reverse color" for the cursor. This makes it impossible to use rxvt-unicode if you have a light background terminal and a dark background editor.