iTerm: Faster, with Safari-like tabs 3 comments

Posted by robon September 13, 2006

The other day, my PowerBook’s drive croaked and I was given a loaner machine (one of Tim’s old ones; keys worn down, no battery, etc.). Normally I use Panther at work but this loaner came with Tiger.

The first thing I noticed was how slow iTerm (version 0.8.2) runs under Tiger. This is pretty much a show-stopper in my world. I guess I should explain why. For me, the idea of going back to a terminal without tabs would be like using Firefox with a new window for each page!

I confirmed the slowness with other developers at work using it and Tiger. They all had various solutions, including just using a dozen Terminal.app windows instead. I started digging into the iTerm project to see if development was still active. I hadn’t notice much action since the release of 0.8.2. This was Monday, and the very next day I saw this on the iTerm project page (http://iterm.sourceforge.net/):

New Look 9/12/2006
We are experimenting with a new tab control (PSMTabBarControl) that can mimic Safari-like tabs. Download the binary build from the latest CVS and check it out.

It certainly looks like these guys (Fabian and Ujwal) aren’t bored with the project just yet. I grabbed the latest source from CVS to have a look. You should do the same and help them test it. Download the project source with this:

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@iterm.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/iterm co -P iTerm

or just grab the binary build from the latest CVS.

I’m running it now and the result is good: I appears the memory leaks are cleaned up and I can fly around vim and the shell like I own the place. Also, check out the new Safari-like tabs:

Fabian and Ujwal: Thanks so much for continued development of this great tool.


Comments

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  1. Rob Sanheim – September 15, 2006 @ 06:49 AM

    Thanks for the tip – I originally gave up on iTerm after seeing how sluggish it felt. This build seems to a quite a bit better.

  2. procreate – September 16, 2006 @ 01:53 PM

    Have you tried (gnu)screen in Terminal.app? Might not be for you, but worth a try if you’re not familiar with it.

  3. Rob Orsini – September 16, 2006 @ 09:07 PM

    @procreate, I think you might have shared your .screenrc with me.. in #caboose? Well anyway, I think I could get used to it if I had to, but it’s still a little less visual then seeing tabs for me.

    Also, I use screen a lot when shelled into servers. How does using two layers of screen work? I suppose they would need different control keys.

    Anyway, the iTerms guys are pretty responsive and are fixing every bug you send to them these days. Good news.