If you're a developer, system administratir, or just a general Mac power user, you're probably very familiar with Terminal functionality. Command line tools, while intimidating to learn, offer some of the fastest and slickest ways to get serious work done on your macOS machine. Customizing your terminal is a rite of passage, and can be the ultimate productivity hack. You can slowly build up a collection of macros, aliases, scripts, and dotfiles that personalize your experience into an efficient command line interface, limited only by your typing speed. iTerm2 is the king of this, and while the stock macOS terminal is far from bad, iTerm2 can really level up your customization and productivity game.

What is iTerm2?

An insanely customizable terminal emulator, built for macOS

iTerm2 is a complete terminal replacement for macOS. Terminal emulators have come a long way over the last few decades, morphing from simple remote consoles into complex tools with many features and customization options. iTerm2 is one of the best options for macOS, and it is one of the first things I install on a new Mac.

Designed from the ground up for macOS, iTerm2 is FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) licensed under the GPLv2. You can get it as a DMG on the project's website.

If you're using brew, you can also install it as a cask with:

brew install --cask iterm2

While the default terminal has improved significantly, swapping it out immediately when you get a new computer will save the work of porting for a specific feature or customization option you may want later.

What makes iTerm2 so great?

Endless customization and some nifty features

iTerm has been in a bit of a battle over the past few years, as Apple has made steps forward to develop the functionality of the stock macOS terminal. But iTerm still has some killer features which set it apart.

Split Panes

If you're a fan of a terminal muxer like tmux or screen, this feature might not be for you. But, if you're looking for a simpler way to split your terminal window into multiple panes, iTerm2 has you covered. With customizable hotkeys (without the need of a clunky config file), it has built-in support for separate shells, including some neat features not easily possible with CLI muxers such as dimming inactive sessions.

Still want to use tmux anyway? Don't worry — iTerm2 has inbuilt tmux integration out of the box, so a new system isn't forced on you if you don't want it.

Guake-like window hotkeys

We featured something similar to this in our top tips and tricks for the Windows Terminal. iTerm2 allows you to bind a specific keyboard key to bring a terminal window to the foreground — whether sliding in from the top of the screen, magically appearing in the middle like Spotlight search, or any manner of other customizable options. This is great for when you're working on a single monitor — you can easily reference documentation, guides, or other content while quickly having a hotkey to toggle back and forth to a terminal prompt, and it's always a cool effect to have your terminal drop down seamlessly from the top of your monitor. This is one we'd highly recommend that you set up.

Copy Mode

As a urxvt user, this one is a personal favorite. iTerm2 features an inbuilt copy mode — a copy mode activated via keyboard which instantly freezes the contents of the screen (even if there's a noisy script or log file dumping onto it). This function allows you to select and copy content either by line or across a larger rectangle. This makes it far easier to fish out specific error messages or log lines to pass on to Google. Copy mode is activated using control + space, and is exited using either escape or q. It uses Vim bindings by default, so if you're not familiar with home-row navigation you might want to get used to that in vi first.

Visual customization for a lifetime

iTerm2 is absolutely packed with customization options. Perhaps you would like your terminal to be completely transparent, or to show a taskbar or not, the good news is that you can customize almost everything about iTerm2. Whether it's your pointer, how or where different windows should open, custom window titles or tab names, and a million and one other things — iTerm2 lets you do it. There's far too much to go over in detail here, but iTerm2 really has some of the best customization I've ever seen in a terminal emulator. And if that's not enough, it also has full profile support (including dynamic and hotkey switching) so that you can flip between customizations easily.

And much more…

It would take us ages to thoroughly list all of iTerm2's features in-depth, the list goes on and on. Fundamentally, iTerm is a mature and well-built terminal emulator full of treasures for more serious productivity on macOS. This includes great quality-of-life features for those of us who've migrated from more complex Linux setups, like full focus-follows-mouse and proper mouse reporting. It's also got nice integration with other muxers (such as tmux), dynamic profiles, and other quality of life features like a global search across tabs.

Experimental features keep coming all the time

iTerm2 is being updated constantly — you can check out how development is going or even make feature requests on Github. There's also a wealth of other options buried in the settings menu's Advanced tab, including a range of experimental features. Here you'll find everything from niche performance tweaks & integrations, to endless customization of settings and options. Most of these are only for specific use cases, but it's great that they're available and surfaced for the user if you do need to find a more advanced feature.

If you're interested in checking out the full list of iTerm2 features, there's a great list that is maintained on the project's website. I'd recommend flipping through some of them and picking out the bits that matter to you. iTerm2 really is quintessential high-quality macOS software, and I'm still amazed that it's free. Unfortunately, it is limited only to macOS, but its narrow platform focus has clearly helped developers focus on quality and stability. If you're not a fan of the stock Terminal, or looking to level up your productivity, I can highly recommend iTerm2.