iTerm – Safari-like Tabbed Terminals in Mac OS X

Something that has long bothered me about Apple’s Terminal.app is its lack of the ever so common “tabbed” navigation option. We see it in Safari, why not also benefit from this space saving technology when using the terminal? Behold, iTerm, a GPL’d (open source) free alternative to the Terminal.app. iTerm’s features matches what Apple’s Terminal.app has to offer on every front plus more, like tabbed terminals and Growl notifications. Apple has a history of taking good ideas from the community and including them in their operating system (widgets for example) and I hope they do the same with some of the quality work that has gone into iTerm. I haven’t noticed any downsides to using iTerm, as it appears to open just as fast as Terminal.app and it effectively gets the exact same job done. Check it out.

Developer’s home

Download now

Count ‘em, thats 5 tabs!

Here is a full feature list (direct from the iTerm homepage)

• Native Cocoa application that runs both on Tiger and earlier Panther.
• Native OS X user interface
• Support for both PowerPC and new Intel Macs
• Support of Applescript
• Transparent windows and custm background pictures
• Bonjour support
• Complete VT100 emulation, with additional support for most common xterm and ANSI escape sequences.
• Custom key-mapping
• Supports select-to-copy and mid-button paste
• Supports focus follow mouse
• Supports xterm titling sequence to change tab label
• Supports ANSI 16 colors, which are also fully customizable
• Multi-tab within one window.
• Tabs can be drag and drop between windows.
• Tab labels can change color to indicate the session activiies
• You can send keyboard input to multiple tabs
• Bookmarks for storing settings of most used sessions
• Anti-idle function that avoids disconnection because of no activity
• Universal Binary that runs natively on both PPC and Intel Macs.
• Supports all language encodings that are available with OS X
• User can specify a second font to display non-latin characters to achieve best look
• Supports double-width characters, as used in eastern Asia languages