I might be in the minority, but there is nothing I prefer about iTerm2 vs terminal.app. In fact, I think text color representation is much more accurate in terminal. And I don't need window-paning / split screening since I do all of that in Emacs anyways.
I don't really care about Terminal.app anymore, iTerm does full screen and 256 colors well, and iTerm2 is under development and has even more fancy features.
For me, the main reason I moved to iTerm2 was because terminal only had support for 16 colors (I think ... it was 4-5 years ago). So I just use iTerm now out of habit. I didn't have any other issues with Terminal.app.
I'm sure I'm missing iTerm2's big appeal, but every time I try to use it, I find myself going back to Terminal.app, which I find more responsive and just as featureful, especially when combined with zsh and a windowing manager. That's probably just because I'm familiar with it and I didn't come from tmux or anything similar, but I keep hoping I'll be "enlightened" at some point and realize the error of my ways ;)
Out of curiosity, why do you love iTerm? It's always struck me as kind of ugly (especially its preferences). And AFAIK, the only real feature it has that Terminal.app doesn't (besides the native tmux integration, because I still don't really see the point) is support for apps customizing the 256-color palette on the fly (e.g. the initc capability), and wile I really would like to see Terminal.app gain support for that seeing as how the xterm-256color terminfo it uses declares that it works, lack of support for that isn't a good enough reason to switch away.
I recently switched to iTerm2 from Terminal.app. The main reason for switching for me was that iTerm2 has great full-screen support. Just hit Cmd-Enter and you're immediately greeted with a full-screen terminal.
What converted me to iTerm was using Vim with a decent color scheme (e.g. Solarized or Base16). Even though supposedly it's possible in Terminal.App, I could not get it working (Mavericks). After hours upon hours of trying, and retrying, I gave up (in?) to iTerm because it just worked.
I do prefer Terminal.App. To me it feels more polished and stable and I'm used to it and it comes with the OS. I appreciate iTerm and the work put into though and it's what I currently use, but if I could get my Vim setup working in Terminal.App I would switch back.
Terminal.app is actually pretty broken in a lot of ways. If you use iTerm2 for a few weeks, even with minimal or no customization, you'll feel the difference if you go back.
I used iTerm for many years because it was so much better than Terminal.app.
At the suggestion of a coworker, I recently switched back to regular Terminal.app and it does everything I need, but with much less cpu/ram usage and 'feels' faster. This is one area where Apple has really done a good job in improving things.
As much as I love this alternative solution, I'm mot sure I'd go back to iTerm2 unless I had a specific need that Terminal didn't address.
I was using iTerm2 while Vim was my main text editor. Recently I switched to Emacs, and now my iTerm2 usage is lower for 60%. It's lower to that point that I ask my self is it now worth over Terminal.app. I used it because it had True Colors, while Terminal.app didn't, and it was a deal breaker for me. Now I am considering ditching iTerm2 since I feel it is slower than stock terminal. Used it for years btw, worked great with my nvim/tmux/zsh setup. But now it is kinda all falling apart since I installed emacs.
Yeah, Terminal.app isn’t necessarily better than iterm2, depending on what you need out of your terminal emulator. The latter’s got more features, for sure. The Mac platform’s just blessed with two way-above-average terminal emulators, one installed by default, is all I mean.
Besides Firefox, iTerm2 is my most used app, by far. I love the customizability of it, the Visor mode, and how stable it it to work with. I've used it so long, I don't even remember why I don't use Terminal.app any more.
I switched to Iterm2 a couple of years back, my main reason back then was that Terminal.app was missing a lot of features which I had gotten used to when using Linux (Terminator it was, I believe).
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