My terminal.app color scheme uses P3 colors on 7% gray rather than the usual sRGB colors so that I can use an OKLCH equidistant palette, and I make extensive use of shift-cmd-up to select and copy “the previous command’s output”. I considered switching for 24-bit color but ultimately I prefer not having to learn a new “rudimentary” app that’s deficient versus my nostalgia just like all the others, and it drastically reduces my stress level when working on other people’s devices that I am proficient in working with an OEM environment.
I occasionally use tabs but for the most part I prefer windows, so that I can drag them around and over/underlapped with other work I’m doing in my GUI. Not a big fan of screen and tmux except as their limited value to me in mitigating ssh disconnects when that’s a concern.
Perhaps your definition of power user is limited to uses aligned with your own?
I was clearly being flippant. Terminal.app does suck but if you’re happy in it then I’m not going to judge.
For what it’s worth, I cut my teeth on very limited terminals of the 80s and 90s too.
But I ended up writing my own terminal emulator because I wasn’t entirely happy with any of the options available these days.
Clarification: As noted above, Terminal.app is indistinguishably suck from all the rest in the areas that are materially important to me, so no meaningful gain in happiness exists with any current alternative. I enjoy one of the specific features it offers but I’d give that up the instant a relevant-to-me improvement over the status quo was available. Perhaps someday.
The built-in editor for all files had two modes, line-based and character based. In edit (char) mode, you edited the text file as usual. In line (command) mode, you selected lines and hit Return on them to begin execution there.
Commands were wrapped in curly braces; non-wrapped text was ignored.
The built-in phone directory was just a macro file with a dedicated keystroke; so you could structure and annotate it however you liked, and navigate it with search or with line-based mode up/down/pgup/pgdn as one would expect. Each entry was something like {dial 472627} {user x} {pass y} {ifca {goto :autologin_wwiv}} {end} with whatever niceties you enjoyed outside the curly braces.
It understood {gets} and {puts} from the modem tty (I don’t remember the actual command names) and it had conditional logic and substring index stuff.
If you needed human input, you could throw a {dialog} and get it, acting according to the result.
In modern parlance, imagine if your terminal emulator had ansible playbook support embedded into it and pressing alt-E popped up an editor for the playbook that let you start playback from any point in the script, JMP/GOTO-style.
You can see an example playbook at https://ftpmirror.your.org/pub/misc/dos/cavebbs/The%20Cave%2... inside PWRMC30S.ZIP. Read everything that isn’t a .MAC file first so that you know where to start reading. POWER.MAC is the main attraction; 53k of playbook macros serving as bionic assistance to TradeWars players.
My own archives are currently probably-lost unless I get very lucky someday, or else I’d share my own archive of playbooks built up over five years to auto-dial and auto-QWK hundreds of local BBSes for two-way mailing list packets.
Sigh.
For a long time I installed iterm2 because "that's what you do" but one day I realized I was suffering a little wasted disk space, slightly slower start-up, and slightly worse input latency, for... no reason, because I didn't do anything with it that Terminal.app couldn't do.
25 years on unixy operating systems. Spend tons of time in the terminal.
