The comments in this thread are depressing, I expected much better from HN.<p>The AI features are but 1 minor aspect of this release, they are optional, you can change the URL to point to a local LLM, yet people are pretending like all your data is going to be sent to OpenAI if you update.<p>I’m not sure if people are being intentionally daft or are just not reading anything past the word “AI” (which, again, isn’t even listed as the top feature of this release).<p>If you don’t want to use it, don’t put in an API key. It’s not like you are going to accidentally enable it.<p>iTerm2 is one of the most solid pieces of software in use on a daily basis. To the point that I often forget it’s not a default/included app. It has a million configuration options and it makes complete sense for them to /offer/ /optional/ AI/LLM features.
Hi! I’m the author. I wrote my thoughts on the AI furor here (in two unlinked parts because I’m apparently bad at computers):<p><a href="https://techhub.social/@gnachman/112481098349565431" rel="nofollow">https://techhub.social/@gnachman/112481098349565431</a><p><a href="https://techhub.social/@gnachman/112481098800427110" rel="nofollow">https://techhub.social/@gnachman/112481098800427110</a><p>I’m happy to discuss the tradeoffs.<p>There’s a change coming in the next dot release so managed environments can disable all generative ai features. I’ll keep an eye out for what others do in this regard to support enterprise users.
I really just don’t want software to have these ai things in them. How long are they going to maintain it?<p>If they want to allow extensibility for the explicit purpose of Llm integration then why not just… make an API?
A lot of the comments mention the AI inclusion from an LLM-is-everywhere point of view. I'm also a little confused about why behaviour like that is in a <i>terminal</i> rather than a <i>shell</i>?<p>To my mind I just want the terminal to render text and handle input, and then it's my shell's job to define behaviour of commands etc.<p>I find that a super helpful distinction- what if you like iterm but want a different shell like fish or xonsh? How does the LLM integrate there? Is it still gonna spit out zsh commands?<p>I'm not an apple user, so maybe I'm missing something abouf iterm?
So what are the good Mac-centric alternatives for folks who don't want OpenAI snooping around their terminal? Warp already went all-in on AI and cloud, now iTerm headed down that same path.<p>Alacritty? Kitty? Hyper?
iTerm is such an amazing piece of software. It's one of the first things I install. Glad the settings dialog had a "donate" button tucked into the corner; did that straight away. The value for money is absurd.
What are the security implication of this? Can you really trust an external entity arbitrarily sending commands as responses. The attack surface is huge and I expect we'll see AI integration as shocking as telnet support at some point in the future.
> A new AI feature in the Toolbelt, "Codecierge", lets you set a goal and then walks you step-by-step to completing it by watching the terminal contents<p>What exactly is “watching the terminal contents”? Does this happen locally or is data sent to a third party?<p>If a third party is involved, what data is shared exactly?
I write this as a top level to avoid targeting anyone specifically but also, my rage is so hot that I have to say it: I think this thread sucks and am appalled by most of the things people are saying.<p>AI is fine. iTerm2 is awesome. You are a bunch of ingrates complaining about living in an age of miracles and wonder.<p>Could things go badly some day, sure. Is it ok to have ethical concerns about where AI fits in, sure. Is it reasonable to whinge like this? Only if you are a dogmatic fool.
"- Clipboard content reporting via control sequence OSC 52 is now supported, but requires user consent to enable."<p>This pairs well with the recently released neovim 0.10 support for OSC 52 to interact with the clipboard.
News headline from May 2025 -<p>"Junior developer at <big-corp/gov-org> exposed and then deleted all customer/citizen's data after enabling AI integration in popular IT tool 'iTerm', and allowing AI to 'Run commands automatically' on the <big-corp/gov-org> systems."<p>And we'll do it to ourselves with our race to the bottom - clueless middle managers pushing for "more performance" and creating zero sum competition environments. If I were a junior dev today, I'd feel like I need to enable AI everywhere to compete and survive.
Up next: AI integration in /bin/ls<p>Seriously, though, iTerm is an absolute beast. I'm using it every minute of the day for the last like ten years or so, on beta channel.
Genuine question from iTerm users: which of its many, many features do you use most and find most valuable? I have always had it installed, but Terminal.app from macOS seems to have been enough for me. Maybe because I’m always using tmux anyway and that covers some of iTerm’s advantages. But I’m still curious about iTerm.
Ghostty - a modern cross-platform very fast terminal written in Zig by non other than Mitchell Hashimoto of Hashicorp fame - is currently in private beta. Public release date is not set but seems to be in few months. BTW, getting into private beta is not difficult. I am using it as my daily driver and love it!
Impressive release.<p>I absolutely love this:<p>> If you use shell integration and the output of a<p>> command goes past the top of the screen, the<p>> command will be shown at the top.
Is it just me, or allowing hallucinations into my terminal a line that I am not willing to cross?<p>Also, it would make a lot of sense to have an option to use a local ollama instance instead--otherwise this just feels like a cool feature that seemed like a good idea at the time, and not something thought through where it regards privacy and likelihood of damage.
iTerm is a great program and I love it.<p>If there is one thing I could add to it, I really would like "IDE style autocomplete", like fig promised, and I guess that warp terminal or whatever it's called.<p>Right now when I press "CMD+;" it pops up an autocomplete style box, I would just like to have pretty much that but always on, and filled with suggestions for the command being typed, like an IDE or code editor with a language server.<p>I know I'd get a lot more use out of that than any kind of AI feature – but in the end it's a free tool and has served me well, I don't want to complain about it, I would recommend it to anyone.
Are we past the point of no return? Does all software need to have AI features now? I know it's opt-in, but just knowing it's there makes me not want to use this any more.
There are so many AI critics in the comments. It's a pity they ignore all the good features in version 3.5.0 and focus only on a small, completely optional feature.
iTerm2 is still the best terminal emulator on macOS, thanks to the hard work by @gnachman. I've tried to switch to alternatives like Kitty and WezTerm several times in the past decade, but none of them beat iTerm2 in terms of stability, feature richness, and ease of configuration. While iTerm2 may fall short in rendering efficiency, compared to how well it performs in other aspects, that's a minor concern.
I'm waiting for the FBI to infiltrate OpenAI and force them to report everything under secret NDA. AI services are a tool to track and convict hackers.
How does iTerm compare to Prompt from Panic for people who used both a lot?<p>I just use the default terminal that comes with macOS but was considering trying one of these ones.
It's a shame their "OpenAI" integration doesn't let you specify the Base URL and model. Then it could have worked locally with ollama (or with any other OpenAI compatible API if that matters: mistral, groq, ...)<p>It's a bit of a shame to see an open source product makes an "OpenAI" only integration when they could have make it work with minimal effort with the free and open alternatives (ignorance maybe). Hopefully I can contribute that.
I'm really disappointed that iTerm2 is adding AI gimmicks :/ Last place I want that crap integrated is in the terminal. Next disappointment is that there's no obvious checkbox for disabling it.
Can all the Helen Lovejoys angry about this nonsensical feature please just stop using iTerm?
iTerm would lose a single digit number of users and $0 of income.