Home General Usage Preferences Profiles Bookmarks Scripting Installation Misc | General Usage For casual users, iTerm can be straightforward. When starting up, iTerm will create a default session that take you to your home directory with your default shell. You can however set up iTerm in millions of ways. This can be done in the Preferences Panel, Profiles Window, and Bookmarks Window. The Tab The tab might be the most important feature of iTerm. It works as (and looks like) the tabs in Safari. Further more, you can drag and drop tabs between windows, tear down a tab to create a new window, or even join a window with just one tab into another window. All tabs with a window will have the same size and same font, regardless what the settings for each session is. However, if you tear a tab to create a new window, it will restore its own setting. By default, the label of each tab is the name of the session. You can however change the label either from the Info panel, or using escape sequences (ESC ]0;string^G) from within the session. The color of the label indicate the status of the tab. Normally it will be black. A dead session has a greyed out label. If a background tab is having some new output, its label will change into magenta. Once the new output stops, its label will be red. Therefore, you can run a long make in the background. You do not have to check it frequently. Once the label changes to the red, you know it is probably done. You can also set up a Growl notification in case you have iTerm window buried underneath other windows. Toolbar The toolbar lets you do things quickly. The New button gives you a list of bookmarks to launch. Hold the Option key for launching in a new window. The Info brings up the Info panel. The Bookmarks gives you a bookmark draw. That is just one more way to launch a new session. It is especially useful when you need to look at your bookmarks all the time. The Close button closes the front tab, and the window if it is the last tab. And finally, the Execute field lets you to type in the command locally before you send it to the terminal. You can also type in a URL. In this case, iTerm will launch the URL handler, in some case it is another application. If you press TAB key instead of Enter after you type in the command, a new session will be launched with your command. Info Panel Info Panel lets you examine the property of the session. You can change the settings. Notice the change you do here will not be saved, unless you press the Update button. Mouse Although iTerm is a command line tool, it nevertheless lets you to use the invention of GUI era, the mouse. Mouse works mostly the way you would expect. Xterm mouse reporting is supported (there is an option in the Terminal profile to switch it on and off). Hold down Option key will temporarily disable xterm mouse reporting, so that you can select and paste text. Double-click selects a word, triple-click selects a line. Quadruple-click, well, does nothing yet. Shift key lets you extend a selection. Ctrl key mimics the right-click. Command-click launchs a URL. Command key is also used to drag and drop selected text. If your mouse has a wheel, that works too. Keyboard Key behavior is very configurable in iTerm. Go to Profiles Window to set it up to your taste. By default, command left/right arrow lets you cycle through the tabs. Command 1 to 9 brings you directly to a tab. Command ` and ~ cycle through the windows. If you have problem using certain keys in your session, make sure your TERM setting is correct. iTerm uses terminfo to get the key information. If that does not work, you can always create a keyboard profile to specify your own key bindings. Many key bindings invovling the Command key need to be "high priority". Contextual menus There are a couple of useful contextual menus available in iTerm. The first one is available by right or control clicking in the text view of a tab. This brings up options to launch new sessions or select among the sessions already open. When the option key is held down, new sessions are opened in new windows. Also, selected text can also be sent to the default web browser and email client. You can launch a google search for the selected text. You can also command-click on URLs to launch them directly. Finally, other standard functions such as copy, paste, save, and close are also available. The other contextual menu is availble by right or control clicking on a session's tab. This menu provides options to select among open tabs and to move a specific tab to a separate window.

Modified: Jan 12th, 2006
Created: Dec 18th, 2002
Fabian and Ujwal S. Setlur
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