Beta 1: We're halfway there!

[George Nachman]

Dear iterm2-discuss,

Today's the big day that iTerm2 enters Beta! You'll find greatly
improved stability in this release. No new features will be added
until the final release from this point on. Please file bugs
vigorously so the final release can be bug-free.

Thanks!
-George

Release notes:

Beta 1
This release heralds a new age of stability. It also brings some
notable UI improvements over the previous release.

Big features:
- The Find UI was redesigned to stay out of the way.
- Smart selection added: quad-click selects recognizable objects like
email addresses, paths, URLs, host names, quoted strings, etc.
- Semantic History added: cmd-click on a filename or directory to open
it, or cmd+drag a filename to copy it (only if you're logged onto
localhost, of course).
- Reorganize preferences.
- "Help" docs revamped.

Enhancements:
- Find highlights all matches in yellow
- Flash a bell graphic (if visual bell enabled) instead of blinking the screen.
- Add key shortcut for previous/next pane (cmd-[ and ])
- Add pref to show a 1px border around the window.
- Add proprietary escape code to change cursor shape.
- Add keyboard shortcuts for controlling instant replay (601)
- Splitting a pane now uses the same profile as the original pane.
- Preserve window numbers when a window closes (746).
- Add hidden pref to adjust hotkey animation speed.
- Only confirm quitting if a terminal window is open.
- Dim inactive panes less visibly.
- Confirm overwriting saved window arrangements (686)
- Flash a graphic when search wraps.
- Add preference to disable the "alternate screen" escape codes (324)
- Add new key mapping actions to open new window, tab, split pane.
- Improve how transparent windows are drawn to be more like iTerm 0.10.
- Accept first click in terminal windows (720)
- Add preset keymapping that disables app keypad.
- Add "copy to profile" button in session info (662)
- Speed up split pane dimming animation (724)
- Add pref to disable blink (344).
- You can now unregister from handling a URL.
- Add $$RES$$ var to Command field for "everything after the scheme".
- Warn the user when a session lives less than 3 second that he may
have a bad profile. Don't quit immediately at startup.
- Add key mappings for ctrl+shift+arrow keys.
- Add warning about requirements for setting a profile's Space

Bug fixes:
- Fix memory leak related to Bonjour (705)
- Fix memory leak of process names that caused slow constant growth.
- Fix bonjour IP addresses.
- Remove variable stroke thickness (it was too slow).
- Slowness with multiple panes (
- Fix bug where fullscreen windows couldn't exit fullscreen properly (627)
- Show job name in tab title by default (690)
- Fix crash when closing a background tab where a split pane had closed.
- Fix bug where instnat replay would cause window size to change.
- Focus search field when entering profiles window (367)
- Disable transparency when window type is fullscreen.
- Draw border of fullscreen window properly when it is not transparent
and there is no bg image (700)
- Don't adjust window order when hotkey window is toggled to avoid
switching spaces.
- Change how jobs are killed when a session is closed to make them
really die (370)
- Fix a crash that happened when a session ends unexpectedly.
- Fix bug where specifying a directory caused the session to be a
non-login session (588)
- Improve how locale is detected.
- Only preserve profile name in session-set title if global
show-profile option is on (733)
- Do not show non-hotkey windows when the hotkey window closes (734)
- When scrolling part of the screen, add the top line to the
scrollback buffer it the region is adjacent to the top.
- Fix crash on autocomplete.
- Respect hard newlines when finding URLs (739)
- Fix bug where focus incorrectly returns to hotkey window after
closing autocomplete/paste history.
- Improve behavior of selection that extends after last non-empty line
when resizing.
- Fix vertical alignment of bold non-ascii text.
- Fix cmd-click on mailto: which was prepending http:// to the URL.
- Fix bug where closing autocomplete/paste history changed window order.
- Don't send input when cmd-shift-enter is pressed but doesn't do anything (731)
- Make jump to mark work when jumping down.
- Fix bug where cmd-k would reset max # scrollback lines to infinity.

[Martin Lundberg]

Great news! Updated and everything seems great except I remember reading that iTerm2 would be able to change the cursor from box to bar when changing from normal mode to insert mode in vim. Or did I understand this the wrong way? Do I need to do something for this to work?

Anyway, great work George! I really appreciate all the hard work and enjoy working with iTerm2.

[sste...@gmail.com]

On Apr 14, 2011, at 12:23 AM, George Nachman wrote:

> Dear iterm2-discuss,
>
> Today's the big day that iTerm2 enters Beta!

Yay! Great work; I'm so glad I finally found this update to the aging iTerm.

One thing I've noticed in recent builds is a vastly decreased memory footprint.

I used to see iTerm at the top of my memory-sorted lists, even beating out known memory hog Firefox.

No more! The minimum I used to see was around 250mb (!) and that just kept going up.

Now it starts at about 18 and goes up predictably as scrollback buffers accumulate, but it never approaches its former gluttony.

Thank you; great work!

S

[George Nachman]

Hi Martin,
See here: http://www.iterm2.com/#/section/documentation/escape_codes

Thanks,
G

[George Nachman]

Thanks, S! There was an unfortunate memory leak of all the tab titles
every half second. Fixing that made a big difference :)

[Chris Jones]

George et al,

Great news and great update. I'm digging the new UI changes and the addition of the thin grey border. I like.

-C

---

George Nachman April 13, 2011 9:23 PM

[Martin Lundberg]

I added it to my .vimrc but it didn't work. When I went into insert mode ]50;CursorShape=1]50;CursorShape=0]50;CursorShape=1 was just inserted into vim.

[George Nachman]

Oops, looks like part of it got eaten. It's supposed to start \e but the "e" is missing.

[Craig Paterson]

My experience so far with the new version is great.. performance seems a lot better with screens split multiple times, which got quite sluggish.. don't think i'm imagining it :-)

On 15 Apr 2011 12:06 AM, "George Nachman" <geo...@google.com> wrote:

[Martin Lundberg]

On Friday, April 15, 2011 12:05:37 AM UTC+2, georgen wrote:

Oops, looks like part of it got eaten. It's supposed to start \e but the "e" is missing.

 

Now it works, thanks! Great improvement. 

I know I'm being nitpicky but when I press ESC to get out of insert mode into normal mode the cursor which now is a vertical bar moves to the front of the letter which the cursor is over and then after maybe 1 second changes into a box. I tried disabling blinking cursor but it still looks the same. It makes it feel slow. It's not very important but it would improve the feeling if it didn't do that, any idea why it's happening? 

Also, is it possible to increase the spead of the blinking cursor? I would like it to blink a little faster :) (once again I know it's a very little thing and to some maybe a little stupid but it would improve the experience for me)

[George Nachman]

On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 12:07 AM, Martin Lundberg
<martin....@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Friday, April 15, 2011 12:05:37 AM UTC+2, georgen wrote:
>>
>> Oops, looks like part of it got eaten. It's supposed to start \e but the
>> "e" is missing.
>
>
> Now it works, thanks! Great improvement.
> I know I'm being nitpicky but when I press ESC to get out of insert mode
> into normal mode the cursor which now is a vertical bar moves to the front
> of the letter which the cursor is over and then after maybe 1 second changes
> into a box.

Unix is broken. This is how vim tells that you're pressing ESC by
itself and not as part of an escape sequence such as ESC[D (meaning
"left arrow").

> I tried disabling blinking cursor but it still looks the same.
> It makes it feel slow. It's not very important but it would improve the
> feeling if it didn't do that, any idea why it's happening?
> Also, is it possible to increase the spead of the blinking cursor? I would
> like it to blink a little faster :) (once again I know it's a very little
> thing and to some maybe a little stupid but it would improve the experience
> for me)

This can be done...please file a feature request for it.

Cheers,
G

[Martin Lundberg]

On Friday, April 15, 2011 5:19:45 PM UTC+2, George Nachman wrote:

This can be done...please file a feature request for it.

Done, http://code.google.com/p/iterm2/issues/detail?id=824 

[tonymcdaniel]

I just want to say "Thank You!" for all your work on iTerm 2. In
particular, being able to change the cursor shape in vim and cmd-
clicking to open files and folders are HUGE for me. Also, I'm not sure
when it got fixed, but I noticed that the beta draws correctly in
Expose.

Thank you for making this such a great program!

[George Nachman]

Thanks for the comments, Tony! I have a lot of fun working on iTerm2.

I don't think Exposé works any better, but perhaps you turned off
blur? This is a side-effect of the undocumented API we use to do blur.

[sste...@gmail.com]

On Apr 15, 2011, at 6:14 PM, tonymcdaniel wrote:

> I just want to say "Thank You!" for all your work on iTerm 2.

Hear, Hear!

> cmd-clicking to open files and folders are HUGE for me.

I didn't even know about that!

Quick bug report: trying to cmd-click a file name with a space in it doesn't correctly select the file name; it tries to open a web address using whichever part gets selected.

Steve
aka/S
aka/ssteinerX

[Chas. Owens]

On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 03:07, Martin Lundberg
<martin....@gmail.com> wrote:
snip

> I know I'm being nitpicky but when I press ESC to get out of insert mode
> into normal mode the cursor which now is a vertical bar moves to the front
> of the letter which the cursor is over and then after maybe 1 second changes
> into a box. I tried disabling blinking cursor but it still looks the same.
> It makes it feel slow. It's not very important but it would improve the
> feeling if it didn't do that, any idea why it's happening?

snip

Vim is waiting to see if you are going to type anything else (which
could have a different mapping). You can control how long Vim waits
for things like this with timeout, timeoutlen, ttimeout, and
ttimeoutlen. Reading :help timeout in vim may make things clearer.
My brain is fried at the moment and it has stopped making sense to me,
but I worked it out once before and found that I liked

set ttimeout
set ttimeoutlen=250
set notimeout

--
Chas. Owens
wonkden.net
The most important skill a programmer can have is the ability to read.

[Marco Ferragina]

Regression from alpha 17.

I use a statusline with vim.

Here the configuration snippet that I use
set laststatus=2
set statusline=%F%m%r%h%w\ [Row=%l/%L\ (%p%%)]\ Col=%c

Now when the cursor is at the bottom of the screen and I keep the J
key pressed to scroll the buffer down, the status line flicks. It
doesn't happen with MacOs default terminal app, and it never happened
to me with alpha 17.

This is very annoying. I've reverted my installation to alpha 17 to
prevent this.

Anyway, thanks for iTerm2 :)

[George Nachman]

I don't know how I never saw this before but it's flicking for me in
Beta 1 and Alpha 17. Weird.

[Martin Lundberg]

The flickering happens for me too.

[Chris Jones]

I submitted a similar issue yesterday about this when using tmux with vi key bindings. Scrolling down with the J key causes the tmux status line to flicker. However, using the down arrow does not produce any flickering while scrolling.

http://code.google.com/p/iterm2/issues/detail?id=827&q=tmux

-C

---

Martin Lundberg April 17, 2011 12:59 AM

The flickering happens for me too.

---

George Nachman April 16, 2011 7:09 PM

[George Nachman]

Chas.,

Thanks for posting this! You have doubled my productivity :)

> set ttimeout
> set ttimeoutlen=250
> set notimeout

-G

[George Nachman]

This is fixed in r777.

On Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 11:25 AM, Marco Ferragina

[Marco Ferragina]

Many thanks :)
I will wait for the next build.

[Martin Lundberg]

George, about how long will it take for a realease with this in it? Should I get it from source? :)

[George Nachman]

The nightly build is already up.

[Martin Lundberg]

Ah, didn't know about that, thanks! Scrolling down in vim looks a lot better now :)

[George Nachman]

Woohoo! :)

[Martin Lundberg]

Will the nightly build check for new nightly builds or do I have to do that manually? :) (I got the high cpu bug now)

[George Nachman]

Sorry, the nightly build doesn't have an auto-updater. Follow me on
twitter if you want to get announcements. I'm @gnachman.