I really like using tmux and vim, but it was unbearably slow on iTerm2 (afaik, this is due to tmux. Running vim standalone is fine). Googling and profiling vim didn’t really help. I concluded that the Mac terminal emulator is just slow (?). Unfortunate.

I tried switching to Alacritty, which is very buttery, but I missed some of the features that iTerm2 has (e.g., the hotkey window).

In an attempt to make rendering faster, I turned off anti-aliasing (iTerm2 > Preferences > Profiles > Text > Uncheck Anti-Aliased). Anti-aliasing “smoothes” the jagged edges of curves. This makes your text look crisper. So, while tmux/vim performs well now, the terminal doesn’t look so good, but it’s fine for me. Trade-offs…

Aesthetic comparison: anti-aliasing-comparison

back up