As I have been doing more and more CLI-based development lately, I ran into something I had never fully appreciated before: the terminal itself can be surprisingly unstable.

Yes, the terminal can crash too.

As my workload increased, crashes started happening often, and after looking into it, the cause appeared to be fonts that are not handled well inside terminal environments on macOS.

I was getting pretty frustrated trying to figure out how to fix it, and then I had a simple thought: if this kind of instability is common, there must already be a solution. So I started wondering whether there might be a better terminal environment designed specifically for smoother terminal-based work.

After searching around, I found that many people use a terminal emulator called iTerm2.

https://iterm2.com

To summarize iTerm2 briefly:

iTerm2 is a powerful open-source terminal built by the community to overcome the limitations of the default macOS Terminal. It offers features such as split panes, tabs, advanced search, and profiles that significantly improve developer productivity. Because of those strengths, it is widely regarded as the de facto standard terminal for developers on macOS.

Installation is simple. You can download the installer from the link above, or install it from the terminal with the command below.

usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Thinking about it, terminal-based development is basically very close to doing normal work in a Linux environment. On GUI-based operating systems, that means relying on terminal tools that recreate something similar. The most stable answer might simply be to set up Linux properly, but if that is not a familiar workflow, then a better terminal emulator is the next best thing.

I may not be understanding every technical detail perfectly, but after using iTerm2 for about half a day, it felt absurdly fast and stable.

There seem to be several other good tools in this space as well, so I organized a quick list of terminal tools worth considering.

Recommended Terminals for macOS

  • iTerm2: The most stable and feature-rich terminal, often treated as the standard on macOS.
  • Warp: A next-generation ultra-fast terminal with a block-based interface built in Rust and integrated AI features.
  • Alacritty: A minimalist terminal that aims for top speed through GPU acceleration.

Recommended Terminals for Windows

  • Windows Terminal: Microsoft’s official modern terminal with tabs, split panes, and multi-profile support.
  • WSL 2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux): An essential development environment for running a real Linux kernel and Linux distributions inside Windows. (Not a terminal app by itself, but commonly used together with Windows Terminal.)
  • Cmder: An all-in-one terminal package that can be used immediately without complicated setup and includes Git/Bash support.
  • MobaXterm: A professional terminal environment that bundles SSH, SFTP, an X11 server, and many other remote-access tools.

I hope this helps at least a little for anyone else, like me, who has been struggling in a CLI-heavy environment.