First, an introduction to a series. I have realized that when I want to find the best piece of software for a given category, I read some reviews, I check out screenshots, but mainly I install every player in the category and put them all through their paces. This should be evident from my roundup of Mac text editors. In my head, I rate them for many things, and figure out which suits me best. But aside from just writing rambling reviews, I figure I should make these raw evaluations more readily available. So I would like to regularly review a pile of apps in a given category, and accompany them with comma- and/or tab-delimited tables. In the future I will also compile these tables into a regularly-updated SQLite database. Today is terminal emulators, of which there are apparently more than just Terminal.app and iTerm.
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Terminal Emulation on the Mac
Lesser known, round one.
There are well-known best-in-class Mac apps for tackling many tasks. In fact, many Mac users are Mac users because of certain tools (Final Cut Pro) that are well known and highly regarded. Aside from the obvious choices (Creative Suite, unfortunately, is still the only serious contender for design work), there are a handful of programs that every serious Mac user knows about - Quicksilver (and now, Google Quick Search Box) for a launcher, TextMate for a text editor, Transmit for an FTP client, Dropbox for cloud storage, and Quinn for Tetris. There are excellent alternatives to most of these, and power-users know and have tried them all. But we each have our own lesser-known favorites, without which we probably couldn't make it through the day…
Chrome VS Safari
Project Chromium for a Week was pretty uneventful. I got pissed off at the constant barrage of beachballs from Safari, and started The Project a few days ahead of schedule. Chrom(e/ium) works well enough, and I've stuck with it, even after the official end of The Project. Up until recently, your choice of web browser on the Mac was essentially Safari, Firefox, or Opera. There are also the antiquated IE for Mac and OmniWeb. In my opinion, all but Safari are completely laughable. Chrome is the first real competitor, in my opinion. Firefox is probably next closest - I know some are willing to put up with its joke of a UI in the name of extensibility and openness, but I am not. Chrome's UI is nowhere near perfect, but still much more pleasant to use than Firefox. Rather than write a lengthy essay on why I'm using Chrome for now, or why I might switch back to Safari some day, I figured I'd just throw together a quick pro/con list, and leave it up to the reader to prioritize.