The Return of an Old Favorite – iTerm 0.9.6.1012
In the days of Mac OS X 10.4 - when the Terminal.app didn't have tabs, I was a big fan of iTerm. But when OS X 10.5 arrived and Terminal.app had tabs and workspaces and seemed to be just as nice, then I stopped using iTerm and went back to strictly using Terminal.app. But it hasn't been perfect. iTerm has much better control of the rendering of the window than Terminal.app does, and while speed is no longer an issue, the ability for iTerm to remove the scroll bar from the window is still a big plus to me.
I've tried several hints off the internet to remove the scroll bars on the Terminal.app windows - even going into Interface Builder and seeing if I can remove them there. Unfortunately, no. It's not something that's supported any more. I can see the reason - the resize handle. If you want to have a resizable window then you need to have the resize widget. If you have that, then it's going to have to exist in the left border or the bottom. So you might as well have it in the left and not make problems for yourself.
Of course, iTerm solves this by simply removing the resize handle with the scollbar. If you're going to be looking at an undecorated window then chances are you're a guy that's going to set the size of the window and leave it. I can see the trade-off. I just wish Apple agreed and put something into Terminal.app to remove the scroll bar and resize widget.
Until then, when I really want to have a terminal window without the scrollbar and resize widget, I'll pull up iTerm. With the new version, it's better than it was, and maybe worth another serious look. After all, for all of 10.3 and 10.4, I used it instead of Terminal.app.
UPDATE: I started playing with it again and I have to say I'm a little disappointed in iTerm - it's memory usage with one window open is more than Terminal.app with nine windows open. While I'd really like to skip the scrollbars, and I will still keep it on my box, it's not worth the memory footprint. Shucks.