I’m an avid user of iTerm2, mainly because I’m an old linux geek, and the Terminal.app that comes with OSX is a raging piece of junk. God how I miss kterm sometimes. But iTerm2 is a really great replacement for kterm.

The project itself is under heavy development, and is continually being updated. The recent activity in tmux integration alone is awesome all by itself, but the constant upgrades come at some cost.

This cost sometimes, however rarely, comes in the form of “Where did they move X this time?” One of these questions came up on twitter this week, and a collection of brains bigger than mine let me help them find a solution.

The basic question was “I just upgraded iTerm2 to the latest version, and now, when I open iTerm, I have to ask it to open an actual terminal window. How do I get iTerm to open a stinkin’ window when I start the app?”

This didn’t happen to me, so I needed to do some investigation. What I found was that iTerm2 has the ability to open custom window arrangements to better suit your workflow. For some people, the default window set (open one big window when I start) seems to have gone missing, so here’s how to get it back.

There are two settings, one in the general preferences, and one in the “Arrangements” preference. In the general tab, make sure “Open default window arrangement” is checked:

Now we get to setup a default arrangement for iTerm to open at startup. I typically close all of my windows, open one, set it up the way I want, then go to the Window menu, and Save Window Arrangement. Once your window arrangement is saved, open up the Preferences again, this time, go to the Arrangments tab, select the arrangement you just created. It may or may not be called Default, the important thing is that whatever arrangement you want to be the default is checked.

And that’s pretty much it. If you have any questions about iTerm2, please let me know, I’ll see if I can help.

/korishev