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Terminals are tricky beasts, especially when it comes to key bindings. I have iTerm 2 set up to report itself as xterm-256color and also do "Xterm mouse reporting". It is not as fast as Terminal.app, the search highlighting is infuriatingly hard to read (and there appears to be no way to set a preference for the direction of the search), and it is very occasionally unstable (but not often enough to really interfere with you getting your work done), but it has 256-color support (more importantly than this though, it has easily configurable and loadable color schemes, which means you can get color schemes like Solarized up and running and looking nice with ease) and does all the right things as far as things like mouse support are concerned. ITerm 2 is really the only way to go here. It’s now about basically the whole way there. Starting in 2011, however, I’ve spent a fair bit of time beating the command line version of Vim into shape and making it work the way I want, even over SSH connections or inside tmux sessions. You can get fast-and-easy context switching between your editor and the terminal with "Command-Tab".Key bindings simply work you can even set up ones like "Command-T".MacVim supports 256-color schemes out of the box.
MACVIM FASTER THAN TERMINAL MACVIM MAC OS X
Partly because the version of Vim that comes with Mac OS X doesn’t have the necessary Ruby support, and partly because MacVim has some niceties that make it pleasant to use compared to using Apple’s vim inside Terminal.app: For a long time I used Command-T principally only inside of MacVim.
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