What does HackerNews think of nerd-fonts?
Iconic font aggregator, collection, & patcher. 3,600+ icons, 50+ patched fonts: Hack, Source Code Pro, more. Glyph collections: Font Awesome, Material Design Icons, Octicons, & more
Seriously, fonts that coders tend to use have included ligatures for quite a few years. For me, it’s less visual noise and a cleaner look.
I use Vim/Neovim and WezTerm but there are many combinations of editors and terminal emulators that support ligatures.
And many programmers fonts: https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts
https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts https://github.com/ToxicFrog/Ligaturizer
But no, they won't add them, because God forbid they actually do something useful. It's obviously more important they add five different skin tones... still don't understand what was wrong with generic yellow. Not everything has to be politicized.
The new iTerm features sound really awesome, but the one thing I'm already missing badly is inline image-rendering via escape codes. I had a great workflow set up on for viewing astrophysical data products on a remote analysis server using the itermplot matplotlib backend to render plots directly in my terminal from ipython. I'm still planning on firing up iTerm2 for that use case.
All that said, iTerm2 is the best terminal emulator I've ever used, especially when you're first learning things. I probably wouldn't have been able to switch to tmux as easily if I hadn't already used it a bunch through iTerm2's beautiful tmux integration (I'd already configured some tmux functionality for that use case). The aforementioned image-rendering should be a universal feature for terminals. And though the input and redraw lag are higher than Alacritty or Terminal.app, it's always been fast enough. I still recommend it to people with Macs who are just starting to program.
That said, if you're a speed addict and want something with limited but easily-configurable features, give Alacritty a try!
[edit] I should also mention that, if you're willing to put in more effort, you can implement a ton of iTerm2's visual bonuses (like the status bar and pretty icons) with a combination of a Nerd font [0] (particularly a pretty modern one like Iosevka [1]) and an advanced tmux configuration [2].
[0] https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts
[1] https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/tree/master/patched-...