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Tabby is a customizable cross-platform terminal app

tabby.sh

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Re: Tabby is a customizable cross-platform terminal app

#21

Post by Y_Y »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #8

I think you can make a terminal app even more infinitely customizable by allowing the user to specify a real number that will be displayed in the title bar. Since the reals are uncountably infinite, I think that will be the most infinitely customizable terminal.

Sure reals are uncountably infinite, but they're (mostly) not specifiable. Even with Turing machines I'm are afraid you're limited to countable numbers, and on these measly finite state machines they call computers these days you're even worse off.

Re: Tabby is a customizable cross-platform terminal app

#22

Post by Aloha »

ostenning wrote: post #16

Lets reinvent the wheel but rather than having it round, lets make it square so its slower and less efficient, then we can slap our names on it and cross promote ourselves for higher paying web development jobs

But you see, the square wheels have the effect of a built in parking brake, no need for pesky wheel chocks or other mechanical systems.

For v2 we're investigating octagon wheels. So far early feedback is very promising, a much smoother ride and still the built in parking brake feature.

Re: Tabby is a customizable cross-platform terminal app

#23

Post by Aloha »

pxc wrote: post #15
sixothree wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oof. That’s some toxic conversation.

I feel bad for people whose projects get shredded on HN, especially from a place of prejudice, like reflexive Electron hate. But when I actually tried a bunch of Electron-based terminal emulators on Mac a few years ago... they all felt awful . They were slow in ways I did not realize terminal emulators even could be, and they often had extension ecosystems that were similarly slow and also buggy as hell. Maybe things…

Electron is a decent fit for some products - I dont think a terminal emulator is one of them however.

Re: Tabby is a customizable cross-platform terminal app

#24

Post by Aloha »

This does seem useful as something you might embed in another website or as part of a service, an interesting use case would be to host something like this as an external facing application, with authentication and login functionality.

But I dont think it does any of that.

Re: Tabby is a customizable cross-platform terminal app

#25

Post by eddyg »

Despite the negativity in the comments (and in the comments of the previous discussion), the architecture of Tabby seems like it would lend itself to implementing "modern" features like those in the "pricing TBD" Warp[0] terminal emulator for macOS.

[0] https://www.warp.dev

Re: Tabby is a customizable cross-platform terminal app

#26

Post by eddyg »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #11
danpalmer wrote: post #10

I'm not sure what the state of terminals is on other platforms, but on macOS iTerm2 is excellent - having every feature under the sun and very good performance. If performance is a bottleneck then Alacritty is even faster, but I've never felt performance limited in iTerm. This makes me skeptical about new non-native terminals. Usually the pitch is faster development so more features, but iTerm2 already being feature…

Maybe my needs are just too basic, but I've not found much reason to look beyond Apple Terminal, GNOME Terminal, etc. Probably the only feature those don't come with that I'd like is quake-style dropdown, but I don't find that worth the quirks that come with e.g. iTerm2.

True Color support is a big enough reason to switch from Terminal.app to iTerm2.app.

But beyond the cool Quake-style "hot key" overlay terminal that's always at the ready, once you start using other features of iTerm, you'll really appreciate all the amazing features it has!

For example:

- being able to press Cmd-Shift-E to quickly show/hide timestamp overlays for your entire scrollback

- pressing Opt-Cmd-B to open the time-slider of the Instant Replay feature to go back and grab output from the terminal that's not in your scrollback because it was clobbered by `less` messing up your screen

- pressing Cmd-/ to highlight the active cursor

- pressing Opt-Cmd-M to set an annotation at the cursor so you can quickly jump through your scrollback to them with Opt-Shift-Cmd-↑ and Opt-Shift-Cmd-↓

- want to know when a long-running command finishes? Just press Opt-Cmd-A in that window or pane to set an alert and you'll get a macOS notification when the prompt appears (be sure to enable Shell Integration: https://iterm2.com/documentation-shell-integration.html)

the list goes on and on... like `vi`, iTerm rewards study of its capabilities.

No other terminal comes close...

Re: Tabby is a customizable cross-platform terminal app

#27

Post by mariusmg »

baal80spam wrote: post #4
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #3

Built on Electron? Hard pass. The scourge of the modern age.

Not to mention 100 MB for a terminal app. What in the world? edit: just looked into the linked discussion: "The gzipped tar for this is 90MB. It's 265MB unzipped." This is madness.

>This is madness.

Yeap, even Sparta would bow down to a 265 MB terminal app.

Re: Tabby is a customizable cross-platform terminal app

#28

Post by LambdaComplex »

pxc wrote: post #15
sixothree wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oof. That’s some toxic conversation.

I feel bad for people whose projects get shredded on HN, especially from a place of prejudice, like reflexive Electron hate. But when I actually tried a bunch of Electron-based terminal emulators on Mac a few years ago... they all felt awful . They were slow in ways I did not realize terminal emulators even could be, and they often had extension ecosystems that were similarly slow and also buggy as hell. Maybe things…

> They were slow in ways I did not realize terminal emulators even could be

When I type in a normal terminal emulator (xterm, alacritty, anything!) it feels "fast." There is no perceptible lag whatsoever between pressing a key and the character showing up on the screen.

Then I switch to a tty, and realize there's somehow even less perceptible lag.

I'm afraid to try one that uses Electron.

Re: Tabby is a customizable cross-platform terminal app

#29

Post by thequux »

bee_rider wrote: post #18
danpalmer wrote: post #10

I'm not sure what the state of terminals is on other platforms, but on macOS iTerm2 is excellent - having every feature under the sun and very good performance. If performance is a bottleneck then Alacritty is even faster, but I've never felt performance limited in iTerm. This makes me skeptical about new non-native terminals. Usually the pitch is faster development so more features, but iTerm2 already being feature…

I like the ligature support in Kitty. Alacritty—I used it for a while but I didn’t really notice a performance advantage. I’m not sure what people are doing where terminal throughput really matters, and when Dan Luu did latency tests (admittedly, this was a while ago), Alacritty was middle of the pack.

Quite some time ago (~15 years?), I needed to repeatedly recompile SBCL from scratch, a process that produced multiple megabytes of output per second. I found that the gnome-terminal (which I was using at the time) increased compile time by ~4x relative to redirecting the output to /dev/null. Xterm only increased compile time by ~20%, but rxvt-unicode had no measurable overhead, so I switched over and only reconsidered when it became fashionable for CLI tools to use emoji in their output.

Re: Tabby is a customizable cross-platform terminal app

#30

Post by 0x00washere »

ComplexSystems wrote: post #9

What can this do that iTerm2 can't?

One thing I think it has over iTerm2 is Broadcast across all terminals. It's fairly customizable. I prefer that over Tmux. I still use iterm2 as the daily driver, but have Tabby in my back pocket for moments I find it useful over iTerm2, which is rare, but not zero. I personally prefer iTerm2's password manager and regular expression triggers.
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