Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tabby is a customizable cross-platform terminal app

tabby.sh

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 96 posts

Re: Tabby is a customizable cross-platform terminal app

#81

Post by efrecon »

crispinb wrote: post #41
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #3

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

Without Electron (or electronalikes), very few of the (extremely useful to me) mainstream commercial apps would be available for the Linux desktop. Before Electron, indeed, they weren't. That said, although I haven't tried Tabby so have a slightly open mind on that particular case, terminals seem like the wrong use for web tech. There's no shortage of native terminals on any platform.

I have been using VS code remote tunnels recently and used the terminal from there when connected. It's been surprisingly an ok experience. Perhaps not the fastest terminal on earth, but it'll work for most workflows

Re: Tabby is a customizable cross-platform terminal app

#82

Post by crispinb »

efrecon wrote: post #81
crispinb wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without Electron (or electronalikes), very few of the (extremely useful to me) mainstream commercial apps would be available for the Linux desktop. Before Electron, indeed, they weren't. That said, although I haven't tried Tabby so have a slightly open mind on that particular case, terminals seem like the wrong use for web tech. There's no shortage of native terminals on any platform.

I have been using VS code remote tunnels recently and used the terminal from there when connected. It's been surprisingly an ok experience. Perhaps not the fastest terminal on earth, but it'll work for most workflows

I'm not a routine VS Code user but agree it's good. Those guys know what they're doing. A slightly different case from a standalone terminal really.

Re: Tabby is a customizable cross-platform terminal app

#83

Post by KronisLV »

The multiple supported shells remind me a little bit of the Windows cmder app, which I recall being pretty decent: https://cmder.app/

But the cross platform aspect is really nice, even if in my experience using different terminal apps per platform hasn't been too big of an issue.

Maybe except for MobaXTerm feeling better than most Linux tabbed/split terminal offerings due to its usability and support for sending input to multiple remote sessions at the same time, RDP/VNC integration etc.: https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/ (something like Remmina is on par with mRemoteNG, so nice but not quite there)

Still, it's nice to have many alternatives to choose from.

Re: Tabby is a customizable cross-platform terminal app

#84

Post by thiht »

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

Yeah like terminals are perfect. The current state of terminals is more like an octagon wheel to me, it works but the edges are rough. Like, why is it so hard to copy the output of a command? Why can’t I just right click anywhere in the output and select « copy stdout », « copy stderr », « copy output »? Right now I have to scroll like a caveman, hoping my configured scroll back is high enough, and that I don’t select too far ahead

Re: Tabby is a customizable cross-platform terminal app

#85

Post by nicoburns »

bombolo wrote: post #75
nicoburns wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proper multiline editing with full mouse support is the main thing I want that warp has that I haven’t been able find in any other terminal. No enough to make me switch to a proprietary terminal though.

> Proper multiline editing with full mouse support ctrl+x cltr+e Works on every terminal. Vim and EMACS do support the mouse, you can set your editor to a graphical one.

> ctrl+x cltr+e > Works on every terminal. Vim and EMACS do support the mouse, you can set your editor to a graphical one.

It didn't work on mine (iterm2 + zsh)! But in any case, I want multiline text input without losing the context of my terminal (so I can still see the command history and the output of previous commands, and can scroll back as necessary). The functionality I've seen before to drop one into a an editor (either TUI or GUI) doesn't allow for this.

Re: Tabby is a customizable cross-platform terminal app

#86

Post by hardex »

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

It's really comments like yours that keep me going.

Re: Tabby is a customizable cross-platform terminal app

#87

Post by hardex »

illiarian wrote: post #78
wackget wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still trendy to hate on Electron? Give it up. The ship has sailed. I like native apps as much as anyone else but you've got to realise the absolute clusterfuck that is cross-platform development. Plus building rich GUIs is actually feasible when using tools that are actually meant to build rich GUIs (i.e. HTML/CSS/JS).

> tools that are actually meant to build rich GUIs (i.e. HTML/CSS/JS). These were never meant to build rich UIs. They were meant to build a text page with a few images. That's it. There's a reason why every single UI framework for these tools re-invents the same primitive controls like avatars and tabs.

That ship has sailed 15 years ago. Web is (unfortunately) the most flexible and feature-complete crossplatform GUI framework.

Re: Tabby is a customizable cross-platform terminal app

#89

Post by pxc »

abathur wrote: post #74
pxc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I had a similar experience. It doesn't help that Terminal.app is incredibly performant and stable. Even when I found a cross-platform terminal with a nice feature set, watching it jank around while some build spams 50k lines of output would quickly burst that bubble.

> watching it jank around while some build spams 50k lines of output

Add tmux to the equation and have some output like that simultaneously occuring in multiple visible windows within a single pane, and Terminal.app will also struggle, in my experience. To get a smooth experience on Mac, I had to use iTerm2 and enable the then-experimental GPU acceleration in the alpha version.

I like to have my 'window management' for terminal stuff happen inside the terminal, so that my keybindings can live in my dotfiles and apply portably across operating systems. It's a great setup for me in terms of usability and efficiency, but it's also one that relies on great terminal performance. I was surprised to discover how much I'd taken terminal performance for granted!

Re: Tabby is a customizable cross-platform terminal app

#90

Post by bee_rider »

3np wrote: post #60
bee_rider wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're on Wayland with properly set up GPU drivers, Alacritty was a top-tier performer on my benchmarks (sorry, didn't save them) but can be pathological in other scenarios.

Were you measuring throughput or latency? I’d expect to see good throughput measurements for Alacritty, I just think that only matters if something else has gone wrong (no terminal is slower than my eyeballs).
Post reply on HN