[HN Gopher] Tabby is an infinitely customizable cross-platform t...
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Tabby is an infinitely customizable cross-platform terminal app
Author : thunderbong
Score : 53 points
Date : 2023-03-11 18:58 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (tabby.sh)
(TXT) w3m dump (tabby.sh)
| ComplexSystems wrote:
| What can this do that iTerm2 can't?
| 0x00washere wrote:
| 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.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Heat your house with your CPU thanks to Electron.
| junon wrote:
| If you haven't seen WezTerm, you should.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Nice find, I'll check it out.
| danpalmer wrote:
| 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 complete makes this unnecessary, and this
| isn 't exactly a fast moving ecosystem. UX also isn't something
| that can really be competed on for a terminal app as the UX is
| typically dictated by the shell, tool, tmux, etc. By being _non-
| native_ they also lose a significant performance advantage, even
| if some parts are ported to native code.
|
| So while I think Electron makes sense for a lot of apps, I'm not
| convinced that it's got "product-market fit" for terminals.
| notyourwork wrote:
| I'm always fascinated in what features people love about the
| terminal app they use. I use iTerm2, would love to hear from
| others what features they adore or rely on most from their
| terminal?
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| 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.
| eddyg wrote:
| 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...
| danpalmer wrote:
| Absolutely. The only major feature of iTerm2 that I use over
| the Apple Terminal feature set is the tmux integration, so
| that my tabs can exist on my server and my terminal is more
| of a thin-client.
| [deleted]
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Probably the only feature those don't come with that I'd
| like is quake-style dropdown,
|
| On Linux I use yakuake for that (was in the repo), added it
| to the startup applications for my desktop environment.
|
| On my Macbook Air I didn't find anything suitable.
| Lownin wrote:
| iTerm has this feature
| https://www.karam.io/blog/2018/turning-i-term-in-to-a-
| quake-...
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| thequux wrote:
| 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.
| Groxx wrote:
| Stdout is frequently buffered _slightly_ , but yeah, once
| you exceed it your `print(...)` line becomes blocking, and
| the execution moves to your terminal until it displays or
| discards it, freeing room in that buffer.
|
| With large amounts of output, that can be a _massive_
| amount of time. As a really simple example, try `time dd
| if= /dev/random bs=1k count=1000` to print a megabyte of
| random data, vs `... > /dev/null`.
| eddyg wrote:
| You can enable ligatures in iTerm under Prefs > Profiles >
| Text. (Unfortunately ligatures are not supported by the
| Metal-based GPU renderer, which is faster than the legacy
| renderer.)
| ostenning wrote:
| 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
| silon42 wrote:
| Yeah... xterm with a few tweaks (and some pruning) would still
| be best for me.
| Aloha wrote:
| 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.
| gjvc wrote:
| electron app rubbish
| Aloha wrote:
| 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.
| spullara wrote:
| Is anyone else put off by infinitely customizable things? I used
| to love this stuff when I was a kid but now I just want things to
| work well out of the box.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Yes, I just want good defaults.
| cute_boi wrote:
| I used warp and I really like it. I don't think any terminal can
| replace warp at least for macos.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| It's written in JavaScript and it uses electron.
|
| Moving on.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Built on Electron? Hard pass. The scourge of the modern age.
| crispinb wrote:
| 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.
| baal80spam wrote:
| 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.
| mariusmg wrote:
| >This is madness.
|
| Yeap, even Sparta would bow down to a 265 MB terminal app.
| mdaniel wrote:
| The previous discussion covers a lot of the experiences with
| this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29553767
| sixothree wrote:
| Oof. That's some toxic conversation.
| pxc wrote:
| 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 have improved a lot, or maybe Tabby is an
| exception. (I'd love to hear from longtime users of Tabby
| here.)
| LambdaComplex wrote:
| > 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.
| Aloha wrote:
| Electron is a decent fit for some products - I dont think a
| terminal emulator is one of them however.
| [deleted]
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| What's toxic about it? _Negative_ , sure, but it's not toxic
| to make a substantiated negative comment.
| Y_Y wrote:
| "Toxic" seems to have become a word you say when you don't
| like something, but you want to represent that it's
| inherently bad, rather than merely in your estimation.
| eddyg wrote:
| 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
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Y_Y wrote:
| 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.
| yuhc wrote:
| I'm looking for features like external terminal, mosh and ipv6
| supports which will make a difference from other existing
| products. Otherwise it doesn't make much sense to migrate from
| excellent terminals/ssh clients like iterm, putty and mobaxterm.
| raydiatian wrote:
| Just use kitty or foot. Tabby is a kludge
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