25 ms·

Tabby – A Terminal for the Modern Age

68 points by als0 5y ago

bitigchi 5y ago
Why would I want to run a whole web browser for shell access? Hard pass.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  Thing of the 'whole browser' as basically a GUI framework these days.
  - ziftface 5y ago
    I thought that peoples' reactions to electron apps was way overblown, and it certainly comes with benefits, like customizability. So I thought I'd try hyper shell on windows. It was unusable. I expected terminal windows to open right away but there's a really annoying delay every time you open a new one. Really, everything was slow. Maybe it was just my computer. I would definitely prefer to use a less capable terminal that's fast.
  - ur-whale 5y ago
    > Thing of the 'whole browser' as basically a GUI framework these days. An a very bloated one at that.
- mthoms 5y ago
  Because Clippy? https://github.com/Eugeny/tabby-clippy https://github.com/Eugeny/tabby-clippy :) Seriously though, I've got a potential use-case where I want to cobble together a few related scripts into an an ad-hoc REPL that supports HTML and image output. A key library I have to use is written in JS. Granted, this is my first time seeing Tabby so I'm not sure if it will work - just that I might see a use for it. I agree with your sentiment 100% though - this is way too heavy for a day-to-day shell.
- sigmonsays 5y ago
  I second the hard pass. My comments below oh my god, the .tar.gz is 90MB compressed, uncompressed its 265MB. The xterm source code is 7-8MB. We dont need a terminal 33 times the size of a basic terminal. While I entertain the idea of a terminal in a web browser, I dont believe it has the ability to capture the keyboard entirely for tmux, emacs, etc to work. I also think the use of a web based terminal is quite limited to specific scenarios. Perhaps it would be nice to connect to a k8s cluster on a remote machine.
smallerfish 5y ago
They need a website for the modern age. Oh, it finally loaded.
- Aloha 5y ago
  they have one, thats the problem.
dhruvmittal 5y ago
Is this the same thing as Terminus? It looks weirdly similar, down to the logo, so I'm assuming this is a soft relaunch?
- shellac 5y ago
  Termius is a mobile ssh client, which might explain the renaming. Edit: damn you autocorrect. However, this is correct https://github.com/Eugeny/tabby/issues/4088 https://github.com/Eugeny/tabby/issues/4088
- quasarj 5y ago
  Yes it's the same project
handrous 5y ago
Looks... slow. Terminal.app comes pre-installed and has excellent input latency and general responsiveness. Linux and the BSDs have several decent-performing terminal emulators available. This looks like it's "modern" mostly in the sense of "uses Webtech and has no respect for your system resources".
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Terminal.app comes pre-installed Not on most of the devices that can run Tabby.
  - trvz 5y ago
    But on every system that any worthy developer would consider using.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - toomanydoubts 5y ago
      We are still doing OS wars in 2k21?
  - handrous 5y ago
    Obviously, but it does on one of the three platforms they list as supported. Also I wrote more words after the part.
    - distrill 5y ago
      it may be one of three listed platforms, but this product seems pretty clearly targeted at windows users, so that will not account for anything close to one third of the potential users. agreed that you were mis quoted, but i don't think they were wrong.
      - handrous 5y ago
SkyMarshal 5y ago
Looks pretty and full-featured, though from the "electron-builder.yml" in the source apparently an Electron app. From the GitHub page: > What Tabby is and isn't Tabby is an alternative to Windows' standard terminal (conhost), PowerShell ISE, PuTTY, macOS Terminal.app and iTerm Tabby is not a new shell or a MinGW or Cygwin replacement. Neither is it lightweight - if RAM usage is of importance, consider Conemu or Alacritty
lom 5y ago
I strongly dislike this, no terminal emulator should have a big tech login, for syncing your configuration.
- igetspam 5y ago
  Big tech? Agreed. A built in sync that I don't have to think about, so all .y various environments look and feel th same? Yes, please (I know, I need to look at syncthing or some other such tool)
  - dvtrn 5y ago
    Is is generally not-advised to put sanitized dot files and similar configurations into git? That's what I've been doing.
djanogo 5y ago
Easy pass. I wonder what the reasoning is for creating this, Hi native hosting apps for shell are so small and fast, and have simple dependencies, lets use code base from one of the worlds most complicated and biggest apps with constantly changing code to create a "app" with colors from latest google trends and call it modern. IMO apps based on browser framework need to die.
- dummy_physicist 5y ago
  I agree with you, and I wonder what would take for people to stop having Electron as their first choice when implementing a GUI app. I guess there's no other killer cross-platform library that is as friendly for GUI, maybe?
ozzythecat 5y ago
I currently use iTerm2. Why/when would I consider ditching it with this one? The website has a list of things it can do. What specifically does iTerm2 not do that I need? Unclear what specific problem this solves. I’d highly recommend making that clear front and center. Otherwise… my response is: “oh, another piece of software someone wrote. Maybe just for fun. That’s nice.”
usrbinbash 5y ago
The gzipped tar for this is 90MB. It's 265MB unzipped. That's bigger than my kernel, my initramfs, all my terminal emulators, my media player, glibc and the gnu coreutils together, and I'd still have room to spare for some mp3s. No.
- sneak 5y ago
  I don't think bundle size is a legitimate/relevant criticism of a modern graphical application, unless we're talking double- or triple-digit gigabytes. I have 8000GB in my portable machine.
  - jstummbillig 5y ago
    It certainly is on hn.
  - usrbinbash 5y ago
    Storage is free. RAM isn't. And even if it were, the size of an application in relation to its purpose is a relevant metric.
    - sneak 5y ago
      The overton window of "acceptable program size" has shifted so many times as technology advances, surely you can recognize that your own personal attachments to a given SI suffix are irrelevant? Our ancestors would argue that a 1MB application was bloated. Our children will complain about 1000GB bundles. The programs, of course, do vastly different things as the realm of what is possible with technology inexorably advances. Comparing a complete bundle for an advanced graphical application framework with a TUI application is apples to oranges, and the curmudgeons who are shaking their collective canes at the kids on their lawn are actually technically competent and can recognize this if they choose. There are legitimate technical criticisms to doing things with JS and Electron and whatnot; but "the bundle is hundreds of megabytes" isn't that.
      - smoldesu 5y ago
insanejudge 5y ago
size, vm-itude, etc. aside, i've seen (albeit very high end) laser printers that can render text on paper faster than this scrolls. yikes.
sneak 5y ago
My main concern with something like this is the fact that it advertises an "ssh client". I've spent years refining my ~/.ssh/config and integrations with OpenSSH client. I think the best way you can implement a good and compatible ssh experience is by shelling out to OpenSSH, always. Reinventing the wheel usually results in a worse wheel.
- handrous 5y ago
  Windows tools often vendor in SSH implementations, which can get super annoying if you're trying to just shell out to one and find you're in some other tool's version that they added to the path... which further encourages bundling your own SSH, if you're distributing software to Windows. This is changing (improving) with recent Windows versions, but you can still totally end up with competing installations by doing fairly normal things.
yewenjie 5y ago
Of late I have been pretty happy with the Foot terminal emulator - feels snappier than alacritty, is lightweight, and works. https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot
- TeddyDD 5y ago
  Not on xorg :(
tapoxi 5y ago
There seems to be an inverse relationship between how good a project's website looks vs how well the application runs. Probably a "here be Electron" warning sign?
MrWiffles 5y ago
For those on Windows who would rather avoid yet another electron bloatfest, Microsoft’s new “Windows Terminal” app, available through GH and their App Store, is native and extremely good. Not quite on par with iterm2 for Mac, but damn close. (Look it up on GH or search via DDG, on mobile right now so I can’t dig up the link). IMO it’s a far better alternative for you Windows folks out there.
- jsmith99 5y ago
  Windows Terminal is very good. Conemu is another option on windows, also native (not electron) and more featureful. I use Cmder which is a bundling of conemu with clink (provides stuff like tab completion) and git but it's more bloated. Especially in large git directories, opening the terminal can take a few seconds.
riskneutral 5y ago
Is the "Web version" running a whole Linux VM in the browser?
nrclark 5y ago
There are lots of cool features to like here. I'm not in the camp of Electron-haters, you just have to understand what it is and isn't. Nobody (including the author) is advertising Tabby as a lightweight terminal with high-performance GPU acceleration or anything. And on the flipside, you get a cross-platform terminal app that supports a lot of really handy features like zmodem transfers and an easy interface for port-forwarding and session management. On the off-chance the author is reading this comment, tmux command-mode integration would be a killer addition to Tabby. It's the one feature that keeps me on iTerm2, and by extension on MacOS. I've never seen the feature on a Windows terminal, and it's a great "this feels like magic" way to have persistent tabs/windows that survive a disconnect.
phnofive 5y ago
Got as far as running 'lua test.lua' before crashing mobile safari.
jen20 5y ago
It's almost inevitable that when something says "for the modern age" it means "built with electron or some other web tech". What would actually be a terminal for the modern age is a native tabbing UI etc wrapped around Alacritty.
- apocolyps6 5y ago
  Kitty is about as fast as Alacritty, has tabs, and friendlier devs https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/
  - jen20 5y ago
    But it also appears to have a runtime Python dependency, which is equally unacceptable (to me) as electron...
    - apocolyps6 5y ago
      Why is that? Do you have some moral objection to python?
      - hardex 5y ago
- pittmajp 5y ago
  https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/ https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/
geodel 5y ago
From README: "Tabby is not a new shell or a MinGW or Cygwin replacement. Neither is it lightweight - if RAM usage is of importance, consider Conemu or Alacritty" Kinda make sense. RAM usage should be of importance to No one. I wonder if it would take Presidential Executive order to get lowlife low RAM people banned from internet.
- jlkuester7 5y ago
  This is an unfair take. The author is being clear that low resource usage is not one of the priorities of the project. (Maybe because he knew the HN crowd was going to go on yet another Electron rant-fest.) They even helpfully link to efficient alternatives. Sure, not everyone has tons of RAM, but some people do and it is okay to write applications catered to either. E.g. I could use something efficient to write code in like EMACs, but I choose to use the "RAM hog" that is Intellij.
  - Nicksil 5y ago
    >This is an unfair take. [...] because he knew the HN crowd was going to go on yet another Electron rant-fest. [...] Bundling all legitimate criticism as a "rant-fest" is an unfair take.
    - geodel 5y ago
      Indeed. We are not far from where security bugs would be 'alternate features' catering to specific set of users.
    - jlkuester7 5y ago
      Seriously? You are going to call the hyperbole in this thread "legitimate criticism"? Sure, there are legitimate things to criticism Electron for, but it is not very helpful to dog-pile on every project that uses the framework _just for using it._ In this case you have a literal webapp that they also want to bundle as a desktop application. Turns out Electron is the most convenient way to do this.
Narretz 5y ago
Reminds me of Hyper, another electron based terminal. https://github.com/vercel/hyper https://github.com/vercel/hyper It was pretty hyped back when it was released, but I was worried about performance and never gave it a shot. I'm using the new Windows terminal now, and even this is sometimes slow. And if the main input mode is text, you don't want slowness.
- jlkuester7 5y ago
  Yes! I have used Hyper quite a bit and been happy with it over the years. This feels very similar and I will definitely be giving it a shot. (At first glance it already seems more fully-featured and polished.)
decebalus1 5y ago
Is this some sort of satire? OTOH this seems like one of those digital works of 'art' aimed at getting an emotional reaction from people..
znpy 5y ago
I recently bought a SecureCRT license from Van Dyke (https://www.vandyke.com/products/securecrt/ https://www.vandyke.com/products/securecrt/) and I'm very happy :) (their deb install is 13MB, and it's native code using the QT ui framework)
sergiomattei 5y ago
On a more positive note, looks pretty beautiful and the settings sync feature is welcome. I wouldn't use it for the reasons stated in other comments (quite happy with iTerm), but it's a cool endeavor and reminds me of Hyper.sh.
spyremeown 5y ago
I didn't even read the whole website nor have read the comments and I just know this is written in Electron.
throw-away-2022 5y ago
Just to give a point of contrast to the mainly negative comments here: I've been using Tabby for the last three years (it used to be called Terminus) as my daily driver on Windows, mainly with WSL. Coming from terminal.app on OSX, I wanted a terminal with tabs, and at the time (2019) this was the best I could find. It's still a good choice, IMO, and Eugeny does a great job solo-maintaining it.
oneplane 5y ago
There seems to be quite the influx of "the shell and terminal emulator, but better" and nobody makes it actually better. Most of the "upgrades" (since to me, they are not upgrades) revolve around making it pretty or constantly showing irrelevant data or "helpers" on screen. The downside and upside of a shell is that you need to have a mental map of what you want to do before you can do it. That is not how the current generation seems to approach technology at the foundational level anymore and thus the 'need' for making it pretty and shove potential 'answers' to what you wanted to do in your face is what we get from the 'new' incarnations. I have no idea if it would actually be better or if it is a discoverability or usability issue, but after learning how to use a shell I personally never found the need for a shell or terminal emulator that does more than accept my commands and show the results. To me, it's almost like it needs to be as close to a system monitor as possible while still allowing high-level interaction with the operating system. Not an 'environment' separate from the system. It's the same with powershell. I get that it is more of a mini-os inside the os with its own things and data structures passing between commands (which sometimes are actual commands, sometimes are not... and I'm not talking about shell bultins), but if I wanted a REPL I would choose to use a REPL. (but one could argue that a POSIX shell is just as much a REPL shell) Creating a terminal emulator that 'connects to SSH' is of a similar issue to me. The SSH-client connects to SSH, not the terminal emulator. And the SSH-client runs as a program in the shell in the terminal emulator. You could have some sort of weird GUI-shortcut to open a terminal emulator window or tab, which starts a shell and an SSH-client inside that shell, but what is the point of that if you are going to open a shell anyway? You're essentially adding an extra step (the mouse) where there was none. And now, instead of having the model in your mind where you think "I am going to use an ssh client to connect to an ssh server on a system somewhere" you have the "I click some buttons, fill in a form, and now I am 'on' the other system somehow". The first part is portable as you can swap out the program with another program and your model works, where the second one isn't and you essentially end up remembering waste for every single command that is GUI-fied and you have to think about them in pictures and locations instead of commands and goals. And now this rant is over before I make it worse.
- oneplane 5y ago
  Replying to myself for some sort of nuance: at the same time, just as 'yet another application' it doesn't look bad and it's not unusable... it's just not a replacement for a terminal emulator.
roydivision 5y ago
I’m not considering it if it’s not written in Rust.
- phist_mcgee 5y ago
  And the HN Rust meme continues..
throwawayboise 5y ago
Absolutely locked up my machine in Firefox. No thanks.
mdekkers 5y ago
Wow, there is a lot of hate for what is a pretty cool project. Yes, Electron isn’t great, but Tabby (formerly Terminus) is a pretty decent term and is cross platform, which is actually a big deal for me. It allows me to assign “copy on select” and “paste on right click” which, a few years back, many other term apps decided I didn’t want or need anymore. It’s sensible about a bunch of other stuff, and allows me to easily transfer files from within the same terminal. It’s also simple to define jumphosts etc. Yes, a lot of that can be done in different config files, but in Tabby it is right there, no sweat. Every now and then the HN comment section reminds why I don’t engage that much anymore in the Open Source community. It used to fun and cool, now it’s all… nasty.
scanman1 5y ago
Even with all the modern features, I still cannot replace Procomm+ due to the hundreds of aspect scripts I have painstakingly created to setup many devices out of the box. This is for use in a telecom data center. This is the best newer terminal replacement I have seen in years for quickly opening multiple serial tabbed connections with SFTP and xmodem (still used for backups on legacy devices like my door maglock system and SFTP for recovery flash restore on some embedded devices) If I am not running a setup script, the terminal is much nicer. Too bad it does not support the legacy VT terminal modes I still require for extreme legacy devices. Telecom does not retire a device still carrying traffic until replacement parts on the second hand market are not available anymore so this is an edge case and not something 98% of people would desire anymore.

68 points by als0 5y ago

bitigchi 5y ago

Why would I want to run a whole web browser for shell access? Hard pass.

chrisseaton 5y ago
Thing of the 'whole browser' as basically a GUI framework these days.
- ziftface 5y ago
  I thought that peoples' reactions to electron apps was way overblown, and it certainly comes with benefits, like customizability. So I thought I'd try hyper shell on windows. It was unusable. I expected terminal windows to open right away but there's a really annoying delay every time you open a new one. Really, everything was slow. Maybe it was just my computer. I would definitely prefer to use a less capable terminal that's fast.
- ur-whale 5y ago
  > Thing of the 'whole browser' as basically a GUI framework these days. An a very bloated one at that.
mthoms 5y ago
Because Clippy? https://github.com/Eugeny/tabby-clippy https://github.com/Eugeny/tabby-clippy :) Seriously though, I've got a potential use-case where I want to cobble together a few related scripts into an an ad-hoc REPL that supports HTML and image output. A key library I have to use is written in JS. Granted, this is my first time seeing Tabby so I'm not sure if it will work - just that I might see a use for it. I agree with your sentiment 100% though - this is way too heavy for a day-to-day shell.
sigmonsays 5y ago
I second the hard pass. My comments below oh my god, the .tar.gz is 90MB compressed, uncompressed its 265MB. The xterm source code is 7-8MB. We dont need a terminal 33 times the size of a basic terminal. While I entertain the idea of a terminal in a web browser, I dont believe it has the ability to capture the keyboard entirely for tmux, emacs, etc to work. I also think the use of a web based terminal is quite limited to specific scenarios. Perhaps it would be nice to connect to a k8s cluster on a remote machine.

smallerfish 5y ago

They need a website for the modern age. Oh, it finally loaded.

Aloha 5y ago
they have one, thats the problem.

dhruvmittal 5y ago

Is this the same thing as Terminus? It looks weirdly similar, down to the logo, so I'm assuming this is a soft relaunch?

shellac 5y ago
Termius is a mobile ssh client, which might explain the renaming. Edit: damn you autocorrect. However, this is correct https://github.com/Eugeny/tabby/issues/4088 https://github.com/Eugeny/tabby/issues/4088
quasarj 5y ago
Yes it's the same project

handrous 5y ago

Looks... slow. Terminal.app comes pre-installed and has excellent input latency and general responsiveness. Linux and the BSDs have several decent-performing terminal emulators available. This looks like it's "modern" mostly in the sense of "uses Webtech and has no respect for your system resources".

dragonwriter 5y ago
> Terminal.app comes pre-installed Not on most of the devices that can run Tabby.
- trvz 5y ago
  But on every system that any worthy developer would consider using.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - toomanydoubts 5y ago
    We are still doing OS wars in 2k21?
- handrous 5y ago
  Obviously, but it does on one of the three platforms they list as supported. Also I wrote more words after the part.
  - distrill 5y ago
    it may be one of three listed platforms, but this product seems pretty clearly targeted at windows users, so that will not account for anything close to one third of the potential users. agreed that you were mis quoted, but i don't think they were wrong.
    - handrous 5y ago

SkyMarshal 5y ago

Looks pretty and full-featured, though from the "electron-builder.yml" in the source apparently an Electron app. From the GitHub page: > What Tabby is and isn't Tabby is an alternative to Windows' standard terminal (conhost), PowerShell ISE, PuTTY, macOS Terminal.app and iTerm Tabby is not a new shell or a MinGW or Cygwin replacement. Neither is it lightweight - if RAM usage is of importance, consider Conemu or Alacritty

lom 5y ago

I strongly dislike this, no terminal emulator should have a big tech login, for syncing your configuration.

igetspam 5y ago
Big tech? Agreed. A built in sync that I don't have to think about, so all .y various environments look and feel th same? Yes, please (I know, I need to look at syncthing or some other such tool)
- dvtrn 5y ago
  Is is generally not-advised to put sanitized dot files and similar configurations into git? That's what I've been doing.

djanogo 5y ago

Easy pass. I wonder what the reasoning is for creating this, Hi native hosting apps for shell are so small and fast, and have simple dependencies, lets use code base from one of the worlds most complicated and biggest apps with constantly changing code to create a "app" with colors from latest google trends and call it modern. IMO apps based on browser framework need to die.

dummy_physicist 5y ago
I agree with you, and I wonder what would take for people to stop having Electron as their first choice when implementing a GUI app. I guess there's no other killer cross-platform library that is as friendly for GUI, maybe?

ozzythecat 5y ago

I currently use iTerm2. Why/when would I consider ditching it with this one? The website has a list of things it can do. What specifically does iTerm2 not do that I need? Unclear what specific problem this solves. I’d highly recommend making that clear front and center. Otherwise… my response is: “oh, another piece of software someone wrote. Maybe just for fun. That’s nice.”

usrbinbash 5y ago

The gzipped tar for this is 90MB. It's 265MB unzipped. That's bigger than my kernel, my initramfs, all my terminal emulators, my media player, glibc and the gnu coreutils together, and I'd still have room to spare for some mp3s. No.

sneak 5y ago
I don't think bundle size is a legitimate/relevant criticism of a modern graphical application, unless we're talking double- or triple-digit gigabytes. I have 8000GB in my portable machine.
- jstummbillig 5y ago
  It certainly is on hn.
- usrbinbash 5y ago
  Storage is free. RAM isn't. And even if it were, the size of an application in relation to its purpose is a relevant metric.
  - sneak 5y ago
    The overton window of "acceptable program size" has shifted so many times as technology advances, surely you can recognize that your own personal attachments to a given SI suffix are irrelevant? Our ancestors would argue that a 1MB application was bloated. Our children will complain about 1000GB bundles. The programs, of course, do vastly different things as the realm of what is possible with technology inexorably advances. Comparing a complete bundle for an advanced graphical application framework with a TUI application is apples to oranges, and the curmudgeons who are shaking their collective canes at the kids on their lawn are actually technically competent and can recognize this if they choose. There are legitimate technical criticisms to doing things with JS and Electron and whatnot; but "the bundle is hundreds of megabytes" isn't that.
    - smoldesu 5y ago

insanejudge 5y ago

size, vm-itude, etc. aside, i've seen (albeit very high end) laser printers that can render text on paper faster than this scrolls. yikes.

sneak 5y ago

My main concern with something like this is the fact that it advertises an "ssh client". I've spent years refining my ~/.ssh/config and integrations with OpenSSH client. I think the best way you can implement a good and compatible ssh experience is by shelling out to OpenSSH, always. Reinventing the wheel usually results in a worse wheel.

handrous 5y ago
Windows tools often vendor in SSH implementations, which can get super annoying if you're trying to just shell out to one and find you're in some other tool's version that they added to the path... which further encourages bundling your own SSH, if you're distributing software to Windows. This is changing (improving) with recent Windows versions, but you can still totally end up with competing installations by doing fairly normal things.

yewenjie 5y ago

Of late I have been pretty happy with the Foot terminal emulator - feels snappier than alacritty, is lightweight, and works. https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot

TeddyDD 5y ago
Not on xorg :(

tapoxi 5y ago

There seems to be an inverse relationship between how good a project's website looks vs how well the application runs. Probably a "here be Electron" warning sign?

MrWiffles 5y ago

For those on Windows who would rather avoid yet another electron bloatfest, Microsoft’s new “Windows Terminal” app, available through GH and their App Store, is native and extremely good. Not quite on par with iterm2 for Mac, but damn close. (Look it up on GH or search via DDG, on mobile right now so I can’t dig up the link). IMO it’s a far better alternative for you Windows folks out there.

jsmith99 5y ago
Windows Terminal is very good. Conemu is another option on windows, also native (not electron) and more featureful. I use Cmder which is a bundling of conemu with clink (provides stuff like tab completion) and git but it's more bloated. Especially in large git directories, opening the terminal can take a few seconds.

riskneutral 5y ago

Is the "Web version" running a whole Linux VM in the browser?

nrclark 5y ago

There are lots of cool features to like here. I'm not in the camp of Electron-haters, you just have to understand what it is and isn't. Nobody (including the author) is advertising Tabby as a lightweight terminal with high-performance GPU acceleration or anything. And on the flipside, you get a cross-platform terminal app that supports a lot of really handy features like zmodem transfers and an easy interface for port-forwarding and session management. On the off-chance the author is reading this comment, tmux command-mode integration would be a killer addition to Tabby. It's the one feature that keeps me on iTerm2, and by extension on MacOS. I've never seen the feature on a Windows terminal, and it's a great "this feels like magic" way to have persistent tabs/windows that survive a disconnect.

phnofive 5y ago

Got as far as running 'lua test.lua' before crashing mobile safari.

jen20 5y ago

It's almost inevitable that when something says "for the modern age" it means "built with electron or some other web tech". What would actually be a terminal for the modern age is a native tabbing UI etc wrapped around Alacritty.

apocolyps6 5y ago
Kitty is about as fast as Alacritty, has tabs, and friendlier devs https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/
- jen20 5y ago
  But it also appears to have a runtime Python dependency, which is equally unacceptable (to me) as electron...
  - apocolyps6 5y ago
    Why is that? Do you have some moral objection to python?
    - hardex 5y ago
pittmajp 5y ago
https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/ https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/

geodel 5y ago

From README: "Tabby is not a new shell or a MinGW or Cygwin replacement. Neither is it lightweight - if RAM usage is of importance, consider Conemu or Alacritty" Kinda make sense. RAM usage should be of importance to No one. I wonder if it would take Presidential Executive order to get lowlife low RAM people banned from internet.

jlkuester7 5y ago
This is an unfair take. The author is being clear that low resource usage is not one of the priorities of the project. (Maybe because he knew the HN crowd was going to go on yet another Electron rant-fest.) They even helpfully link to efficient alternatives. Sure, not everyone has tons of RAM, but some people do and it is okay to write applications catered to either. E.g. I could use something efficient to write code in like EMACs, but I choose to use the "RAM hog" that is Intellij.
- Nicksil 5y ago
  >This is an unfair take. [...] because he knew the HN crowd was going to go on yet another Electron rant-fest. [...] Bundling all legitimate criticism as a "rant-fest" is an unfair take.
  - geodel 5y ago
    Indeed. We are not far from where security bugs would be 'alternate features' catering to specific set of users.
  - jlkuester7 5y ago
    Seriously? You are going to call the hyperbole in this thread "legitimate criticism"? Sure, there are legitimate things to criticism Electron for, but it is not very helpful to dog-pile on every project that uses the framework _just for using it._ In this case you have a literal webapp that they also want to bundle as a desktop application. Turns out Electron is the most convenient way to do this.

Narretz 5y ago

Reminds me of Hyper, another electron based terminal. https://github.com/vercel/hyper https://github.com/vercel/hyper It was pretty hyped back when it was released, but I was worried about performance and never gave it a shot. I'm using the new Windows terminal now, and even this is sometimes slow. And if the main input mode is text, you don't want slowness.

jlkuester7 5y ago
Yes! I have used Hyper quite a bit and been happy with it over the years. This feels very similar and I will definitely be giving it a shot. (At first glance it already seems more fully-featured and polished.)

decebalus1 5y ago

Is this some sort of satire? OTOH this seems like one of those digital works of 'art' aimed at getting an emotional reaction from people..

znpy 5y ago

I recently bought a SecureCRT license from Van Dyke (https://www.vandyke.com/products/securecrt/ https://www.vandyke.com/products/securecrt/) and I'm very happy :) (their deb install is 13MB, and it's native code using the QT ui framework)

sergiomattei 5y ago

On a more positive note, looks pretty beautiful and the settings sync feature is welcome. I wouldn't use it for the reasons stated in other comments (quite happy with iTerm), but it's a cool endeavor and reminds me of Hyper.sh.

spyremeown 5y ago

I didn't even read the whole website nor have read the comments and I just know this is written in Electron.

throw-away-2022 5y ago

Just to give a point of contrast to the mainly negative comments here: I've been using Tabby for the last three years (it used to be called Terminus) as my daily driver on Windows, mainly with WSL. Coming from terminal.app on OSX, I wanted a terminal with tabs, and at the time (2019) this was the best I could find. It's still a good choice, IMO, and Eugeny does a great job solo-maintaining it.

oneplane 5y ago

There seems to be quite the influx of "the shell and terminal emulator, but better" and nobody makes it actually better. Most of the "upgrades" (since to me, they are not upgrades) revolve around making it pretty or constantly showing irrelevant data or "helpers" on screen. The downside and upside of a shell is that you need to have a mental map of what you want to do before you can do it. That is not how the current generation seems to approach technology at the foundational level anymore and thus the 'need' for making it pretty and shove potential 'answers' to what you wanted to do in your face is what we get from the 'new' incarnations. I have no idea if it would actually be better or if it is a discoverability or usability issue, but after learning how to use a shell I personally never found the need for a shell or terminal emulator that does more than accept my commands and show the results. To me, it's almost like it needs to be as close to a system monitor as possible while still allowing high-level interaction with the operating system. Not an 'environment' separate from the system. It's the same with powershell. I get that it is more of a mini-os inside the os with its own things and data structures passing between commands (which sometimes are actual commands, sometimes are not... and I'm not talking about shell bultins), but if I wanted a REPL I would choose to use a REPL. (but one could argue that a POSIX shell is just as much a REPL shell) Creating a terminal emulator that 'connects to SSH' is of a similar issue to me. The SSH-client connects to SSH, not the terminal emulator. And the SSH-client runs as a program in the shell in the terminal emulator. You could have some sort of weird GUI-shortcut to open a terminal emulator window or tab, which starts a shell and an SSH-client inside that shell, but what is the point of that if you are going to open a shell anyway? You're essentially adding an extra step (the mouse) where there was none. And now, instead of having the model in your mind where you think "I am going to use an ssh client to connect to an ssh server on a system somewhere" you have the "I click some buttons, fill in a form, and now I am 'on' the other system somehow". The first part is portable as you can swap out the program with another program and your model works, where the second one isn't and you essentially end up remembering waste for every single command that is GUI-fied and you have to think about them in pictures and locations instead of commands and goals. And now this rant is over before I make it worse.

oneplane 5y ago
Replying to myself for some sort of nuance: at the same time, just as 'yet another application' it doesn't look bad and it's not unusable... it's just not a replacement for a terminal emulator.

roydivision 5y ago

I’m not considering it if it’s not written in Rust.

phist_mcgee 5y ago
And the HN Rust meme continues..

throwawayboise 5y ago

Absolutely locked up my machine in Firefox. No thanks.

mdekkers 5y ago

Wow, there is a lot of hate for what is a pretty cool project. Yes, Electron isn’t great, but Tabby (formerly Terminus) is a pretty decent term and is cross platform, which is actually a big deal for me. It allows me to assign “copy on select” and “paste on right click” which, a few years back, many other term apps decided I didn’t want or need anymore. It’s sensible about a bunch of other stuff, and allows me to easily transfer files from within the same terminal. It’s also simple to define jumphosts etc. Yes, a lot of that can be done in different config files, but in Tabby it is right there, no sweat. Every now and then the HN comment section reminds why I don’t engage that much anymore in the Open Source community. It used to fun and cool, now it’s all… nasty.

scanman1 5y ago

Even with all the modern features, I still cannot replace Procomm+ due to the hundreds of aspect scripts I have painstakingly created to setup many devices out of the box. This is for use in a telecom data center. This is the best newer terminal replacement I have seen in years for quickly opening multiple serial tabbed connections with SFTP and xmodem (still used for backups on legacy devices like my door maglock system and SFTP for recovery flash restore on some embedded devices) If I am not running a setup script, the terminal is much nicer. Too bad it does not support the legacy VT terminal modes I still require for extreme legacy devices. Telecom does not retire a device still carrying traffic until replacement parts on the second hand market are not available anymore so this is an edge case and not something 98% of people would desire anymore.