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.
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.
It's a bit heavy, but I've liked Tabby outside Windows a bit... I really like the new Windows terminal from MS, but it's Windows only, Tabby is about the closest I've found to it.
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.
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.)
I tried Alacritty some months ago also because of a HN post.
I think it lacks features compared to Kitty. At the very least tabs for multiple sessions and support for a transparent background made it not an option for me.
Kitty has replaced the standard terminal in Ubuntu for me, and I am quite happy with its performance and Unicode support.
Can't agree more! With all respect to Alacritty, I find Kitty easier to install/update, having more features and at least comparable performance (as it also uses OpenGL for rendering). Overall it seems a pretty mature product and the author is very responsive to Github issues.
I'd like to see it more in these terminal-related articales and discussions...
I've been using Terminal.app for years (I used iTerm2 before Terminal.app had some major improvements). I switched to Kitty so I could bind a shortcut key to opening a new terminal window--a habit I picked up from tiling window managers. I can't remember if I had other criteria, but Kitty has been surprisingly a quiet workhorse since I switched (I occasionally had TERM issues when ssh-ing).
Last I used Windows was Windows 7 and the terminal was serviceable but not as useful as kitty. It wasn't as fast for sure. I also don't think it used a text-based configurtion file I could edit and check into my configs repo.
st is superb. Other terminals have more features (that I don't care about). Kitty is well thought-out, but Kovid has a lot of strong opinions that cause all sorts of problems with common software (like vim & tmux). Wezterm is also a fine piece of work, but the constant upgrade notifications turned me off. xterm is a classic, but the .Xresources / xrdb dance gets to be a pain.
To each his own: I find Terminal.app to be one of the best terminal out there, all platforms combined. Speed and latency are awesome, colors are exact. Line marks (both manual and with automatic prompt detection) navigated with cmd+up/down is a godsend. Escape sequences to update tab and window titles with directory and document paths are great too. The only thing I miss is having different settings for alt and meta on the left and right alt keys. The days of Terminal.app being crap (up till Leopard) are long gone since Snow Leopard where it had a major update, and was constantly improved upon on each subsequent release.
On Mac at least, kitty seems to be the best terminal option. It's fast/low latency, has no font rendering issues, and fully supports ligatures (iterm2, alacritty, all have issues in my experience). It also works well with tmux.
reply