 Terminal emulators are one of my favorite things on Linux and on any operating system really mainly because I'm a nerd and I like to mess around in the terminal Which means that I like to play around with the tools that let me play around in the terminal And the biggest one for that is obviously is the terminal emulator now My favorite terminal emulator of all time is Lackardy slash termite now termite is dead. So Lackardy has kind of taken the crown But I'm always on the lookout for new terminal emulators to try out So today we're gonna be taking a look at a terminal emulator called tabby now tabby Proclaims itself as a terminal for the modern age and if you go to the website for tabby You'll see something that looks like this now usually when it comes to web design and all that stuff I'm very much a minimalist. I don't care for flashy animations. So All that stuff could go away and I'd be perfectly happy, but we're not here to judge the website We're just gonna take a look at some of the features that tabby proclaims that it has So if you scroll down here a little bit here are the things that it says are the important things So it runs on Windows Mac and Linux, which is good. That means if you have a need where you use Multiple platforms you can use the same terminal emulator across all of them, which is good It has an integrated SSH client, which is pretty weird for a terminal emulator to be honest with you most terminal emitters You're just terminal emulators They don't have anything extra on top of them unless they're specifically built to do something different tabby has an integrated serial terminal It supports PowerShell PS core W cell and quite a few other things It has full Unicode support including double with characters It allows file transfer from or to SSH sessions via SFTP and Z modem It has an absolute Ton of theming and color schemes. I'm talking like at least two dozen of them. There are a a lot of them I'll show you those later tabby has fully configurable shortcuts and multi chord shortcuts Which means I believe that it allows you to do something like key chords It remembers your tabs and your split panes. This feature is It's like they were talking to me when they wrote this and they created this I don't really use tabs in my terminal emulator. I use alacrity It doesn't have tabs tabs really aren't something that it really needs But I also love things that have tabs and I also love things that remember your tabs when you close and reopen them Everyone knows I have a love affair with crusader crusader remembers all of your tabs It's a file manager to have a terminal emulator that remembers your tabs and your splits is kind of awesome Proper shell experience with windows including tab completion, which if you're on windows apparently you don't get tab completion Is that a really a thing? I don't know. I'm not a windows user if that's true poor poor windows people Integrated encrypted container for SSH secrets in configuration, which is again really cool It goes along with this as age client which means basically that it's going to allow you to save your passwords and passphrases and stuff Which is nice now There's a whole bunch more stuff here on the website, which I'll link in the video description But enough of this let's take a look at the actual terminal emulator. This right here is tabby now This is not the default team theme of tabby. I've changed the theme because of course I did that was of course the first thing that I did I mean obviously and it Looks okay, I would say I'm not a big fan of the big bar at the top You guys got to remember I'm used to this kind of thing. This is what my terminal emulator looks like. This is a Lackardy There's no frills There's no bar at the top nothing like that. That's just a Lackardy, you know now obviously people who use Tabby or console or GNOME terminal in an actual desktop environment You're used to having chrome or on your your terminal. You're used to having the window Controls and stuff like that. I'm not used to that. So that's the first thing I noticed It's not that big of a deal and that's just my personal thing You know, I mean so anyways tabs up here along the bottom and this button here if you click on this This is where it allows you to select a different profile So it has all of these access to different TTY's which are the serial terminals and it goes up to what I believe is Actually, that's 31 and then it goes into a couple others And then it also has the ability to use different shells that you have installed in your system So I could open up a tab with bash. So here's a tab with bash I could open up a tab with a different path to bash so the user slash bin slash bash Technically these things are exactly the same thing. You could also do one with regular shell born shell I believe is what that's called, right? Also for those team at Tmux people out there It has Tmux right here now I'm not sure if it comes with Tmux or if somewhere along the line. I installed Tmux and don't remember it I don't think I did so it's possible that Tmux comes built in if so either way it allows you to use Tmux from this drop-down and Then you can do the things that you do in Tmux I'm not a Tmux user as you can obviously tell I did a video on Tmux When I first started the channel, I'm pretty sure I was wrong about a hundred percent of the things in that video So don't go watch it. It's horrible. It's really bad ZSH is also installed on this computer. So that's also an option. It's also the user default up there Right here is where Tabby allows you to mess around with SSH in an SSH client So if you were to click on one of these it would ask you for your passphrase Which I'm not going to enter right now because it actually shows the characters I think it actually does blur it out which it does but I'm not gonna do that anyways But anyways, you would enter your pass key and then you'd be connected to GitHub in this case via SSH, which is really nice now. It seems to work better with things like websites and Other servers and stuff like that connecting directly to your GitHub account seems to be rejected So I couldn't get that to work But maybe I'm just doing something wrong Probably if you're managing like a VPS or something like that That's where this SSH client would really truly shine now It also allows you to do things like split so you can have splits left right up and down There's obviously key bindings for all of this stuff So you can do a split like that you could do another split like this if you wanted to To and that's not where I where I wanted it But I could also do to the right So you gotta have a whole bunch of splits and all of these are Tmux obviously now Tmux obviously will do its own splits if you wanted to do that but this is Doing a split in the terminal so you have separate Tmux sessions going and they can be dragged like so So that you can make them bigger or smaller however you want What I don't see is a way to drag them to different positions So I'm assuming that there's probably a way to do that But as far as I can tell resizing them is the only option that you have now in terms of settings Because this is where supposedly Tabby shines there are a lot of settings as they say I don't say that it's infinite of course, but you know, they got a market somehow so There are a ton of options here. I'm not gonna go through all of them But the there are quite a few so there's a lot of appearance settings here This is where you're gonna choose the font and the font weight and the cursor shape and stuff like that There is the profiles and connections This is where all the built-in connections that we just went through with this button here are and You can create new profiles as well if you want to do that in the terminal section You can choose the terminal front end the scroll back whether it draws bold text and some settings for the keyboard and mouse along with the Clipboard as well now here are the color schemes and as I said there are a ton of them So I'm gonna actually just scroll down Through these I'm not gonna pause too much. There is a color scheme here for pretty much everybody here There are kind of them I'm just going through them really slowly and I'm not even halfway yet. Yep. Keep going still going Yep, still going there. There's dozens of them and This is like heaven for me because I love themes I like racing things and if your terminal emulator comes with themes and it comes with this many themes That's awesome. It's really cool Obviously any of these are edit edit editable So if you click on one and you go back up all the way to the top you can click edit and You can change any of the colors that you want and you can rename which is basically the equivalent of creating your own color scheme Which is nice, right? So that's really easy. It also has a config sync option so that you can Sync your configuration to different computers or different operating systems. This is where you'd edit all of your hotkeys There is a plug-in system so you can add plugins There's not a lot of plugins here, but there are some things like there's a clippy plug-in where you will annoy you or whatever There this is where you'd manage your SSH stuff There's not a lot of options here most of the options for SSH are actually when you connect to an SSH through their client The vault here is an always encrypted container for Secret such as SSH passwords and private key fat passphrases So this is where it's going to set up the ability to remember your SSH passphrase and stuff like that and then finally we get to the window and This is where most of the stuff that I would change is actually located so the first thing that I wanted to do was move the tabs to the bottom and Remove the window decorations. So it actually it's going to require restart And that's going to let me to show you one of the things that's really kind of annoying. So when you open up tabby There's a loading screen Yeah, there's a loading screen now as you can see it does remember your tabs It does not remember if you have the settings pane open. So that's a little weird, but you know, whatever Another thing that you notice if you guys see down here along the bottom You see how slow that was let me let me move the Tabs back up to the top. Maybe you can see that a little bit better if the tabs are along the top So we'll put the tabs back on top and if I open up a tab see how There's like a little stutter there and if I close it, there's like a an animation stutter. So When I first started using tabby, I noticed I was like man, this is really slow and it is like the animations here are just they completely make it feel like the Terminal is just slow. It's all get out. The good news is you can turn those off So if I turn those off and then open up you can see how much faster that is to open up and close tabs It's just they're gone and it's gone. It's gone, you know, that's so much better So really they need to disable animations by default now It's also possible that this is a problem with me in a turn in a window manager Maybe it's a window manager thing and because I'm using something like picon Maybe it's has some kind of incompatibility there or something. I don't know but yeah out of the box Those animations aren't able and it makes the whole experience seem just super slow really sluggish so the actual usage of this terminal is kind of cool and I think some of that is just me being really excited by the fact that it remembers your tabs It does remember all of your splits and stuff, which is nice So if you have a split in one of these terminals and even if it's not Tmux So if I have a split here and then close it it does Remember that you had a split here and that's really nice So if you you know have a preferred layout that you want to use every time you open up terminal That's cool. Now all of the stuff I really enjoy. There are a few things that are Kind of annoying me. So the first one was that slowness So get rid of the animations and it kind of takes away that the second one is that loading screen that loading screen is just No, I don't want a loading screen on my terminal ever now. I understand why it's probably there It's probably getting all of your history and all of your tabs and stuff like that And that's the reason why it's slower to start up I understand it and I've been probably put up with it if I needed some of these features But it still bugs me and the third one is that it does ask you for telemetry by default You can turn it off, but it is opt out instead of opt-in which kind of bugs me So those are three things that kind of just kind of bug me about Tabby now In terms of speed and stuff like that. I haven't noticed the actual Emulation of the terminal to be slower fast. I haven't done a ton of stuff in this So in terms of compiling and stuff like that. I haven't done any of that But just running regular programs. I didn't notice it being any slower or faster than anything else that I've ever used So take that how you will I will say that the theme support is not as great as I thought it was So if we go back here to the color schemes if we choose a new color scheme It will show up in hope. Wow, that's really bright, right? It will show up in the terminals But it will only do so if you've selected this one here So by default from theme is selected by default and if you choose that then all of them always look like this if You want to use the actual color scheme that you just picked you'd have to choose this one now Another thing is is that there doesn't seem to be a way to change the actual main theme From what I can tell so these only have to do with the terminals themselves It doesn't have nothing to do with the chrome around the window. So like the tabs and stuff I can't find a way to change that now. It's possible that I'm just missing it Maybe there's a spot that I'm just kind of blanking out on but I don't see a way to do that It's not a GTK or QT theme. So it's not going to inherit your Thaming from the rest of your system. It's going to have this blue color scheme and again I don't really see a place. Oh wait, never mind. I found it right there. Oh, no, not really That's those aren't themes that those are paper. That's just like a light theme Standard acrylic background and it just allows you to have opacity on okay, so those aren't I mean I wouldn't really consider those. I mean that one there's a theme. Those are just versions of the same theme So you get like shorter tabs, which I suppose is nice So I don't see a way here to actually change the theme color I might just be missing it It does have a configuration file. So if you wanted to Configure this via a configuration file if you're used to doing it that way you can do that if you want So that is tabby a very brief look at tabby overall I'm I have mixed feelings the Whole remembering of tabs thing is really cool, but it has a downside of having that stupid load screen So I could probably just take that or leave it as much as I like applications that remember previous states I kind of have a thing for that kind of stuff I really don't know if I need it in my terminal first of all second of all It does slow things down a bit and I don't know if I like that at all. So in terms of the rest of it it's It's okay. It feels like an electron app to be honest with you Some of the stuff is kind of slow and sluggish the animations are definitely Completely unusable in terms of like being there. I don't you don't need them turn those things off by default The Customizability of it is really nice. It does have a ton of customization options. So if that's something that you like This is an option for you It does seem to be fairly stable I didn't have the problems I had like with black box when that first came out. That was very crashy This one hasn't crashed at all. So that's nice And it works fairly well the Added session and profile manager stuff where you can use team ups and different shells and the serial terminals And all that stuff that stuff's really neat I don't think that I need it because I can just ssh in the manual way like a nerd But having that ssh client available to you and having the ability to have it remember Not only your save state, but also your passphrases and stuff like that. That's really nice It's definitely something that is beyond a traditional terminal emulator Which is good because a lot of terminal emulators are just terminal emulators Which is fine, but they don't really add anything to the conversation. So that is tabby if you have thoughts on this You can leave those comments in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you You can follow me on twitter at the linux cast You can follow me on master and or odyssey those links will be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash the linux cast just to go all these fine people Thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon youtube. You guys are all absolutely Amazing people without you the channel just would not be Anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so much for your support. Thanks everybody for watching I'll see you next time