I’ve been busy the last few days migrating to a replacement daily driver with a larger screen. Usually I alternate migrations - with one new computer, I’ll just do a flat out migration (using the Migration assistant on my Macs), on the next, I’ll copy over my main document directories, .ssh directory, and my terminal shell config files, and reinstall everything from scratch.
This was one of the latter.
It’s painful, but the reason I do this is to clear out configuration and other cruft that has accumulated over time. Especially installs of various libraries or databases that I don’t need anymore, application settings for firewall and scanner apps that, if I need them again in the future, I’ll just reinstall (little snitch, etc…), and so on and so forth.
One utility that did not make the cut on my Mac, but I’m keeping on my windows computer, is Tabby.
Cons
The first and most obvious question is “why did you not keep it?”
The answer boils down to “it’s somewhat bloated, could be faster and more lightweight, and on top of that, the real advantages it brings are non-issues on a Mac.”
Go to Reddit - yes, it’s cancer - and you’ll see comment after comment mocking it for calling itself a modern terminal while being written in Javascript and shoved into an Electron wrapper. It certainly isn’t light on the memory footprint.
Pros
So why am I sticking with it for windows? I mean, VScode has a terminal built in - which is also slow and an electron wrapper, but can be wrangled to use an sshconfig file and shortcut various logins and ssh login keys, and is immensely useful for directly working in remote development servers.
The short answer is I hate Putty. On top of that, one of the popular suggestions, Kitty, doesn’t run on Windows, and I have to work cross-platform. Lastly, Windows, not entirely unreasonably, nuked telnet out of the command line as a default setup.
Tabby has:
An integrated SSH client that works transparently
An integrated serial terminal
Makes it easy to set up a library of common connections and shell environments for Powershell, ssh, telnet, etc., including credentials and keys
Full Unicode support including double-width characters
File transfer from/to SSH sessions via SFTP and Zmodem
Finally, while not lightweight, it doesn’t weight down my windows machine, with plenty of RAM and CPU power, anywhere near as much as any number of other, especially photo editing apps, do.
The most impressive part for me is how you can create a library of standard connections and how easily you can open a new tab/terminal of a needed type. Below is the screen you see to add a new SSH connection to the library:
And a serial connection - there are more, faster baud rates.
Of course, anything BSD or *nix based has telnet and most of these features already, and setting up an SSH config file with mapped keys and shortcuts is no big deal, but it’s nice to have all of these options in one place on my Windows desktop.