> We scanned 1338 dependencies and found 94 problems.
Just what I want in my terminal app.
I don't like the endless "security audit" noise, but there are 13 critical issues, some dating back 4 years, and including cryptogrpahy-related flaws (and that's just the top-level yarn.lock).
I've used it for a few years; can't complain really. Perhaps it's a bit slow, but I don't notice because I already use VSCode and IntelliJ and have enteprise tooling and Teams in my Mac, so if I were to run a piece of fast software it will probably feel jarring and seizure-inducing.
I actually was looking for a modern age terminal recently, even though I'm sort of happy with how xfce4-terminal has worked for me with regards to tabs and customization.
I was trying to make ssh work on tabby when I realised it's just a glorified browser, I stopped in my tracks and purged the thing. I do enjoy the UX of moving around tabs and changing my mental contexts, but this is too much a price to pay. I don't mind download sizes as long as the application is performant, customizable, and don't have unnecessary backdoors.
This was my first terminal emulator when I got started with Linux (I skipped GNOME's one because it was completely uncustomizable). It's got many useful features and I'd compare it to Windows Terminal, but the 3 second startup times (with a good computer) were too much. After many other terminals I've now settled on Ghostty which provides the customization options I need and starts instantly. The most useful feature of Tabby which I can't find elsewhere is connecting to remote servers with file upload/download support and serial consoles (useful for people working with embedded systems).
IIRC back when I was using it that wasn't possible. It has improved a lot recently. (Technically it didn't improve, it was just replaced with a similar, better one, kgx [0] in GNOME 42)
I tried using this a couple years ago - the big issue I had with it is that it's very slow to render text. I'd often accidentally try to print out something that was much longer than I had realised, and then be stuck with Tabby frozen for serveral minutes while it printed everything out.
If you're just using the terminal to run a few commands, and not working in it a lot, it's a pretty tool, and clearly built with a lot of love.
Do people still use alacrity? It still feels like the most sane choice, although kitty and ghostty's rendering seems more robust. I guess I'll need to give them a go sometime
Last I personally used Alacritty was 3-4 years back on Linux w/ wayland got some weird rendering bugs, switched to st (https://st.suckless.org/) for a good while.
When I got a Macbook last year, I did a "best terminal macos" search and evaluated multiple terminals; kitty, ghostty, iterm2 and wezterm.
settled on ghostty because it just felt faster for terminal refreshes when I use vite, had tabs, could easily theme it to use ayu-dark.
Nothing too extreme, just personal reasons
iterm2 was fine as well, nothing special; wezterm and kitty just felt like linux apps that were on macos as well. YMMV.
I use alacritty. I tried ghostty but not supported on my old home mac, felt slower, and some of the config was not robust. Same with Wezterm, felt slow. Alacritty has worked with no problem everywhere I installed it. Only annoyance was once when the config changed from yaml to toml. Other than that, happy user of alacritty.
I still do. It's faster than Kitty and Ghostty, and I don't make use of the extra features those provide. I don't use glyphs nor rendered images, and I use a tiling WM so tabs aren't that important to me. Alacritty does what I need it to, and does it well.
Been driving my use for the last year or so, perfect as a thin wrapper around tmux (which is the same on macOS and Linux).
I'll give iTerm2 another try, has many shiny features like touchID-sudo and such, otherwise don't understand what could possibly be better in ghostty/kitty
chiming in as another alacritty (linux) user. kitty never seemed to be much of an improvement for my own workflows, and on my mac, ironically enough, ghostty was having issues with escape sequences when using the terraform CLI, so i stopped using it there.
What I like about Tabby is the fact that it has also options to connect to serial ports.
I know that is not something useful to everyone, but working in an embedded using serial ports is something I do everyday. And I know there is Putty or Kitty or Teraterm or another serial connection tools, but most of them are either only for Windows, and don't allow all the options that I need (e.g. option to enable local line editing with history).
The fact that it uses Electron... whatever, we are still full of Electron applications anyway, it's not an issue to me, I have enough RAM.
I've jet to find something replacement that either has all the features of tabby (including support for connecting to serial ports) I would be happy to switch.
There is little reason for SSH client to be integrated into a terminal emulator. Admittedly, my favorite kitty has a wrapper around OpenSSH, to fix terminfo and stuff, but it doesn't tries to re-implement the protocol. There is even less reason for serial port terminal to be a part of a terminal emulator - serial port terminal simply sets baudrate, remaps some control characters and gives you an escape key, it is not connected to rendering in any way.
I don't understand what an ssh client does that is useful as a separate thing from your terminal of choice and openssh. Why wouldn't you always just ssh through your terminal?
Can't comment for others but for me I find zoc or in that regard, a SSH client useful for the following
1. Remembering multiple hostnames and keys in a centralized location
I manage a fleet of VPSs, whose hostnames, credentials I don't always remember off the top of my head. Writing ssh -i <identity> <hostname> gets tedious when I'm wrangling multiple of them over a single session
2. Faithful terminal emulation
Zoc does a great job at emulating a plethora of terminals; it's not a do or die feature, but nice to have.
3. Separation of concerns
This is a personal reason, but I like having two different applications while I am doing something that needs me to SSH to multiple VPSs, my main terminal will have local commands, local file editing, etc while my SSH client will only be used for remote connections and management. Just helps me keep things tidy for myself.
Also as I mentioned in the parent I primarily use my main terminal to SSH; but for the cases mentioned it's nice to use a separate client.
I don't have your use-case, but I use the `.ssh/config` to give aliases (Host/Hostname) to my remote machines and can set the identity to use there (IdentityFile).
This may be tinfoil, but this is the kinda configuration that I want version controlled, and I've never felt good about adding ~/.ssh/config (or anything within ~/.ssh) to my dotfiles because I definitely do not want its siblings in version control. And I don't trust myself not to bone myself.
Instead I have some files elsewhere that I source into my terminal on start, containing:
I'm pretty sure SSH wouldn't mind the config being a symlink to a file in your safely-held-elsewhere repository. Maybe I'm wrong. (m)DNS is what I'd really go for if I'm really just looking for easy access to names.
I wouldn't worry, but I also have the habit of adding things to the index explicitly. If I did worry: gitignore.
To see a clear and categorized list of saved sessions, for example I have 300 different saved sessions and that's not even a tenth of the hardware we have. They are categorized, so I can quickily find a specific one I need and connect to it in one click. This also mean that I can see what sessions I do not have saves and immediately go to a page with all information. Telnet sessions also live there, seamlessly. And finally I can have saved arbitrary commands, different per each session for the quick use. Especially useful with inane kilometer long k8s commands.
The "native input editing" on Warp did spoil me though. The block feature is also super nice. Especially in the days of copying and pasting from AI tools.
I tested all others (wezterm, ghostty, kitty, rio..) but this comfort trumps the speed or minimalism for me.
Just want a Warp without any AI. (Just checked and the main toggle was enabled, will try to disable it again)
it is extremely weird to me that someone would write something like this in javascript. it is very, very wrong, to me. like ... "you need your head examined" wrong.
That will be an unpopular opinion on this site, I know. Javascript is so slow, so bloated, and so far from the CPU that it is almost like building a railroad bridge using plastic. Could you build a railroad bridge out of plastic? yeah I'm sure that could be done. Is plastic the best material for this application? Not in the slightest. Javascript is not the right tool for anything outside of the browser, to me.
But, it's 2025 and plastic is everywhere, even inside our brains, so what do I know?
If modern means slow, laggy and made with js then sure
It does!
Well sign me up with buggy two factor!
> We scanned 1338 dependencies and found 94 problems.
Just what I want in my terminal app.
I don't like the endless "security audit" noise, but there are 13 critical issues, some dating back 4 years, and including cryptogrpahy-related flaws (and that's just the top-level yarn.lock).
I've used it for a few years; can't complain really. Perhaps it's a bit slow, but I don't notice because I already use VSCode and IntelliJ and have enteprise tooling and Teams in my Mac, so if I were to run a piece of fast software it will probably feel jarring and seizure-inducing.
It's cool, but when I tested it last time, it was very, very laggy and very slow. Not sure if that's the definition of "modern".
Considering all apps become more slow and laggy every year it seems on point.
Terminus 2019, 61 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19988557
Tabby 2021, 107 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29553767
Tabby 2023, 92 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35111397
Tabby 2023, 72 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36607323
I actually was looking for a modern age terminal recently, even though I'm sort of happy with how xfce4-terminal has worked for me with regards to tabs and customization.
I was trying to make ssh work on tabby when I realised it's just a glorified browser, I stopped in my tracks and purged the thing. I do enjoy the UX of moving around tabs and changing my mental contexts, but this is too much a price to pay. I don't mind download sizes as long as the application is performant, customizable, and don't have unnecessary backdoors.
> for the modern age
Of course it's an Electron app... Sigh.
My exact thought. Another phrase is "cross-platform" usually means Electron.
Sometimes it does mean Qt though.
> Tabby (formerly Terminus)
Apparently this has nothing to do with the other terminus [0]?
[0]: https://gitlab.com/rastersoft/terminus
Yes, that's why they renamed it: https://github.com/Eugeny/tabby/issues/4088
How does this have so many stars? As much as ghostty and kitty combined, even though I hadn’t heard of it until today.
This was my first terminal emulator when I got started with Linux (I skipped GNOME's one because it was completely uncustomizable). It's got many useful features and I'd compare it to Windows Terminal, but the 3 second startup times (with a good computer) were too much. After many other terminals I've now settled on Ghostty which provides the customization options I need and starts instantly. The most useful feature of Tabby which I can't find elsewhere is connecting to remote servers with file upload/download support and serial consoles (useful for people working with embedded systems).
>gnome's terminal emulator is uncustomizable
Right-click the terminal area and select "Settings". Then go to the "General" tab where there should be a setting for the color scheme.
IIRC back when I was using it that wasn't possible. It has improved a lot recently. (Technically it didn't improve, it was just replaced with a similar, better one, kgx [0] in GNOME 42)
[0]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/console
I tried using this a couple years ago - the big issue I had with it is that it's very slow to render text. I'd often accidentally try to print out something that was much longer than I had realised, and then be stuck with Tabby frozen for serveral minutes while it printed everything out.
If you're just using the terminal to run a few commands, and not working in it a lot, it's a pretty tool, and clearly built with a lot of love.
I wonder if it chokes on a big c project build or tailing a webserver log.
Waiter waiter, more core applications using Electron!
Just needed these two reasons to not even try it out.
* Google Analytics on by default
* >100mb download
For a native terminal I'll happily use kitty or ghostty
For a SSH client Zoc (https://www.emtec.com/zoc/) hasn't disappointed me yet, and even then I almost just always ssh through my terminal.
Do people still use alacrity? It still feels like the most sane choice, although kitty and ghostty's rendering seems more robust. I guess I'll need to give them a go sometime
Last I personally used Alacritty was 3-4 years back on Linux w/ wayland got some weird rendering bugs, switched to st (https://st.suckless.org/) for a good while.
When I got a Macbook last year, I did a "best terminal macos" search and evaluated multiple terminals; kitty, ghostty, iterm2 and wezterm.
settled on ghostty because it just felt faster for terminal refreshes when I use vite, had tabs, could easily theme it to use ayu-dark. Nothing too extreme, just personal reasons
iterm2 was fine as well, nothing special; wezterm and kitty just felt like linux apps that were on macos as well. YMMV.
I use alacritty. I tried ghostty but not supported on my old home mac, felt slower, and some of the config was not robust. Same with Wezterm, felt slow. Alacritty has worked with no problem everywhere I installed it. Only annoyance was once when the config changed from yaml to toml. Other than that, happy user of alacritty.
I still do. It's faster than Kitty and Ghostty, and I don't make use of the extra features those provide. I don't use glyphs nor rendered images, and I use a tiling WM so tabs aren't that important to me. Alacritty does what I need it to, and does it well.
That's exactly my experience. I dislike ligatures (I want to see the characters I typed) and tiling/tabs are anti-features if you have a tiling WM.
Been driving my use for the last year or so, perfect as a thin wrapper around tmux (which is the same on macOS and Linux).
I'll give iTerm2 another try, has many shiny features like touchID-sudo and such, otherwise don't understand what could possibly be better in ghostty/kitty
I've been using alacritty for ... I don't know, but many years, and haven't once been tempted to switch away.
Definitely, been using it for years and it's one of the upgrades that has genuinely made every day noticeably better
I did for several years but moved on to foot due to minor Wayland quirks I don't even remember.
Happy alacritty user here (Wayland + sway)!
chiming in as another alacritty (linux) user. kitty never seemed to be much of an improvement for my own workflows, and on my mac, ironically enough, ghostty was having issues with escape sequences when using the terraform CLI, so i stopped using it there.
What I like about Tabby is the fact that it has also options to connect to serial ports.
I know that is not something useful to everyone, but working in an embedded using serial ports is something I do everyday. And I know there is Putty or Kitty or Teraterm or another serial connection tools, but most of them are either only for Windows, and don't allow all the options that I need (e.g. option to enable local line editing with history).
The fact that it uses Electron... whatever, we are still full of Electron applications anyway, it's not an issue to me, I have enough RAM.
I've jet to find something replacement that either has all the features of tabby (including support for connecting to serial ports) I would be happy to switch.
Just use picocom in any terminal you like: https://github.com/npat-efault/picocom (unmaintained, but works fine and there is a ng fork: https://picocom-ng.oddbit.com/). Or minicom or screen, but those are more bloated.
There is little reason for SSH client to be integrated into a terminal emulator. Admittedly, my favorite kitty has a wrapper around OpenSSH, to fix terminfo and stuff, but it doesn't tries to re-implement the protocol. There is even less reason for serial port terminal to be a part of a terminal emulator - serial port terminal simply sets baudrate, remaps some control characters and gives you an escape key, it is not connected to rendering in any way.
I don't understand what an ssh client does that is useful as a separate thing from your terminal of choice and openssh. Why wouldn't you always just ssh through your terminal?
Can't comment for others but for me I find zoc or in that regard, a SSH client useful for the following
1. Remembering multiple hostnames and keys in a centralized location
I manage a fleet of VPSs, whose hostnames, credentials I don't always remember off the top of my head. Writing ssh -i <identity> <hostname> gets tedious when I'm wrangling multiple of them over a single session
2. Faithful terminal emulation
Zoc does a great job at emulating a plethora of terminals; it's not a do or die feature, but nice to have.
3. Separation of concerns
This is a personal reason, but I like having two different applications while I am doing something that needs me to SSH to multiple VPSs, my main terminal will have local commands, local file editing, etc while my SSH client will only be used for remote connections and management. Just helps me keep things tidy for myself.
Also as I mentioned in the parent I primarily use my main terminal to SSH; but for the cases mentioned it's nice to use a separate client.
I don't have your use-case, but I use the `.ssh/config` to give aliases (Host/Hostname) to my remote machines and can set the identity to use there (IdentityFile).
> 1. Remembering multiple hostnames and keys in a centralized location
There’s ssh_config(5) for that.
This may be tinfoil, but this is the kinda configuration that I want version controlled, and I've never felt good about adding ~/.ssh/config (or anything within ~/.ssh) to my dotfiles because I definitely do not want its siblings in version control. And I don't trust myself not to bone myself.
Instead I have some files elsewhere that I source into my terminal on start, containing:
export M4MINI=192.168.1.204
I'm pretty sure SSH wouldn't mind the config being a symlink to a file in your safely-held-elsewhere repository. Maybe I'm wrong. (m)DNS is what I'd really go for if I'm really just looking for easy access to names.
I wouldn't worry, but I also have the habit of adding things to the index explicitly. If I did worry: gitignore.
To see a clear and categorized list of saved sessions, for example I have 300 different saved sessions and that's not even a tenth of the hardware we have. They are categorized, so I can quickily find a specific one I need and connect to it in one click. This also mean that I can see what sessions I do not have saves and immediately go to a page with all information. Telnet sessions also live there, seamlessly. And finally I can have saved arbitrary commands, different per each session for the quick use. Especially useful with inane kilometer long k8s commands.
The "native input editing" on Warp did spoil me though. The block feature is also super nice. Especially in the days of copying and pasting from AI tools.
I tested all others (wezterm, ghostty, kitty, rio..) but this comfort trumps the speed or minimalism for me.
Just want a Warp without any AI. (Just checked and the main toggle was enabled, will try to disable it again)
Also, how many of the required NPM packages will be compromised?
it is extremely weird to me that someone would write something like this in javascript. it is very, very wrong, to me. like ... "you need your head examined" wrong.
That will be an unpopular opinion on this site, I know. Javascript is so slow, so bloated, and so far from the CPU that it is almost like building a railroad bridge using plastic. Could you build a railroad bridge out of plastic? yeah I'm sure that could be done. Is plastic the best material for this application? Not in the slightest. Javascript is not the right tool for anything outside of the browser, to me.
But, it's 2025 and plastic is everywhere, even inside our brains, so what do I know?
How does it compare to iterm2 or kitty?
It's cross platform
This is a rebrand of terminus
Of all the things I never wanted, a terminal implemented on JavaScript is easily on the top 10 that I never wanted the most.
For Windows, Windows Terminal is pretty ok.
Why another terminal?
There's a set of features in the README that you can view if you follow the link:
- Integrated SSH and Telnet client and connection manager
- Integrated serial terminal
- Theming and color schemes
- Fully configurable shortcuts and multi-chord shortcuts
- Split panes
- Remembers your tabs
- PowerShell (and PS Core), WSL, Git-Bash, Cygwin, MSYS2, Cmder and CMD support
- Direct file transfer from/to SSH sessions via Zmodem
- Full Unicode support including double-width characters
- Doesn't choke on fast-flowing outputs
- Proper shell experience on Windows including tab completion (via Clink)
- Integrated encrypted container for SSH secrets and configuration
- SSH, SFTP and Telnet client available as a web app (also self-hosted).
> Integrated SSH and Telnet client and connection manager
Honestly, ssh re-implemented "open source" in javascript goes beyond anti-feature and back around into "useful for security research".
- extra slowness