Since the use of Windows Terminal in Win10, the Windows command line Terminal has been quite satisfied, until recently found a treasure of open source software Tabby, found a more powerful existence.
Tabby.sh and Windows Terminal
1. Open source and cross-platform
Both are open source software, available at the following addresses:
Github.com/Eugeny/tabb…
Github.com/microsoft/t…
Windows Terminal(hereinafter referred to as Terminal) is only supported on Windows 10 and Windows 11, and can be downloaded from the Microsoft Store.
Tabby supports almost all platforms, and you can find binaries for your platform on Github’s Releases Page.
2, appearance
Both the appearance level is very high, whether it is the form of color matching, or terminal text display, are very durable and eye protection. Both use tabs to manage multiple open terminals, and both support multiple terminal types.
3, column
Tabby supports columns within the same TAB, which is ideal for scenarios where vim is used for editing while compiling on the command line:
And Terminal, although we also observed a hint of split function in the option, it seems that this function is not available.
4. Terminal type
Under Windows, both of them contain MinGW Gitbash, Powershell and CMD. Tabby has two more specialized terminal types of SSH and Serial Port than Windows Terminal.
5, SSH,
An SSH session could normally be opened with a simple SSH command in a normal Windows command line window, but Tabby has designed a terminal type specifically for SSH, which is very powerful and in some ways a direct replacement for MobaXTerm, which I also admired.
Use SSH dedicated terminal type is very simple, direct input in the new session you need to log in to the domain name or IP address, Tabby memory can save your login password, because it is open source software, source code all over the world to accept inspections, so you don’t have to worry about the back door no hidden trouble, tens of thousands of people around the world the fork Tabby code, Presumably there is no back door to your precious server passwords.
Tabby also supports GUI-style SFTP. I used MobaXTerm because I needed a friendly SFTP way to manage files on the server, but now I feel I can use Tabby as a purely terminal tool to handle file transfers on the server.
6, Serial Port
If you are an embedded programmer, you must have a putty, which is a command-line tool that can communicate with serial ports. I often use RTOS(RT-Thread) for MCU development, so I often need to use putty to interact with FinSH components, such as logging (Ulog) output, or using FinSH console commands.
In most cases, I prefer not to open a separate putty form using the serial port command line, but rather to use the plink.exe tool in the putty installation directory to access the serial port terminal on the standard command line. Since Tabby, this step has been made easier by using Tabby’s Serial Port functionality.
When a new terminal is created in Tabby, it automatically senses the serial port devices the computer is currently connected to, such as COM11, COM12, and COM15 in the image above.
After selecting the serial port number, Tabby will let you select the serial port baud rate again, and then open a nice serial port terminal with coloring function, so you can see that this log output is very friendly.
You can also configure it more subtly by having your Tabby store some default parameters, such as baud rates, so you don’t have to manually select them every time you open a serial port.
7. Configuration and synchronization
Both Windows Terminal and Tabby have comprehensive configuration capabilities that cover almost all UI colors, hotkeys, Terminal types, and more. One of the problems with configuration complexity is that if we use these software on more than one computer, we have the headache of synchronizing configuration.
Terminal has a natural advantage because it is Microsoft’s own son and runs only on Windows, so it can automatically get a Mircrosoft account to synchronize. The answer to this problem, however, is simply to provide configuration documents in JSON format and expect users to synchronize software usage habits by copying and transferring configuration documents themselves.
Tabby’s answer at this point is to use the account mechanism to synchronize configuration files across the platform:
It was quite amazing that such a small command-line terminal tool could provide a modern Internet synchronization mechanism. Amazingly, Tabby also comes with a Web version. You can log in to The Web version of Tabby, synchronize your account, and use your own configuration habits to use the terminal on the Web without having to download and install Tabby in your hand.
Thanks to Chrom’s powerful local USB device call capability, we still had access to our native serial port on the WEB version of Tabby, making the browser an amazingly powerful serial debugging assistant in an instant.
8, conclusion
Tabby also has more interesting features such as asset protection, Windows ConPTY, and plugins that you can try out for yourself without going into more details here.
This article compares the similarities and differences between Terminal and Tabby in many dimensions, and in the end it seems to be Tabby’s solo show. Indeed, such an open source excellent product is definitely designed with heart, and is better than similar software in every dimension. For those of you who cannot live without a terminal in daily use, you must try it. I believe productivity will be improved a little bit.
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