Vertical Tabs

[dhulihan]

For those of us with way too many shell sessions open at one time...

Equivalent on iTerm2:

Configuration example (locations being Top, Bottom, Left):

[mitchellh]

Converted to a discussion so this can be discussed a bit further.

I'm not a big fan of it. We support bottom tabs on Linux because it is provided by the native GUI toolkit. If Apple supported this natively I'd also be supportive, but this requires a totally different UI element to pull it off (either a list view of some sort or a custom tab view). Generally speaking, Ghostty tries to do as little of that as possible.

I also just want to use this discussion to gauge generally interest.

[dhulihan]

Thanks for opening this up to discussion! I hadn't seen any requests for vertical tabs here in gh or discord, so it's good to have a reference point for this decision for others :).

Vertical tabs are a nice-to-have for me for switching between several open projects at a time (sometimes dozens on bad days), but there are workarounds for this (tmux session switching, etc.). Not a deal breaker by any means! Vertical tabs have been getting a little more popular in browsers (zen, brave), so it is also nice to have familiar layouts across tooling.

On the other hand, maybe I'm just hoarding too many tabs 😉.

[narqo]

I'm not sure if it is worth opening a separate general discussion about tab location option on macOS, so will put it here.

I run iTerm2 in the full screen mode with tabs bar at the bottom. I find the appeal of it because this visually moves the terminal's output higher a bit on the screen. I feel this better utilises the laptop's screen space.

[flextribemartin]

Recently started using ghostty myself and so far I'm liking it. Decided to give it a few weeks as my primary driver before making a decision.
So far I have been able to implement all the configuration I am used to, from iTerm2, including making the font "fat", which I have just gotten used to. Super cool!

However, the one thing I cant yet do with ghostty, is have tabs on the left side of the window. I'm a big fan of having them on the left, because the "list" view gives me a much better overview, and for whatever reason my mind naturally prefers that viewing order.
Not here to claim one is better than the other, but I'm a supporter of implementing those, seeing how this is a discussion, I thought I'd share :-)

Thanks for the amazing work on the terminal!

[pluiedev]

Side tabs are possible on linux via gtk-tabs-position, but we might axe that soon because libadwaita doesn't support it natively (we could hack something together with sidebars, but eh.)

[feakuru]

thanks for pointing this out here, turned out to be the option i needed when i stumbled upon this issue in my search, and i completely missed it in the docs. i would thus like to voice support for not axing this feature if possible 😄

[pluiedev]

Too late - it's already gone in 1.2. We could try to write a vertical tab implementation ourselves but that would come at a cost of potentially visually clashing with all other libadwaita apps. Sorry.

[aflat]

I would prefer tabs on the side for the same reason as the original poster. I tend to have many sessions open, and have about 10-20 tabs running, with various states of windows inside those tabs, used for logical grouping. If I'm working on a cluster of machines, I open a tab, do some window splitting to log into the various machines, run whatever needs to be run, then move onto another tab, while the first set of commands continues to run. This keeps the history of my working in that tab session.

Since I name my tabs, I know what cluster/whatever I'm doing there. Horizontal tabs don't let me name them much, without running out of room. Plus, like I assume everyone, I have a widescreen monitor, so I want more vertical screen space to for output. Sure 1 row isn't much, but it also serves the same purpose to people who remove the toolbar, titlebar, and tab bar, a few extra rows.

[00-kat]

(P.S.: this conversation is very off-topic, please consider moving to a different place, such as the Ghostty Discord server.)

[deltics]

I recently started exploring Ghostty and would like to use it more, but the lack of vertical tabs is a major sticking point. Perhaps it's because I've gotten so used to them in iTerm2, but perhaps not. I think there is a real advantage, ergonomically, as well as in terms of maximizing vertical space.

With horizontal tabs, the position of the titles of open tabs varies according to how many tabs are open, making the number of tabs unclear, including whether there even ARE any tabs. I have to examine the top of the window, away from my prompt (which is rarely at the top) to see if there are tabs open and then process the placement of titles to identify how many there are (if any).

With vertical tabs, the visual signal that tabs are open is immediately obvious without looking away from the prompt. The presence of a tab gutter conveys that tabs are open, and the list of tabs (how many and their titles) is easily found at the top of that gutter.

[assaf758]

Coming from tmux to Ghostty tabs, in my opinion, a use case of browser-level number of tabs is less likely.
One thing I do think will help is the ability to have the tab name in proximity to it's number (currently they are on the opposite side of the tab) so knowing the keybind to move to a tab will be trivial.

[gawie-kellerman]

I have written near essays about the advantages of vertical tabs over and above the quantity thereof.. in:

1. We have wider screens, making the ability to make the tab wider and more descriptive without negatively influencing the console.
2. With or without tab numbers (Alt-1 etc) which I like, it is much easier to get an idea of where you are with left tabs as the area for looking is columnar.
3. Drag and drop operations even are easier as it is over less space.
4. We read from left to right, and in consoles your eyes are on the left of the screen (at the prompt) most of the time... so you dont have to jump your eyes a mile away.... I know you can split, but I rarely do that, typing the wrong command in the wrong console can be disastrous, so I split in rare cases. And sadly, top/bottom tabs even on splits is kind of awkward as it splits the terminal and not the window, meaning you cannot split independently in ghossty/konsole etc to my best experience.
5. Easy to scroll tabs vertically, less so with horizontal

Vertical tabs, my initial reaction years ago was, but why, and after I used ITerm for 3 years I was absolutely sold. I work ssh over various servers, compiles, dockers etc, at once, so having 15+ tabs is nothing extraordinary.

The feedback I received from the Ghostty team is that they have much bigger issues to address and that this is not even on the radar, and even more difficult than meets the eye as the GUI toolkit does not support it well (and since I get it for free I am just too happy to have something decent).

So for a chuckle; my boss describe to me every other day how AI is going to replace me; so it might be that AI takes over and render us all into a heap before we have a decent vertical tab for a Linux console.

[pluiedev]

If you truly feel that strongly about it, PRs are always welcome. In open-source everyone is a volunteer; so be the change you want to see in the world. Just being hoity-toity about it does absolutely nothing for you and I.

[pluiedev]

We understand the need, but bump comments don't make it any easier or compelling to implement, and only serve to send everyone here a needless notification/email in their inbox. The upvote button exists as a more direct, less disruptive way to do exactly what you have done here. See #6937 for more details.

[jairo-caro-ag]

I've implemented a version of vertical tabs with live previews in PR #9931: #9931

It adds a new macos-tab-sidebar config option that replaces the native tab bar with a sidebar showing live thumbnail previews of all terminals. Features include:

• Live preview thumbnails (~5fps)
• Adaptive grid layout (auto-adjusts columns to fit all tabs)
• Tab number badges (1-9) with Cmd+1-9 keyboard navigation
• Click to select, hover to close
• Context menu support

Would love feedback from anyone interested in this feature!

[aflat]

I wasn't looking for a whole mini window as the side tab, I'm more interested in something like

Which I did here https://github.com/aflat/ghostty/tree/vert_tabs with almost all AI. Unfortunately I mixed in some changes for linux, which I need to refactor out(I haven't tested it, so I don't want any of that code in) before I even attempt a PR

[Diaspar4u]

The issue is that for most of our horizontally rectangular screens, the horizontal space is plentiful while the vertical is very precious - and in vertical stack (like menus on websites, etc) it's easy to glance and switch, especially if running many processes / terminals). so definitely a very high vote for this feature! Not only that, but it'll make it easier to color-code them, rename, etc - since not just using native

[marcusquinn]

https://tabby.sh/ does vertical tabs, and more. Really like the way they do profiles, too.