tab, a modern terminal multiplexer designed for overwhelmed software & systems engineers

Tab is a terminal multiplexer written in Rust.

Features:

• Tab is configuration-driven. tab provides persistent tab suggestions which always initialize in the correct working directory. Configuration is defined in simple tab.yml files placed in your workspace and repository roots.
• Tab is shell-oriented, and minimialistic. Tabs are listed, selected, and closed with a single command, tab. Tab has one disconnect escape sequence, ctrl-W. Tab provides tab-unique command history.
• Tab provides rich autocomplete. Your library of tabs are completed when switching to a new tab with tab <TAB> . Your running tabs are completed when closing a tab with tab -w <TAB>.
• Tab is state-agnostic. You can invoke tab to do anything, from anywhere. If a tab isn't running, it's started. If a tab is running, it's reconnected (and possibly shared with another client). If you have a tab selected, and you close it with tab -w mytab, your session is disconnected.
• Tab is low-latency, and efficient. It has a round-trip latency (stdin to stdout) of ~5ms. The tab daemon uses 0.2% when idle, 1-2% CPU during normal usage, and 5% when a tab is throwing extreme amounts of stdout.

Quickstart

Quick installation & usage instructions: $ cargo install --git https://github.com/austinjones/tab-rs.git $ tab foo/ > to open a tab. $ tab bar/ > to switch to another tab. works within an active session! $ echo $TAB > to view the active tab. put this in your promptline, or get https://starship.rs/ $ tab -w foo > to close a tab. $ tab -l > to view the tabs $ ctrl-W > to disconnect the session

Tab adds trailing slashes to tab names. This makes autocomplete between foo/ and it's children, foo/bar/ work nicely. You can type tab foo and tab will add the slashes for you.

Configuration

Tab supports persistent tab.yml configurations. There are two types of configurations: - Workspace configurations, which are active within any subdirectory, and link to repositories. - Repository configurations, which define tab endpoints. Your typical tab interaction would be switching to one of these repositories via tab myproj/

A full set of example files are available in the examples directory, but here are some starters:

``` ~/workspace/tab.yml:

workspace: - repo: my-project/ - tab: workspace-tab doc: "this is a top-level workspace tab" ```

``` ~/workspace/my-project/tab.yml:

repo: proj doc: "my project"

tabs: - tab: run dir: src/ doc: "runs the project server" ```

With these configurations, tab -l provides the following: $ tab -l Available tabs: proj/ (my project) proj/run/ (runs the project server) workspace-tab/ (this is a top-level workspace tab)

Shell Configuration

Tab works best when you configure your terminal with autocomplete, and a statusbar.

Starship

The best way to configure the command prompt is to use starship.

In ~/.config/starship.toml, add: toml [env_var] variable = "TAB" prefix = "tab " style = "bold green"

Bash

tab supports dynamic autocompletion and a custom statusbar in bash.

1. Install the the autocompletion script: mkdir -p ~/.tab && tab --completion bash > ~/.tab/_tab.bash

2. Source the completion script from ~/.bashrc bash source ~/.tab/_tab.bash

3. If you want to add a custom statusline, add to ~/.bashrc PS1="tab ${TAB:-/} $ "

Fish

tab supports dynamic autocompletion and a custom statusbar in fish.

1. Install the autocompletion script to your fish completions directory. mkdir -p ~/.config/fish/completions && tab --completion fish > ~/.config/fish/completions/tab.fish

2. If you want to use a custom command prompt, you can add to ~/.config/fish/config.fish bash function fish_prompt if test -n "$TAB" set_color $fish_color_cwd printf 'tab %s' "$TAB" set_color normal printf ' in ' set_color $fish_color_cwd printf '%s' (basename $PWD) set_color normal echo " \$ " else set_color $fish_color_cwd printf '%s' (basename $PWD) set_color normal echo " \$ " end end

Zsh

tab supports dynamic autocompletion and a custom statusbar in zsh.

1. Install OhMyZsh, and copy the TODO LINK completions/zsh/_tab script to ${ZSH_CUSTOM}/plugins/tab/_tab. mkdir -p "${ZSH_CUSTOM}/plugins/tab/" && tab --completion > "${ZSH_CUSTOM}/plugins/tab/_tab"

2. Add tab to your plugins list in ~/.zshrc: ```zsh

   load the tab autocompletions

plugins=(git tab) autoload -U compinit && compinit

source $ZSH/oh-my-zsh.sh ```

1. If you want to use a custom prompt, add to ~/.zshrc ```zsh

   add the selected tab to the prompt

setopt promptsubst if (($+TAB)); then PROMPT="%{$fg[green]%}tab ${TAB}%{$resetcolor%} $PROMPT" fi ```

Security

Tab can execute commands in a terminal, so I take security seriously. This is how I protect your machine in tab:

The tab daemon requires the following to accept any websocket connection: - The request must include a 128 byte auth token, stored in the file: ~/.tab/daemon-pid.yml. On unix operating systems, the file is assigned the permissions 600. - The Origin header must not be present in the request. This prevents any connection from a browser. - The daemon binds to 127.0.0.1 on a random port. This should prevent any attempted connections from the local network.