When comparing tmux vs Tabby Terminal, the Slant community recommends Tabby Terminal for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for Windows?” Tabby Terminal is ranked 4th while tmux is ranked 15th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Easily split panes
There is a keyboard shortcut that makes it easy to split a window and create more panes.
Pro Windows linked to sessions
tmux calls the individual shell instances windows. They are displayed like tabs in the status line. These windows can be shared between different sessions, so that any given shell instance can be in any number of tmux sessions used for different purposes or by different users. This allows configurations like the following example: User A: wAB, wA1, wA2; User B: wB1, wAB, wB2
Pro Preserve the state
As long as you don't close your session, you may even lose your SSH connection, it'll keep your state just as it was. So you can resume where you left off (via tmux attach
).
Pro Maximize screen space
As a tiling window manager, it'll make use of all the space. As you have multiple workspaces and you can resize, etc. you can adjust to see what matters most.
Pro Frequently updated
Tmux is in a state of constant development. Updates are frequent and bug reports usually get an answer within days.
Pro Customizable
Open ~/.tmux.conf to get started. You can customize keybindings, the bottom status bar, color schemes, the clock screen, your time zone, and more.
Pro Mouse support
Mouse support can optionally be enabled, allowing e.g. scrolling with the mouse wheel, or switching panes with mouse clicks.
Pro Only need to learn a few keyboard shortcuts and commands to make much headway
Pro It looks just beautiful
Pro It's open source
This helps the community to move software forward and to make it even better.
Pro It comes with plugins
Pro Customizable
A lot of things can be easily configured, e.g. color theme, size, window frame behavior, tab location, cursor style, hotkeys, etc.
Pro Is cross-platform
Even the question was "...for Windows", it's nice if you can use your tools over different platforms.
Pro Under active development
Hyper development has basically stalled out.
Pro Excellent interface
At start opens last session terminals. Also has terminal tabs.
Pro Integrated GitBash, Cmd, PowerShell, and WSL
Pro Integrates with git-bash with a simple toggle in the interface
Cons
Con Poorly designed key binding
Counter-intuitive keyboard shortcuts make tmux very hard to use and learn.
Con Bad scrolling support
Con No builtin telnet or serial support
It's considered bloat by the maintainers and for this reason there's no builtin support for them.
Con Some functions still fail
Con Graphics bugs on all platforms
On Windows 10 and Debian 11, Debian 12 the graphics starts bug after some usage. It always happens, even on different computers.
Con Slow with input lag
Sadly, Electron strikes again. The input lag is noticeable and annoying. Startup also takes like 2 seconds or more (On an i7 from 2016 with SSD).
Con 80MB
It's huge. The amount of resources it consumes is not justifiable.
Con Cannot remove the default profiles
For example, you installed Arch Linux for Windows Subsystem for Linux some time ago, but now you have deleted it and currently use Ubuntu on WSL. After that, if you decide to try this terminal emulator, you'll find Arch there without an option to remove the profiles already included in Terminus.