How to Install and Use Tabby Terminal on Windows

Tabby is an infinitely customizable cross-platform terminal app for local shells, serial, SSH, and Telnet connections. It is an alternative to Windows' standard terminal, PowerShell ISE, PuTTY, macOS Terminal.app and iTerm.

As of July 2023, the Tabby project on GitHub has exceeded 49k stars.

Download the latest app release of Tabby Terminal from the Latest release, here we choose the tabby*x64.exe file for Windows.

Click on the package to install it. Choose the installation method you want then click next. The next window that opens allows you to set the location of installation, You can change or leave it as default. Then click on Install. Once the installation is done, the following window opens. Click on Finish to exit setup. You can check the Run Tabby to open once you exit the setup.

Click the Tabby shortcut icon on the desktop to start Tabby Terminal. The welcome page will appear on the first startup, please close it.

Click Settings, open the settings window, click Profiles & connections tab on the left menu, and click the light blue New profile button. Under the Profile and connections tab, you are able to view the profiles which you can connect either via SSH or Serial. You can also create a new profile.

Then select the base profile to use a template, I choose SSH connection.

Add the profile details, including the name, Host, username of the server to connect to, and Group of the instance. You will also have to provide an authentication method. Let's take My Ubuntu VPS as an example. After filling in the necessary information as shown in the figure below, click the save button to save the profile.

As shown in the figure below, click the window icon to open the Profile list, select the ssh connection Profile “My Ubuntu VPS” created in the previous step, and click the Enter button behind it to quickly open the ssh client window.

We are using Ubuntu 20.04 Linux VPS hosted by VPSMart, the initial information after ssh login is as follows:

Click the SFTP file icon on the upper right to open the remote server file browsing function.

Click the file you want to download in the file list, and the save window will open automatically, then select the path and save it.

Drag the local file directly to a certain directory in the Tabby SFTP file browsing window, and the file will be uploaded there automatically.

Click on Settings to customize the app. The first setting is the Application tab which allows you to check for software updates and change the language interface. You can also report a problem on GitHub.

The next setting is the Appearance tab. This tab shows you how to change the font and even the terminal background. You can select the color from the theme or from the Color scheme.

You can customize Tabby's appearance by using various theming and color options.

From this guide, we have installed Tabby Terminal Emulator on Windows 10. Tabby is a free, open-source terminal emulator of the modern age. It is a good terminal emulator with customization options to fit your identity and Plugins to extend its performance It has a SSH client, Telnet client and a serial terminal integrated with it.