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fullstop

alacritty's lack of tabs absolutely killed it for me. They are not open to the idea of adding tabs, either.

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The maintainers would prefer to "do one thing well" and let other programs handle this sort of feature.

You can use tabbed[1] or a multiplexer like tmux, or you can use a different terminal emulator like kitty[2].

For example, instead of launching `alacritty`, you would launch `tabbed -c alacritty --embed`.

1. https://git.suckless.org/tabbed/

2. https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/

tmux doesn't cut it for me. I use tmux on remote machines and really don't want to nest tmux sessions, and it looks like tabbed will spawn an alacritty process per tab.

Kitty it is.

It also depends on your window manager too. I use BSPWM and tabs just always felt off when I could quickly flip to another workspace.

True, but tabs are something built into tiling window managers like Sway. If you want a fast terminal with tabs then I'd recommend kitty.

Can you group tabs in Sway? I have a lot of tabs open and each window represents a specific group. I navigate primarily by keyboard, and having grouped tabs keeps me organized.

I'll give Kitty a shot. I've been using konsole recently and it works for the most part, except when sending files through picocom. ctrl-a+s pops up a message about terminal flow control even though the keystroke is intercepted by picocom and not used for flow control.

Yes, you can do it through the config or by using shortcuts to switch a group of windows into tabs. I'd also recommend tmux and tmuxp.

Yes. Sway represents the world as a tree. You can nest containers as you like. e.g. H[firefox T[Alacritty Alacritty]] describes a horizontal split with Firefox on the left side and a tab container of two Alacrittys on the right side. If you want H[S[T[T[Alacritty Alacritty] H[Alacritty Alacritty] Alacritty] V[Alacritty Alacritty]] Alacritty], go wild!

When you subsequently want to move a group of things around, you can focus the parent container and move it around as though it were a window. (Out of the box, Super+a is `focus parent`, though curiously there’s no `focus child` binding in the default config, so to return to a child you pretty much have to focus a sibling or another container, or use the mouse.)

For what it's worth, my habit in i3/sway is usually to represent "groups of tabs" as single tabbed containers on different desktops, and rarely to have multiple tabbed containers next to each other on a single desktop. Although occasionally I do the latter, too.

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