Torbie

Explore the Torbie homepage — screenshots, features and downloads.

What it is

Torbie is a terminal for Windows, macOS and Linux, built on the Tabby codebase and diverged from it. It has tabs, nested split panes, an SSH/SFTP/Telnet client and connection manager, a serial terminal, and an encrypted vault for secrets. On Windows it drives PowerShell, WSL, Git-Bash, Cygwin, MSYS2, Cmder and CMD.

Installers and portable builds are available for Windows, macOS and Linux in GitHub Releases. Builds are unsigned.

Why it exists

Two reasons, and they pull in the same direction.

The first is the plugin ecosystem. A terminal is only as useful as what people have already built for it, and Tabby's plugin API has a real one. Torbie keeps it — the package names, the npm keyword, the modules plugins require — so a plugin written for Tabby is found and loaded here, with no version gate. That is not a transitional courtesy; it is the reason this is a derivative rather than one more terminal written from scratch.

The second is that terminals are opaque when they misbehave. A window that freezes for ninety seconds leaves no trace: the OS reports the process as responding, nothing throws, and the only evidence is the user's memory of it. Torbie's answer is instrumentation rather than optimism.

What it adds

It says why it froze. diagnostics.log records what blocks an event loop, in the main process and in every renderer, and attributes the stall to the synchronous calls responsible. The finding is usually the summary line: "renderer event loop blocked 71.3s during boot — 98% synchronous I/O: fs.readFileSync ×58214". It counts tallies rather than slow calls, because what freezes an application of this kind is tens of thousands of individually fast operations, none of which would trip a threshold.

It refuses to be a useless hostage. Exactly one process holds the single-instance lock, so a process that can never show a window silently swallows every later launch — measured at six hours of it. A watchdog now ends a process in which no window has ever finished booting, and a startup error no longer blocks the main loop in a modal dialog nobody is looking at.

It brings a pane back running. Restoring a session normally restores the furniture: the tabs, the splits, a picture of the scrollback. Every pane still comes back as a fresh shell, so the agent you had a two-hour conversation with is simply not there. Torbie asks each pane what it is running, persists that with the layout, and types the command back into the fresh shell — reopening the agent's conversation or reattaching the multiplexer. The original process does not survive a restart; what comes back is the same command, in the same directory.

It previews what a link refers to. A hover card over a terminal link, driven by declarative integration manifests that fetch a summary — a ticket's status, a pull request's checks, a commit's files. Rules customise it per pattern, and a preview can open in a real pane beside the terminal.

It inventories itself. Every build on the machine, with live process attribution, size, git provenance, and a health check that names the cause when one will not start — written after an auto-update deleted nine builtin plugins and left the app on a splash screen indefinitely while Windows called it responding.

Relationship to Tabby

Torbie began as a fork and owes it the whole foundation. It no longer tracks upstream: changes are cherry-picked across when they are worth taking, rather than the fork sitting rebased on a moving base. A settings page reports how far apart the two are, and marks which settings this codebase added — because otherwise every row in the window looks the same whichever project it came from.