macOS: Tabs are seen as windows #5880
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Right-click on the dock icon and you'll see that two tabs are "seen" as two windows:
I use Contexts as a Cmd+Tab replacement -- it allows Cmd+Tab to cycle through windows rather than only apps like the stock Cmd+Tab behavior. As such, my window list is polluted with all of my Ghostty tabs, even if I only have one Ghostty window open:
(I blocked out the other windows in the Contexts menu for privacy). I imagine that similar apps such as AltTab exhibit the same issue, but I can't confirm. No other apps that I can find, including non-native terminals such as Wezterm, exhibit this behavior. My Ghostty config is here. |
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Replies: 2 comments 5 replies
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That's a limitation of native macOS tabs: https://ghostty.org/docs/help/macos-tiling-wms. We intend to switch to a custom tabbing solution later on, due to all the bugs native tabbing has. |
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It's not just tiling WMs - unfortunately it's more like that they're treated as windows in all circumstances EXCEPT for the actual rendering of the window. Maybe the linked FAQ is a bit mistitled, but this is exactly what you're seeing. |
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Oh wow. Yeah, the documentation should definitely be clearer. I have to say that I'm pretty puzzled by this, though. One of the primary draws to ghostty for me, and I'm sure many others, is its native GUI. But "Ghostty uses macOS native tabs" aside, this is clearly not native behavior: as mentioned in my original post, I haven't been able to find a single app, native or not, that exhibits this same behavior. What is ghostty doing differently that apparently literally every other app is doing correctly; or perhaps, what is ghostty not doing that apparently literally every other app corrects for? For example, if this is just how macOS operates, which is what is I'm picking up from this conversation, then I'd expect to see my 100+ browser tabs represented as windows when right-clicking on the dock icon. |
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The crazy thing is that builtin macOS apps themselves don't even use "native tabs" per se. Safari for instance has its own tab widget that is wholly different from the one provided by the system toolkit. It's almost like macOS devs know how bad native tabs are 😛 We only learned that native tabs have all these drawbacks fairly late into the beta and there wasn't enough time to devise our own tabbing solution. (macOS devs on the team are also considerably fewer in number and simultaneously busier compared to Linux/GTK ones, which is mostly the bottleneck here.) Again, we are planning to make our own tabs, but for now this is what we have. |
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So the correct question is in fact, "what is ghostty not doing that apparently literally every other app corrects for?" and the answer is "write its own tabbing solution" Christ. I appreciate you humoring me/providing an explanation. What a mess! |
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I'm actually gonna leave this open for now in case someone searches for this |
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So the correct question is in fact, "what is ghostty not doing that apparently literally every other app corrects for?" and the answer is "write its own tabbing solution" Christ.
I appreciate you humoring me/providing an explanation. What a mess!