[Plugin] cctabs: allow Claude Code and Codex to create, name, sort and drive fleets of coding agents/sessions in Tabby

[motin]

If you keep Claude Code or Codex sessions in Tabby tabs, you probably know the point where it stops working. Around ten you can still juggle them by hand. Past that you stop knowing which tab is working on what, which one finished, and which one is waiting for you to say yes.

I usually have more than 50 open. I started cctabs for myself in March, and it has been how I work ever since: thousands of pull requests at work, most in private repos, have come out of sessions in its tabs. My team runs parallel sessions the same way, and it has taken our PR throughput up about four to six times (from around 50 PRs per person week to 200-300 PRs per person week). After people saw it in demos at work and at meetups, I kept adding what my team and others needed, so it is now something you can install too.

cctabs is a CLI and a Tabby plugin. It gives every session a named Tabby tab, and a command line to drive the tabs:

cctabs new auth ~/Dev/myapp                    # new named tab, Claude Code starts in it
cctabs new review ~/Dev/myapp --engine codex   # the same with Codex CLI
cctabs sessions                                # every tab, and whether it's busy or waiting for you
cctabs scrollback auth                         # read a tab without switching to it
cctabs send auth "run the tests again"         # type a prompt into it
cctabs fork auth -n auth-v2                    # branch the conversation into a new tab
cctabs restart-tabby                           # restart Tabby and bring every session's tab back

The main idea: it ships with a Claude Code skill, so you can tell one Claude "open tabs for the API, the UI and the migration, give each its task, and check on them", and it does that itself, in Tabby, while you stay in one tab.

What else it does:

• The tabs stay ordinary Tabby tabs. No tmux, so your keybindings and scrolling work as usual.
• Restore after a restart. cctabs prepare-reboot before you restart the computer, cctabs restore --pending after, and each tab that had a session comes back with its name, its place in the bar and its conversation. In a fleet of more than 30, the ones idle for 3+ days come back suspended, ready to wake, so the machine doesn't start them all at once. This one has been a lifesaver for me.
• An account or backend per tab. Your own Claude account in one tab, a client's in the next, Codex, Ollama Cloud or a local model beside them. When one Claude account runs out of quota, cctabs profile-copy moves the session to another and it carries on where it was.
• Small things for a long tab bar. Tab colours by account or by rule, cctabs sort to reorder the bar by recent activity, and cctabs suspend to stop an idle session but keep its tab, so a 60-tab fleet doesn't mean 60 running Claudes.

It grew release by release from what my team and I needed: Wave Terminal in April (0.1), Tabby and a backend per tab in May (0.3–0.4), moving a session to another Claude account in August (0.5), Windows 11 in September (0.5.4), and in October restore across a reboot, Codex tabs and a token that locks the plugin's API (0.5.12–0.7.0). The whole history is in the changelog.

How it talks to Tabby: the tabby-cctabs plugin serves a small HTTP API on 127.0.0.1:3300 that the CLI calls. Since 0.7.0 every call except a health check needs a token that the plugin writes to ~/.cctabs/control-token (readable only by you) at each Tabby start, and it refuses requests that carry an Origin header, so a web page you have open can't drive your tabs through it.

The quickest install: open Claude Code in a Tabby tab and paste

Visit https://cctabs.com/guide/getting-started?ref=tabby and walk me through setting up cctabs on this machine.

Or by hand, inside Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add generativereality/plugins
/plugin install cctabs@generativereality
/reload-plugins

then the Tabby half: Settings → Plugins → search "cctabs" → install tabby-cctabs → restart Tabby.

Tested on macOS and Windows 11, needs Node.js 20.19.4 or newer. Linux isn't tested yet. MIT.

• Site and docs: https://cctabs.com/?ref=tabby
• Source: https://github.com/generativereality/cctabs
• Changelog: https://cctabs.com/changelog?ref=tabby

If you run agents in Tabby too: what breaks first for you once there are a lot of tabs? And if there's a better way than a local HTTP API for a plugin to let an outside CLI drive tabs, I'd like to hear it.

[motin]

Opened #11846 to add cctabs to the README's plugin list.