macOS: Tabs are seen as windows

[rewgs]

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.

[pluiedev]

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.

[pluiedev]

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.

[rewgs]

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.

[pluiedev]

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.

[rewgs]

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!

[mpr1255]

FYI this seems to be fixed in Alt-Tab 7.23

[rewgs]

Seems fixed in Contexts as well, so I imagine it's due to a Ghostty update. Good stuff!

[edevil]

Which version of Ghostty are you using?

[mpr1255]

fwiw I'm on 1.1.3 (build 9438) and Alt-Tab 7.21.1. The window/tab thing was really bugging me but solved now.

[pluiedev]

I'm actually gonna leave this open for now in case someone searches for this

[pluiedev]

Please have basic courtesy and be considerate when interacting in community spaces. We can't just "fix it" since this is a limitation with macOS's native tabs as outlined above, and the entitlement shown here is frankly very rude.

[rhodes-b]

Did you read this discussion it seems like you haven't.

Its NOT a bug its how the native tabbing of macos works and no the maintainers are not all using tmux they arent using twm on macos

[mitchellh]

Safari, Firefox, Notes, Obsidian

Every listed application uses a custom tab bar (yes, even Safari, even though its written by Apple, the maintainers have studied its behavior and implementation through debug tools quite a lot). Ghostty uses macOS native tabbing (the API built-in to macOS and maintained by Apple Inc).

I've noted that we plan on introducing a custom tab bar as well to fix this (and for other reasons) but it isn't trivial so it's not a high priority. There are workarounds (with tradeoffs) for the macOS tiling WM users.

To reiterate: this isn't a bug (malfunctioning feature), it is a feature request (unimplemented functionality). We are using macOS native tabbing that Apple, Inc. ships, and native tabs by design show up as separate windows via the accessibility API that Apple, Inc. also ships. This is all working as Apple intended.

And to work around this, we need to rebuild all of that functionality ourselves. That's accepted and planned but depends on when any of the volunteers spending their free time on this project want to give it a shot. So if you want to do the work, go ahead, and I'm happy to review it and try to use as much of it as I can (it's a big feature so its unlikely to be perfect the first try). If you're not going to do the work and it's bothering you, then please use another terminal. It's the beauty of choice.

[yoavg]

It might help future viewers of this issue to learn that while Safari/Firefox/Obsidian do not exhibit this, Finder and Preview do.

[00-kat]

Yep, even though Safari is made by Apple it doesn't use Apple's native tabs implementation for some reason 🙃.