Tabby Better Scrollback

I don't know if this functionality is already built into Tabby, so I decided to write my own plugin to do this. Bugs are still to be expected so do not hesitate to report them.

This is a Tabby plugin that persists more terminal scrollback history across application restarts and lets you export scrollback to a file.

Features

• Extended scrollback on restart — recovers sessions without cleaning the previous history
• Configurable limit — set how many lines to persist in Settings → Better Scrollback
• Save to file — toolbar button or context menu item

Install

From Tabby Plugin Manager (recommended)

1. Open Settings → Plugins in Tabby.
2. Search for "better-scrollback" or "tabby-better-scrollback".
3. Click Install, then restart Tabby completely.

Usage

Restore scrollback on restart

1. Enable Recover tabs in Tabby Settings
2. Open Settings → Better Scrollback
3. Ensure Enable extended scrollback persistence is checked
4. Set Lines to persist on restart (default: 10000)
5. Use terminals as usual; scrollback is saved when Tabby exits and restored on relaunch

Export scrollback to a file

Any of these:

• Click Save history on the terminal toolbar
• Right-click the terminal → Save scrollback to file

Exports plain text as tabby-scrollback-<title>-<timestamp>.txt.

Configuration

Settings are stored in Tabby's config YAML under betterScrollback:

betterScrollback:
  enabled: true
  persistLines: 10000

Caveats

• Restores scrollback buffer only, not live shell processes (same as Tabby's built-in recovery)
• Full-screen apps (vim, less) use the alternate screen buffer, which is not persisted
• Very large persistLines values with many open tabs may hit browser localStorage size limits (~5–10 MB)