Tabby SFTP Plugin

Problem

A colleague needed a dark interface to work comfortably — an accessibility requirement, not a preference. The usual SFTP clients do not accommodate it: neither FileZilla nor WinSCP ships a dark mode.

They also each have half of what the work needed. FileZilla has the two-pane layout people are used to. WinSCP has copy and paste. Neither handles the case that comes up constantly: opening a remote file, editing it, and saving it back without a manual re-upload.

Approach

Tabby is a terminal application with a plugin system, and it is themeable — so the accessibility requirement was solved by the host application, leaving me to build the client itself.

The plugin is a full SFTP browser written in TypeScript, built to what the user actually asked for:

• The two-pane FileZilla-style layout they already knew
• Copy and paste, taken from WinSCP's behaviour rather than reinvented
• Open in editor with save-through — edit a remote file locally, save, and the change goes back to the server with no re-upload step

Outcome

In internal use. It may be released publicly later.

The requirement that drove it is worth restating, because it is easy to file as a cosmetic request: someone could not do their job with the available tools, and the fix was a few days of work rather than a workaround they would have carried indefinitely.