a week ago I was using cmux but its osx only and doen't work on remote terminals. then I switched to herdr which is great so far except its not s great at managing panes. I can't move them around or change ordering. now another terminal multiplexer. I'm getting whiplash.
all that said, none of the existing solutions are perfect and rust codebases are nice. how easy is it to reorder panes? is there a cli that lets me control the panel layout via a skill file and allow my opencode session to target and send data to other panes?
I built https://zmx.sh to make it easier to interact with your terminal sessions programmatically. 1 window = 1 session which might feel like a negative but it makes programmatic access easy and agents can use it just by pointing it at the zmx help command. Basically, an agent just needs 2 commands (run and write) for full control and the commands are synchronous so you don’t need to do any polling.
I started using cmux a month ago and it had made my life a lot easier. Finally I have a pane with all my projects open all the time, I can switch between them, have multiple terminals for each one.
What do you mean by remote terminals?
my plan is to eventually move my entire workflow to a remote workmachine over ssh. with kernal, I can automate all my smoketests entirely from a headless machine rendering my laptop overkill to run agentic workflows. I'd rather be using it to watch movies, learn new stuff or hand code in my downtime. if your workflow requires cmux, you're stuck running your agents on your local machine.
To be clear, That doesn't make cmux bad. if you WANT to do everythign on your mac, cmux is fantastic. its just not designed with the remote ssh control use case in mind.
Exactly, the whole point of having a laptop is that you can close it at some point. Once you move to these newfangled workflows it is all gone. That is why I have been slow on uptake with all these new apps they are releasing like Codex GUI and Claude GUI and all that stuff. I like that work continues when I close my laptop, but also I like that it continues on my hardware, not somewhere in the cloud being a supply chain attacked by who knows what.
I'm one of the creators of cmux. I'm moving a lot of my own dev work to Mac Minis, so I'm starting to feel quite a lot of the pain you mentioned... will try to make this better!
no skill file, you get the same 90 commands of tmux. and if you build a rust app you can have many more cool stuff like "wait for" some text to appear, asyncly
well it looks great so far but Its a no go for me for now until you have at least a cli that a coding harness can use to drive it. thats going to be the killer feature going forward for all these multiplexers. last week I vibecoded a plugin that lets me open a line specific input box that sends the context of my code along with my prompt into my opencode session running on a seperate pane. its a game changer when it comes to moving faster.
excited to check back in on the progress as you work on it though! I think these kinds of tools are going to be much more relevant going forward as we all move to agentic workflows.
ok will check it out then ! Thank you, putting it on my todo list