So I've tried to figure out why you might want to use this over Tmux, and essentially I think it comes to down to:
- everything is mouse clickable
- tmux style display-popups are used for friendly UI interactions everywhere
- it has a UI for agents running in panes, with a cool status (idle/working) display
- has opinionated defaults like automatic clipboard copy on mouse text select
- makes nested sessions easier & has default affordances for remote SSH attach
- is generally prettier
- uses display-popups for notifications
Otherwise it seems exactly like tmux.
I wanted to mention that `zmx` is a beautiful piece of minimal software that basically has gotten rid of my tmux and zellij use. Uses a ghostty-based terminal emulator for each session, supports pretty much all of these features by leveraging ghostty. I truly don’t see the benefit of something like herdr over this minimal, robust setup. If I really wanted a lot of customization for AI assistants, I’d consider using Orca, but my current zmx approach works OOB and it’s solid. Great software!
Thank you for mentioning zmx. Reading through their repo, it’s like someone read my mind, took my instinctive, almost pre-verbal, half-formed/quarter-baked preference for `screen` over `tmux`, beautifully and precisely formalized it into an actually lucid opinion, and then instantiated it as an actually real piece of software. I’ve used it for an hour and it already feels like second nature; I somehow have muscle memory for features that I didn’t even know it had until I instinctively used them and they were right where I expected them to be. Seriously, thank you.
My pleasure. Make sure you check out the thriving ecosystem of tools around it as well. I’ve seen a few projects building on it in a prettt creative way.
https://zmx.sh/
for the lazy.
I don't understand what it does. The homepage says it doesn't provide windows, panes or splits. What is it used for?
Provides a daemonized terminal basically, so you can attach and detach it freely. Other UI concerns are left to other layers.
So likely that is neovim running all my terminal/repl/agent/editor panes and tabs?
I really want to like this. Ideologically I'm on board. Who wouldn't want to avoid all this multiplexing complexity and pitfalls? But deferring the window management to the OS sounds great in theory, but in practice it falls short (at least for me).
I work on both MacOS and Linux. Even if I were to figure out a perfect window management approach, I'd have to do it twice, and then figure out a way to "attach" to a layout of windows essentially. And then make it cross-platform... or live with zero organization, or at best some kind of flat structure. That's a immediate non-starter. Even if I focused only on a single OS, I still don't consider this a viable approach. It would be like removing browser tabs, and saying let's let the OS manage all this nasty UI stuff.
So then the next immediate idea is let's just have the Terminal itself manage UI. Ghostty supports tabs, splits etc. Great. But if I need to restart Ghostty for whatever reason, my entire layout vanishes and I have to set it all up again?
For me tmux is not just about the attach/detach part. A session is a personal "layout" of the workspace I've organically landed on for this task. Maybe it's a few windows with splits. Maybe it's just the single window with or without a split. Maybe it's a more browser-like just X amount of windows (tabs). If/when things get overwhelming I branch off into a new session for one (or more) sub-tasks. Little fzf-based utilities allow for nice fuzzying over sessions and what not. Or maybe you just run the different sessions in actual different physical OS windows. You can mix and match however you feel that day.
So if I'm in project x, working on feature y, and I detach and walk over to my other computer I can SSH over and continue as if nothing at all changed and retain the exact layout of what I was using before. Simultaneously in another physical window (or a tab) I can just switch to another local (or not) session and instantly be mentally in a different context, working on a different project or feature. Or I can SSH into a server and resume a debugging session left (intentionally) open for a while (which may consist of a few splits/windows/what not).
Maybe I'm missing something. I'm curious how your day-to-day workflow looks like. I imagine if I was 100% bound to a single machine, I could make it work with a tiling wm. But even then Ghostty crashes or something else happens and poof your entire work layout is gone and needs to be re-created (even if the individual pieces are safe).
If you do most of your work on a central server and treat your other devices as thin clients, then (afaik) Tmux/Zellij are the way to go – not to mention if you want to multiplayer with colleagues.
(I know Wezterm has remote session multiplexing in beta, but I’d be surprised if you can re-attach from a different machine.)
Lately I’ve been experimenting with embracing the total scriptability of my favorite terminal, Kitty. Its creator is famously outspoken about non-native multiplexers, precisely because of the pitfalls you mentioned and because they hold back the terminal ecosystem.
Couple of recent issues I’ve had: washed-out colors in Claude Code, desktop notifications not passing through, scrollback weirdness, and image protocol mismatches.
I used to treat Zellij as an OS to build my own IDE in. Now it’s Kitty.
I save layouts as a Kitty session. Important limitation: this doesn’t persist running processes. And so enter zmx. Whenever I need a process I can reattach to I wrap it in zmx.
A terminal agent can interact with the kitty cli to create splits and such. I’m still on the fence as to whether that’s safe. Probably not. Also, tmux is likely better represented in the training data. Currently experimenting with running claude inside tmux (multiplexing) inside nono (sandbox).
You might want to give https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai a try, then.
Runs agents in tmux in sandboxes.
Hard coded harness support... Yuck.
Gondolin is sand boxes done right...
You don't have to use the opinionated harnesses. Nothing stopping you from launching your own.
Niri is a perfect window manager approach, in my opinion. I don’t need tmux. Just Niri + Foot (terminal) and it’s perfect for the way my brain works. If you haven’t tried it, I highly recommended it.
Huh. The person you're replying to specifically mentioned they connect to the same tmux session from different computers. Niri is great, but how's it relevant here?
I think https://zellij.dev/ covers all of these? But it isn't an "agent native", and `herdr` seems to support importing existing agent sessions.
I use zellij a lot and created myself a zellij skill for an agent to manage my sessions/layouts in zellij directly.
So for a new worktree the agent can create a tab in zellij with multiple panes, properly named etc.
It works really nicely.
Although since I got the 52 inch Dell monitor I tend to just put everything visible at all once most of the time.
Could you share this skill?
how do you handle zellij on mobile?
seamlessly jumping from local to remote sessions is something ive been hoping for in zellij for quite a while so if herdr supports this it could be interesting.
Until I try it, though, I don't think I'll understand why it needs a specific feature for running an agent tool in a side panel, which is appartently one of it's main selling point.
It's better than tmux. I've used both extensively, there's no reason to use tmux again.
Yeah, I use tmux all day. Technically great, but the UX for tmux smux.
You end up having to wrap everything in adapter scripts because it is so verbose as well as so unmemorable, along with that, it has no built in help, not even -h
Well, tmux is mature, battle-tested software, whereas probably no human has ever read the majority of the code in this project.
Would usuability (for what herdr is optimized for) not be the bigger use case for users?
I never heard of this project but in 5 minutes I got the features that I wanted without having to introduce muscle memory. I just wanted a dead simple way to point and click to select different terminals. The only thing I neeed to remember now is "ctrl-b + v" to create a new pane.
From what I can figure it is actively calling itself a multiplexer, so pretty closely linked to something like tmux (one of the review videos on the page calls it a "tmux rewrite").
But they seem to be targeting very different scopes use wise.
I think if you use this to do stuff like, edit files, run htop, drop into an interactive shell, compile some code, my guess is you're gonna be fighting uphill and have a bad time.
On the other hand, if you're only using tmux so that you can have a bunch of terminal windows for agents. Then this is probably going to make your workflow a fair bit smoother.
What makes you guess that? Have you looked at the page at all? A video? Tried it? It works like any other multiplexer.
What? Do y'all even try it before saying things like this?
I use it primarily as a replacement for tmux to do terminal stuff, not use agents. It's awesome. It worked out of the box, has actually good, working mouse support, quickly ships fixes, and the defaults are sane with obvious behaviors represented in an intuitive TUI.
I also quite like that it has a decent CLI and skill for agents to use too.
Quite handy to apply since you can instruct models to run devservers in herdr panes or workspaces rather than doing long running shell commands or scripts in the agent session.
(You could probably do the same with tmux and others but I've had better success with monitoring herdr state)
You can enable mouse in tmux as well.
Claude now hijacks your mouse in tmux!
I had this problem, and was able to get around it by disabling mouse reporting in iTerm2.
Copy paste out of tmux drives me nuts. Seems to work half the time. Interested in a good fix
tmux has a mouse switch--does this do more than that?
I think that just enables xterm mouse support, and allows for various mouse key bindings in tmux. I think the deal is that it's turned on by default, and lots of the UI elements by default are configured with mouse bindings. Not just selecting and resizing panes, you can right click on a pane or a workspace and one of those display-popups pops up with a "rename" dialog box.
I think this is why it's described as "mouse first" terminal.
Tmux mouse support also has right-click context menus, clicking between tabs and panes, scrolling in panes, selecting text etc.
Sounds like byobu+any reasonable term emulator, honestly. Hasn't failed me yet - has most of those features.
Mobile support?
The example I saw of "mobile support" was connecting via a mobile terminal emulator. I don't see how that is any different than using tmux with the same mobile terminal emulator.
Herdr supports mobile-friendly layouts seamlessly, just like responsive web pages. On a narrow terminal, the sidebar is automatically hidden, and the tab bar is replaced with a status line (current workspace name, current tab name, and agent statuses). Everything else is tucked into the hamburger menu.
The clickable areas work on mobile as well - at least using supported clients like Moshi
There are plugins yes. You've to setup cloudflare and ideally your own tunnel, and it's pretty seamless as long as your laptop isn't off / sleeping
If there was a mobile app or at least some kind of agent agnostic telegram integration then I'd be more interested.
There are two pluggins I've seen:
1- https://github.com/dcolinmorgan/herdr-remote Support Cloudflare, Telegram, .. quite buggy to me
2- https://github.com/0cv/herdr-mobile-relay Forked from the original one but improved and usable on phones, however the scope narrowed down to Cloudflare only
I'm trying to get Discord to work with it. A few people have succeeded.
You want to use Telegram as a shell?
To monitor and instruct agents.
You missed the most important one. Automatic git worktree management. So that different agents don't clash with each other.
If my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle
Similarity to tmux is the point
I've been dailying this (inside tmux!) for multi-agent orchestration and for state detection for agentic fleet orchestration, it's excellent. Highly recommend!
you dropped this >rust