6 comments

  • stereo3 hours ago
    You've obviously written this because screen wasn't doing the right thing, but your readme only explains that it's a "young project, not a drop-in GNU screen replacement". What are its advantages over screen or tmux?
    • kylecarbs3 hours ago
      Fair. Adding a section for this now.<p>screen actually works the same way architecturally: it parses all output through its own built-in terminal emulator and redraws from that state on reattach. But that emulator is decades old and lags far behind what modern programs emit. Whatever it doesn&#x27;t understand gets dropped or mangled on redraw. boo swaps that layer for libghostty-vt, Ghostty&#x27;s VT core, so the saved state matches what your terminal would actually display, and terminal queries get answered while detached so TUIs don&#x27;t hang unattended.<p>tmux is great, it was just never the model I wanted. I really liked screen&#x27;s simplicity, sessions and a prefix key and nothing else to learn, and boo keeps exactly that.
      • dgnemo3 hours ago
        can you share more on the tmux model vs boo?
        • drzaiusx111 hour ago
          Tmux is n clients to 1 server.<p>Screen is 1 server to 1 client.<p>In screen each client session is a fork of the screen server. In tmux there&#x27;s one server and many client forks iirc.
          • gguingff1 hour ago
            this is incorrect. you can have multiple clients using screen -x instead of screen -a
            • drzaiusx1142 minutes ago
              I didn&#x27;t say you couldn&#x27;t have multiple clients, I said clients and servers are the same process forked. Or did someone add distinct client&#x2F;server support to screen finally? I know theres a lot of stuff bolted onto screen over the years but I wasn&#x27;t aware they dropped forked servers for the tmux model...
        • kylecarbs3 hours ago
          I want boo to be a screen replacement, not a tmux replacement. tmux gives you a whole workspace: layout, scrollback, copy mode, a status bar. screen&#x27;s appeal was that it did almost none of that: sessions, a prefix key, done. boo keeps that model and swaps the emulation for libghostty so reattach actually redraws correctly.<p>They also compose: a boo session is just a PTY running a program, so you can run tmux inside one if you want.
          • dang52 minutes ago
            Can you please not post AI-generated or AI-edited comments to HN? It&#x27;s not allowed here - see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html#generated">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html#generated</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47340079">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47340079</a>.<p>Of course, it&#x27;s impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but some of your posts (like this one) are getting classified that way.
            • kylecarbs27 minutes ago
              Apologies, half of this indeed was. As I was iterating on the README this seemed apt, but I will refrain!
        • WalterGR2 hours ago
          [dead]
  • ac2934 minutes ago
    Been using zmx for a few months and love it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;neurosnap&#x2F;zmx&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;neurosnap&#x2F;zmx&#x2F;</a><p>Very similar, based on libghostty
  • boltguo1 hour ago
    Really dig the minimal approach here. Swapping the backend to libghostty is exactly the kind of clean architecture we need. Going to test drive this today.
  • johnfn1 hour ago
    I think Cmux is the incumbent in the &quot;screen-style terminal multiplexer built on libghostty&quot; - any key differentiators here? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cmux.com&#x2F;">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cmux.com&#x2F;</a>
    • kylecarbs1 hour ago
      Cmux is a standalone terminal. Boo is a command-line similar to screen, backed by libghostty for terminal emulation.
  • darkteflon3 hours ago
    Installed using the curl-to-bash on Sequoia and I’m getting “error: ReadOnlyFileSystem” on ‘boo new’. Can’t see any open issues on gh and nothing in the readme.<p>Definitely interested in something like this - love ghostty and I’ve been finding Zellij a bit crashy recently (plus I don’t really need tabs).
    • relyks26 minutes ago
      How have you been using Zellij? It&#x27;s been working great for me
    • kylecarbs3 hours ago
      I&#x27;ll take a look at this now. Thanks for reporting!
      • kylecarbs2 hours ago
        Just published v0.5.13 which should fix this! It seems to be a path issue. Now boo falls back to tmpdir for storing sockets.
  • asar3 hours ago
    this looks nice! i&#x27;ve been using herdr the last couple of weeks as a terminal multiplexer for agents, which works amazingly well.