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:<p>- everything is mouse clickable<p>- tmux style display-popups are used for friendly UI interactions everywhere<p>- it has a UI for agents running in panes, with a cool status (idle/working) display<p>- has opinionated defaults like automatic clipboard copy on mouse text select<p>- makes nested sessions easier & has default affordances for remote SSH attach<p>- is generally prettier<p>- uses display-popups for notifications<p>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.
I think <a href="https://zellij.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://zellij.dev/</a> 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.<p>So for a new worktree the agent can create a tab in zellij with multiple panes, properly named etc.<p>It works really nicely.<p>Although since I got the 52 inch Dell monitor I tend to just put everything visible at all once most of the time.
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.<p>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.
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").<p>But they seem to be targeting very different scopes use wise.<p>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.<p>On the other hand, if you're <i>only</i> 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? Do y'all even try it before saying things like this?<p>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.
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.<p>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.
You can enable mouse in tmux as well.
Mobile support?
If there was a mobile app or at least some kind of agent agnostic telegram integration then I'd be more interested.
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.
you dropped this >rust
I've been using tmux historically and it eventually became too cumbersome since my typical workflow started being a lot more AI-agent heavy. I now run over 10 agents at the same time and they're all working on some multi-hour workstreams that I occasionally need to check in on or unblock. Tmux was not making this particularly easy and I would occasionally lose an agent or forget about it until much later only to realize it's been sitting idle waiting for me to approve something for a few days.<p>I've tried Cmux, but it didn't do it for me, since the agent statuses were displayed on the workspaces and having multiple agents in the same workspace would sometime produce confusing results.<p>I've been using Herdr since the start of the week and so far it's been the best in terms of visibility of what my agents are doing and which of them need attention. The only wart I've noticed so far is that the performance is not always great — sometimes I see the text appearing with a noticeable delay as I type it.
I've been using cmux for a long time too but am pretty happy with it. It's not perfect but much better than plain tmux/ghostty. I'll give herdr a shot too.
I thought that was where I was going to end up, but that's where Claude's remote control or copilot's agents tab spared me.<p>The hitching is compounded for me because I tend to run the agents in squads: the agent I talk to operates a strict no-coding 'producer' mode, it tasks a sub-agent to do the research or coding, then the results go via a file to a critic or review agent; keeps the producer context very minimal and lean. Not convinced it's as necessary as just starting new contexts frequently with Fable etc.<p>My general rule is that I won't commit code a human hasn't seen/reviewed to production codebases, and I know I won't maintain that rule if I have to read all the slop that gets generated first time round without an AI reviewer pass.<p>So far my producer skill has survived 4.6 thru fable in succeeding to treat the review/critic output skeptically, as a likely yes-man or team player.<p>The key is to remember that, as of Fable, the size of the training corpus segment representing people responding to AI-generated content is still relatively tiny. Telling Sonnet 4.6 "this is code an agent produced" has a near decorative effect with no apparent significance, Sonnet 4.8 shows some misgivings, and when I experimented with Fable it seemed to do well at anticipating the kind of slop 4.6 would throw you.<p>Interestingly, to me, telling Fable that code a previous Fable agent wrote was AI generated seemed to raise some kind of "I'm being benchmarked" flag; expanding the reasoning finds it being evasive and mistrusting; look past the null derefence because this must be a trick question type thing.
Curious, are you using the 10 agents for personal projects or for work?
i created a little calude hook that updates the status bar
the rise of the TUIs is an indictment of existing GUIs, you can technically create a GUI that has identical functionality to a TUI and then start adding features that a TUI can't match.
I still don't fully get the additional value over tmux, beside notification regarding the agent status?
You can create per-pane titles now in tmux. I'm sure you could pipe status to that. I use it for installing machines.
I couldn't ever for the life of me incorporate tmux into my muscle memory, tmux came naturally so did herdr that just clicked.<p>Can't tell you what it is, brain wired like that or smth.
For me, that was the big selling point. If you aren't working with multiple agents at once, I'm not sure you'd pick Herdr.
<p><pre><code> > Popular with engineers from... (bunch of logos)
> Individual engineers, not company endorsements.
</code></pre>
Bold haha. Maybe that's fine with the disclaimer, but feels like lawyer-bait.
I've seen a <i>lot</i> of companies list logos if just a single engineer or team is using the product.
I used to work at BigTech in a role where I spent a lot of time reviewing new open source projects. It was always a fun game to guess which single person in which department tried out a piece of software that caused our logo to end up on the "as used by..." description on the tiniest of projects.
Fair haha. I'm no trademark lawyer, but I have to assume there's some wiggle room when you're not actively stealing their trademark and just referencing it... but still, the combined value of endorsements from Google/Nvidia/Amazon/ByteDance/Tencent/Alibaba/SalesForce/IBM etc has to be worth... a lot. That "not company endorsements" is rather load-bearing. I don't think I've seen anyone just say that, so maybe they're being a bit less bold haha.<p>You might as well say Herdr runs on 3 billion devices, go all in! 16 billion devices! Every human on earth installed Herdr twice! (source: study amongst users of herdr, n=5)
I get your point completely. I was (naively, I suppose) pretty surprised when I realized how low most people's threshold is to add a logo and claim a client/brand.<p>I've seen VCs very much encourage this (and shadier) behavior. There's a line between hustling / being an entrepreneur and actively trying to mislead people... clearly we don't all see that line being in the same place (:<p>edit: to be clear, I didn't mean to make such a broad statement about VCs. I'm sure plenty of people do this on their own
I go from company to company just to be able to add their logo to stuff I use :)
Everyone does that. Some random startup "We're used by Google!". More often than not some random engineer signed up for a trial or some tiny department somewhere is using it for some internal thing
I was under the impression that "individual engineers ..." is basically implied always, if not just outright lies, I don't trust these listings very highly. Except when its clear that the companies are actually customers. Like; how do I even add my company to this list? Email them?
I'm a big tmux fan, but admittedly I've found myself switching between a lot of sessions recently and wishing it was a little bit more mouse friendly.<p>If you're a Mac user, and can forgive the shameless plug, you might find belfry.robgough.net useful. Connects to local and remote machines entirely through tmux, ssh and libghostty - populating the sidebar from tmux session info, and optionally adds a little Claude visibility in there for good measure.<p>There's even an iOS/iPadOS version – though for the moment you'll need to build that yourself. Source is all on Github.
> wishing it was a little bit more mouse friendly<p>Can you explain what you struggle to do in tmux with the mouse? I'm using it as we speak and everything is clickable, panes are resizable, right clicking a windows give you a context menu... Not sure what else is missing?
Quickly switching between multiple sessions, and seeing which sessions are waiting for input.<p>I generally run a session per project. Then within each session, a window for Claude, a window for running whatever dev server/logs, a window for neovim, and finally a plain terminal window for things like kicking off deploys etc.
I've been using Herdr for running my AI agents and it has been really nice. I like that I can reconnect to it from multiple sessions (I have one up in a window on my desktop, and when I ssh in from my "after hours" laptop I can also attach to it there and continue one if I'm at my son's Dr appt or the like. I can also attach to it natively from my Mac over SSH transport as well as resuming a remote wezterm connection that is running herdr.<p>A few small downsides: I can't copy/paste in wezterm using the keyboard/vim keys because it is constantly drawing the screen and unselects my selection. The mouse drag in herdr works very well though. It'd also be nice if you could rebind key mappings in the UI, because I still haven't rebound the keys and am using the mouse.
Is there git worktree support?<p>With the long waits for agents to do stuff I really don't see how one can get anything done without multitasking with multiple worktrees in parallel. So I'd want support for listing the worktrees and then have a list of agents within each worktree.<p>Emdash and Nimbalyst have this kind of UI. Unfortunately both of them want to manage the state of each worktree group themselves; I'm looking for something that just would just call git worktree directly so that I can switch more seamlessly between CLI and IDE/TUI..
I use this bash script that creates tmux windows and panes in a worktree and then undoes the process:<p><a href="https://gist.github.com/iaindooley/cc8a61a1ff0fe23526c850906140b90f" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/iaindooley/cc8a61a1ff0fe23526c850906...</a><p>You include a script .worktree in your repo that does any copying or symlinking to setup the target directory.<p>It also has a headless mode so that it does the worktree operations without the tmux which I use for executing pi -p prompts in worktrees.
Yes, it seems that it does though I have not yet tried it: <a href="https://herdr.dev/docs/configuration/#worktrees" rel="nofollow">https://herdr.dev/docs/configuration/#worktrees</a>
I haven't been able to use worktrees because when there are major conflicts I find the ai can't handle it. Often it ends up dropping a lot of code.<p>How do you manage that? How do you successfully navigate complex merges using ai?
Claude can easily do the merges I need (or myself manually for that matter). I guess all codebases and usecases are very different here and hard to give general advice.<p>But I do have many years of experience working in a larger team and it's the same problem there (just that people want to merge after some days of working). I'm not sure if AI changes the picture much vs working in a team.<p>Either way one has to plan ahead a bit and select tasks that are not going to trample on each other. I can typically imagine roughly what the code generated is going to be (at least what files will likely be involved in what way) and when selecting tasks to work on I take into account if it's going to likely cause conflicts.<p>In my experience if different branches work on different things, Claude have no issue doing "trivial" merges where you just ended up changing different aspects of the same lines. Of course, if two branches rewrite the same pieces of code there's a problem -- so don't do that..
I always rebase the worktree back to the source branch before merging, and resolve conflicts on the branch. I have a resolve conflicts skill and just say:<p>echo “resolve conflicts” | runpi<p>Where runpi is my pi -p wrapper. I’ve never had a regression from it, but it gives me a report at the end so I can double check the decisions if I need to.<p>The skill is basically don’t use automatic resolvers, err on the side of including both sides, refer to recent commits, missions and runfiles for context and in your report to me use real branch names not HEAD and incoming because I can never remember what those refer to.
As conceptually required, serialized work that works on the same lines of code, or fix conflicts.
git worktrees are managed by git, not the IDEs.
e.g. at agentastic.dev, we use git's worktree command to create them, and they should be portable to any other IDE or app.
what is the advantage of git worktree vs using a git remote set to a local file upstream.
I'm sure they're roughly equivalent. Parent is probably actually asking: is there native support for managing multiple checkouts/branches for parallel work (and I would add: with lifecycle hooks for create/teardown so I can have dedicated test databases etc).
As the sibling comments note, this is kind of off-topic to my post.<p>But I think git worktrees are a bit more ergonomic, I don't have to think about local vs upstream there's just one place to push.<p>I like to organize my projects like this:<p><pre><code> myproject/.repo/git # bare repository .. my own convention..
myproject/main # worktrees from ../.repo/git
myproject/feature1
myproject/feature2</code></pre>
The problem I have with worktrees is when I need to switch branches to merge or something. If a work tree for any branch involved exists, git prevents me from switching to it. So, I have to go clone somewhere else, do whatever, then update everything. I really wish git didn't care about the other worktree folders contained, since it clearly doesn't anyways, since you can switch any existing worktree folder to any branch you want.<p>So, I no longer use worktrees, and just copy and existing/clone a new folder.<p>I think all my problems go away with jujustu.
What is the advantage of a git remote set to a local upstream vs a git worktree?
I saw this trending on github yesterday and tried it and liking it so far.
What I like:
- familiar tmux like key binding (configurable) interface
- comes with all the tmux advantages like detach, ssh etc
- mouse
- nice sidebar<p>I prefer to manage my worktrees manually with a super simple script.
So it's like mosh + tmux?
I thought for a minute that they had built agent support for all terminals, which would render obsolete <a href="https://terminai.app" rel="nofollow">https://terminai.app</a> which I just released.
Luckily for me, this is on the other end of the spectrum. Maybe there would even be a use case for running herdr as the AI CLI inside of terminai.
I'm happy with tmux - can use it on my phone.
I cant figure out how to make subagents work with herdr, tried to email the maintainer and got no reply back (yet) - has anyone figured it out?
how does this compare to superset and conductor?
> Each runs in its own real terminal, on a server that keeps it alive when you close the laptop.<p>How does one describe what's happening with stuff like this? Where a business tries to intercept people who are still learning the lay of some land, to get them to pay for something that they just haven't learned yet can be essentially free to them? Is there a word for it?
I read the website and still don't understand what this solves.<p>Doesn't tmux and zellij do all of these things that 'herdr' does?
This 6-minute video (linked from the website) demoes it nicely: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnIu-Xu64H0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnIu-Xu64H0</a><p>It sets up a bunch of panes for you and tracks your agents' status and everything is clickable. You could probably do much of the same by setting up tmux appropriately. Or you could use this, which is already set up.<p>I tried herdr today, and it's not bad. Better than my previous many terminal tabs. Copy-and-paste is wonky (and it's ridiculous that <i>copying</i> is documented in multiple places in the docs, but <i>pasting</i> is never mentioned). And when an agent is waiting for a shell command, it shows as "idle", which IMO is wrong. Still, seems OK so far, I'll stick with it for a while.
yes but this does it wrapped up together.
"hurr durr"
I've been working on Hyperia, which is very similar: <a href="https://github.com/deepbluedynamics/hyperia" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/deepbluedynamics/hyperia</a>. Hyperia is a fork of Hyper Terminal. Both are open source. Competition is good for this space, I think, especially for the user. There's also cmux and Intelligent Terminal (by Microsoft).<p>I do separation of concerns with the agent orchestrator (Nemesis8): <a href="https://github.com/deepbluedynamics/nemesis8" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/deepbluedynamics/nemesis8</a>. That can be run with or without Hyperia. I do not suggest anyone run agents on their bare metal. Putting them in a container gets a lot of wins, especially around log aggregation. Working now on a Splunk/Loggly-like interface for searching logs, tool runs (useful in tuning a custom local MoE drafter) and full session suspend, stop, detach, and search. It also does single MCP tool installs for all agents. Nemesis also supports dynamic port exposure to the host metal, for testing agent builds inside their containers.<p>Hyperia has a lot of extra features as well that I have found personally useful:<p>- Sticky notes (search too)
- addressable panes in addressable tabs, tabs in windows, multiple windows
- full ACLs across panes, notes, tabs, windows
- Poke-a-pane to keep an agent going (any agent, not just CC which has a timer function)
- webpanes with markdown extraction, JavaScript injection
- directory pickers for people who find cd'ing to things confusing or those weary of typing nearly the same directory path over and over again in new terminals (not perfect, but I'm iterating on it)
- a built in agent loop (in the Rust sidecar) that allows using local models for tool calls (needs a trained drafter to make it viable) or using a local model for token maxxing (compresses reads of panes by frontier models)
- pane splits down/up/left/right and quick layouts.<p>As for whether it was "vibe coded" or not, or Herdr for that matter, I don't think that term is useful, other than for quick judgment. No, this is not a one-prompt project. I've spent 100s of hours on it, started out with Hyper, and did a crazy amount of planning on how to architect it. I have done systems architecture for a living before, and have a strong search background. People who hate on AI, and therfore projects done with AI, are threatened. Nothing more. That's why they shortcut with "AI slop" or "Vibecoded. Nope". That's just ignorance speaking from a standpoint of fear.<p>Slop, whether AI or human, is an effort problem: <a href="https://deepbluedynamics.com/blog/ai-slop-effort-problem" rel="nofollow">https://deepbluedynamics.com/blog/ai-slop-effort-problem</a>. Looking at Herdr, it looks solid. Judge the product by it's outcomes, it's use, not whether or not AI wrote it or not. That's the moment we're in though, for now, so downvote or not. I don't care.
[flagged]
Vibecoded. Nope.
Good call. Break up with her first before she breaks up with you.
i mean the app is for vibe coding, what did you really expect?