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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'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.

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.

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 did try Herdr but found too many things I expected it to have and just didn't. Right now I've been switching between two different approaches for combined local and remote work.

There's the more traditional tmux/zellij way. I have a tailscale and mosh and a script where I can say something like "cw api do-this-feature" and it'll go into the folder of my api, create a worktree, and fire up claude code to use it (and another tab with lazygit and delta so I can do side-by-size diffs). And modified tmux's defaults so the session & window names are more targeted. Then can have it in Ghostty locally or Moshi (https://getmoshi.app/) on my phone. Moshi is basically a terminal for iOS but geared toward doing agentic stuff. Has a lot of shortcuts you can add for common commands of tmux, CC, can pinch to change font size, has a built-in diff tool, etc. Also has a small hook you can put in your agent so you get notifications on your phone. And it can directly open the particular tmux/zellij/herdr pane from that (has specific support for those three).

So that approach is nice in that you get full access to the harnesses, with no worries that a wrapper has a bug or doesn't support some new feature. But it still doesn't flow as well for me as a "real" wrapper does.

For the real wrapper approach, I started with Happy (https://happy.engineering/) and currently am using Happier (https://happier.dev/). Unlike Moshi, these are open source and basically control the various harnesses and have their own UI. Also have a relay so tailscale isn't necessarily needed, along with encryption in such a way that the person owning the relay can't decrypt the sessions. Happier even has a desktop app. Right now I'm running the dev version of Happier from source on my own machine w/ tailscale, with the testflight version of the app. There's various rough-around-the-edges aspects (and they're currently in the middle of a re-write), but it is nice to have a real UI with tabs for all your sessions, can click in to expand tool calls, to start a new session just select the harness, folder, type a new worktree name, etc and it starts going.

So I don't know. I like aspects of both of these and kind of depends on what I'm up to and my current mood. Nothing feels totally perfect yet IMO.

    > Popular with engineers from... (bunch of logos)
    > Individual engineers, not company endorsements.

I still don't fully get the additional value over tmux, beside notification regarding the agent status?

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.

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.

There's even an iOS/iPadOS version – though for the moment you'll need to build that yourself. Source is all on Github.

I’ve been using tmux (with the wonderful iTerm2 integration) for almost a year now to manage agents as well as organize my workspaces. I initially wrote this off but looking closer I think I’m going to give a shot. My mobile experience is acceptable (Blink shell + tmux) but not ideal and the monitoring of agents is nice. Currently I rely on a hook+Pushover to alert me when my attention is needed which works but has not been without frustration.

Herdr did a lot of things really well. It have a great landing page where you can see and interact, and that really made me try it, and a few of my friend was also captured and immediately understood what it is for. I basically do everything remote, never on my own machine.

Once I tried it, I can never go back. It is so simple and worked exactly as I thought how it should work.

I would say it is just a modern version of tmux but really thought about user experience of more novice users. For people who come from the mouse world, moving to this is quite seamless.

Also, coming to the comments, I would think maybe `zellij` would also work well. Or use `zmc` and build something on top. `zmc` is great, as the then the tab/window management can be handled by the desktop or TUI, depend on what someone want to use.

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.

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.

I have created my own opinionated setup but this comment is not about that.

I do think that there should be a protocol such that using these tools becomes more standardized.

For example I know that cmux is trying to support a tmux based setup so it feels like tmux could be most of that protocol.

There are a lot of tools like this popup and I really think making switching easier is the only way I will try a different tool.

Does anyone know how this compares to Supacode (https://supacode.sh)? I just started using Supacode a few days ago and have been enjoying it so far; it is based on libghostty.

Is there git worktree support?

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.

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..

More options: https://agentmgmt.dev (disclaimer: built by me)

This looks very similar to what I do in Emacs, using ghostel, which also has the advantage of using libghostty for excellent quality terminal rendering.

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

I prefer to manage my worktrees manually with a super simple script.

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.

The deceiving logo marquee is the most annoying thing of this software era. "Popular with people that follow these companies on social media" is the next step to this madness.

I just want the sound notification when they are blocked/done.

repo visualization https://app.principal-ade.com/ogulcancelik/herdr

I thought for a minute that they had built agent support for all terminals, which would render obsolete https://terminai.app 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 get why folks use tmux/herdr, but I already use i3wm/Hyprland for window/workspace management, and want to have "shared first class windows" instead of dual binds of "super-based binds for i3 windows ... oh wait control-a based binds for tmux panes".

Has anyone got a tool/setup that is tmux-like but the remote terminals/panes are all local/native windows?

Does it support port forwarding like ssh -L ... ?

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?

So it's like mosh + tmux?

i tried giving tmux a go but there is a period where you're kinda going in and out of a tool, maybe not coming back to it for weeks at a time, this is why imo herdr is a really good tool - it doesn't punish you for not remembering the bindings, everything is clickable and as you go you can decide which bindings to learn and commit to instinct when required. I believe all TUIs should be like this from now on. This is also what makes opencode so great/sticky. Great work herdr team, I've only used it for a few days but I know I will be using this for a long time to come.

how does this compare to superset and conductor?

I've been working on Hyperia, which is very similar: https://github.com/deepbluedynamics/hyperia. 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).

I do separation of concerns with the agent orchestrator (Nemesis8): https://github.com/deepbluedynamics/nemesis8. 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.

Hyperia has a lot of extra features as well that I have found personally useful:

- 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.

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.

Slop, whether AI or human, is an effort problem: https://deepbluedynamics.com/blog/ai-slop-effort-problem. 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.

another example of people inventing something that Emacs already has.

> Each runs in its own real terminal, on a server that keeps it alive when you close the laptop.

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.

Doesn't tmux and zellij do all of these things that 'herdr' does?

Vibecoded. Nope.

"hurr durr"