- 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 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.
> Popular with engineers from... (bunch of logos)
> Individual engineers, not company endorsements.
Bold haha. Maybe that's fine with the disclaimer, but feels like lawyer-bait.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.
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.
- Do you plan to support viewing file-diffs for the cwd? Currently I keep zed / vscode open on the side to view diffs. It would be great if we could fold those into herdr as well
- Is there an easy way to reconfigure the prefix? For tmux i've been using ` for years now, so going back to ctrl+z is a bit of a struggle
Great execution btw, congrats!
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.
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..
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.
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.
I prefer to manage my worktrees manually with a super simple script.
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?
Has anyone got a tool/setup that is tmux-like but the remote terminals/panes are all local/native windows?
Doesn't tmux and zellij do all of these things that 'herdr' does?
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.