Like others here I created my own terminal multiplexer as well. Daemon that holds all sessions, seamless binary upgrades so those sessions never get lost, everything recorded so recovery is always possible, thin client mode so laptop has a native app that connects to daemon, and a wasm responsive webui with transcription so I can carry on with sessions from phone. Claude/codex sessions started with a uuid so they can be killed/resumed at will (mine autosleep after 12h inactivity to free resouces). CLI allows agent control of everything for a harness independent implementation of claude's channels. A few friends have forked and adopted it as their daily driver. Similar organization to herdr wrt spaces to organize sessions. Optimized for speed/bandwidth when running in thin client mode.
The CSS of that website is weird in general, seems to be coming from whatever the kids use today that works like Dreamweaver. The width is so small because the layout is a grid for some reason, although it's just two columns. That same column has a "min-width: 0" and seems like that's happening in more places too, properties set to their defaults? Looks really strange overall.
You can just install Claude Code on the server and drive it from Claude Desktop via remote control. That way you can control Claude Code on mutiple servers straight from your Claude Desktop, Mobile or Web, and stay fully within Anthropic tools.
Everything works: you get the native view of subagents, you can upload files and images, fork threads, etc.
The massive upside is that the actual work happens on the server so you can close your laptop and it will continue plus it will not fry your thighs. The advantage over sessions (which I haven't tried but theoretically sound) is that you can configure Claude's environment on the server however you like. Give it any tools you need, ssh access to other machines, sudo, whatever.
The only downside is that every new project requires a setup step on the server (to add the systemd service) where you will develop it since Claude can only handle one server per directory. Claude will handle this step however if you give it ssh access to your server.
The machines show up nicely in Claude Desktop/Mobile/Web, and repos/projects are in a dropdown. Unless you work on very many projects at the same time, this setup is golden.
I’ve been thinking about something similar using a pizero2w on a little rover thing i have. Turn cc loose writing the software to drive it around while reading sensors for obstacle avoidance. It would be cool to prompt “drive to the wall, turn around, and come back” and see if it could figure it out.
I really liked Tmux and Zellij for the time being, but Herdr does it all so much better out of the box when it comes to agentic coding. I haven't found something I can do with tmux/zellij but can't do with herdr.
My only problem with herdr is its propensity to randomly crash and take out the whole session. At one point it was crashing once or twice a day, recently it’s more like every two weeks, but it still crashes. I have auto session resume on but that still means ongoing work is interrupted and I have to manually restart all the long running non-agent processes.
As a result I still run sessions and processes I really don’t want to lose inside tmux, nested inside herdr. Tmux never crashes.
If you’re mainly just using Claude Code, “$ claude agents” view is a good alternative coupled with tmux. I’m curious if herdr does other things though.
The documentation does mention building from source, maybe edit it or add a note to avoid confusion?
Still though why would you release and announce this before being ready to share the sources? You're telling people to run a shell script that not only fetches and installs a random, closed-source prebuilt binary, but also runs it automatically after fetching it.
Nobody in their right mind should be running this script or recommending it to anybody.
I mean you still went through the trouble (unless you don't check the AI's output at all) to design this entire prebuilt release process, and then encourage people to blindly run it. Regardless of what you want to achieve with this post here, you should expect this kind of pushback if you promote unsafe practices like that.
Looks interesting but I’m confused if you published your source code or not.
> By hand or from source
> To install by hand, download jai-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl (Linux) or jai-aarch64-apple-darwin (macOS) or jai-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.exe (Windows), check its SHA-256 against latest.json, and put it on your PATH as jai (jai.exe on Windows). You can also build from source with cargo install --path .; those builds don't check for updates.
However I’m not able to find source code anywhere on your github.
No worries if you didn’t open source, only it seems ambiguous currently.
I used to use tmux & Claude on a Mac mini, but I gave it away when herdr came around - there were just too many tmux sessions to maintain and herdr does a better job at showing you what’s open. Admittedly, your tmux setup looks far more sophisticated than what I was doing. However, the new claude code projects is insane and a step above on having claude being a real project manager across sessions.
I've made a terminal that is essentially ghostty + herder, but all natively and has a session persistence. https://thurm.rs
there is an ios application in testflight and web client, nothing is on the servers, using tailscale through clients or you can use classic remote hosts.
hehe, I also have done the same, but I'm building on top of tmux. Though much more minimal in scope. https://kido.tools (website showcases the TUI only but there's native macOS app in the PR which I'm using but still refining).
p.s. it has a daemon and automatically installs claude/codex/pi skills so the agent knows how to control and script the panes, tabs and everything else. It is also heavily inspired by Rex's design.
Been using tmux session to hand over to claude for a while. Paranoid me uses the macbooks secure enclave with fingerprint for the ssh key so claude can't ssh into my remote boxes by himself. I then open named tmux sessions, perform the ssh login via fingerprint, and then tell claude that he is free to take over that session with a given name.
I went down this path over 6 months ago and had a variety of custom setups using tmux, cmux, and more. But since using Orca IDE it feels like a leap in usability and robustness.
I love CMUX and some people I know who were building their own tmux setups bailed and just started using CMUX -- The built in browser and associated bash tools are awesome but really just having workspaces with colors and todos that survive a refresh makes it worth it if you run a bunch of agents at one time
tmux is great, specially when you need persistence in a remote server where you don't want or can't install any other software, and when you are stuck with some 2010 terminal emulator.
But if you have control over your setup, I would use a capable terminal and ditch in-band multiplexers that sit in the middle of the process and your terminal eating up escape sequences and native features while adding latency. Then use a separate tool for session persistence (I like zmx but there are more for this).
Firstly, I want to sandbox my agents from each other and from my hard-drive, and partition (and encrypt) secrets, so I use (and wrote) byre[0], and run a devbox with long-running agents for certain tasks. TermRover[1] is a pretty good SSH client for tmux. For a more native integration I have started using Happier[2] which provides a web front-end and iOS app for my sessions too (unified with real Claude Code, so handover is seamless), and put together a byre skill[3] to make that easy.
Isn't this the wrong architecture? Fundamentally, a coding agent should be running as a headless/detached process, a daemon. If it needs a CLI then that CLI can attach/connect to that daemon and interact with it. If you architect it that way then you can quit and resume the CLI anytime you want, from any machine you want and with whatever UI you want, the daemon doesn't care. Running the agent as an interactive CLI process which you need to stuff into something like tmux is just the wrong approach, and "connecting" to it by reading/scraping its screen is terrible.
Or, wrong by design. There is something about nudging users to use the claude CLI from which Anthropic extracts value. Otherwise they would not charge extra for "claude -p" or ACP access.
The tmux send-keys + terminal scrape is the LLM version of the analog hole of DRM'ed audio.
Wait, is `claude -p` usage counted differently? I've built something of a multi-agent daemon system and use `-p` extensively. Now I'm wondering if I'm burning my credits faster.
https://github.com/zackham/seance
The text content occupies like 20% of the screen, the rest is empty. Resizing the window helps.
Everything works: you get the native view of subagents, you can upload files and images, fork threads, etc.
The massive upside is that the actual work happens on the server so you can close your laptop and it will continue plus it will not fry your thighs. The advantage over sessions (which I haven't tried but theoretically sound) is that you can configure Claude's environment on the server however you like. Give it any tools you need, ssh access to other machines, sudo, whatever.
The only downside is that every new project requires a setup step on the server (to add the systemd service) where you will develop it since Claude can only handle one server per directory. Claude will handle this step however if you give it ssh access to your server.
The machines show up nicely in Claude Desktop/Mobile/Web, and repos/projects are in a dropdown. Unless you work on very many projects at the same time, this setup is golden.
This is the only downside? You expose your servers to Claude infrastructure and their security. You inherently leave a backdoor open to your system.
I can't wrap my year around how far we backtracked on security standards, to the point people just don't even see the obvious.
As a result I still run sessions and processes I really don’t want to lose inside tmux, nested inside herdr. Tmux never crashes.
For me (like for many others) tmux didn’t suit the multi agent workflow. Herdr then was too buggy in my experience.
My own tool, Jai, connects to multiple machines, handles multiple agents and enables agent to agent communication.
For those interested: https://michael.sinax.be/jai/index.html
Still though why would you release and announce this before being ready to share the sources? You're telling people to run a shell script that not only fetches and installs a random, closed-source prebuilt binary, but also runs it automatically after fetching it.
Nobody in their right mind should be running this script or recommending it to anybody.
> By hand or from source > To install by hand, download jai-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl (Linux) or jai-aarch64-apple-darwin (macOS) or jai-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.exe (Windows), check its SHA-256 against latest.json, and put it on your PATH as jai (jai.exe on Windows). You can also build from source with cargo install --path .; those builds don't check for updates.
However I’m not able to find source code anywhere on your github.
No worries if you didn’t open source, only it seems ambiguous currently.
A nice alternative for ppl who struggle with terminal based solutions. It's a free indie product. https://shikigami.dev <--- more info there
there is an ios application in testflight and web client, nothing is on the servers, using tailscale through clients or you can use classic remote hosts.
We should compare notes!
Seems like we all get tailored suits now.
But if you have control over your setup, I would use a capable terminal and ditch in-band multiplexers that sit in the middle of the process and your terminal eating up escape sequences and native features while adding latency. Then use a separate tool for session persistence (I like zmx but there are more for this).
Firstly, I want to sandbox my agents from each other and from my hard-drive, and partition (and encrypt) secrets, so I use (and wrote) byre[0], and run a devbox with long-running agents for certain tasks. TermRover[1] is a pretty good SSH client for tmux. For a more native integration I have started using Happier[2] which provides a web front-end and iOS app for my sessions too (unified with real Claude Code, so handover is seamless), and put together a byre skill[3] to make that easy.
[0]: https://github.com/pjlsergeant/byre-happier-claude
[1]: https://termrover.sh/
[2]: https://happier.dev/
[3]: https://github.com/pjlsergeant/byre-happier-claude
The tmux send-keys + terminal scrape is the LLM version of the analog hole of DRM'ed audio.