I switched to herdr this year after a decade of using tmux, and I haven't looked back since. Herdr is wonderful, not only because of the coding agent integrations, but also because it uses libghostty under the hood. So no terminal-emulator-inside-another-terminal-emulator shenanigans.
If you prefer GUIs, I can recommend herdr-gpui which connects to a herdr daemon. It has a bunch of goodies like remote phone pairing, and a built-in browser integration to send screenshots and notes to coding agents.
I've been using Zellij a long time and considered using Herdr, but the VC funding aspect scares me. I don't want to invest a bunch of time in a tool that's going to treat me as a product.
I used Zellij in the past, it is also fantastic and intuitive product. I had issues with... I think selection and copying and pasting which made me abandon it as I was getting frustrated. Herdr has been wonderful and I've been using it for a while.
Pretty much the first thing I tried to set up with I heard about Zellij and decided to give it a shot a while back was how to scroll back and copy paste text without using the mouse, since that's one of the core features of tmux for me. If my recollection is correct, the closest thing that I was able to figure out was some sort of built-in way to open output in a vim buffer, with the info I found when googling basically saying that it was intentionally not something the developers felt like it was important to implement anything closer to tmux for. Maybe it's changed since then but I distinctly got the impression that it using it would force me to adapt to a bunch of new workflows that didn't resemble anything I had seen before, and it didn't really seem worth the effort.
> Herdr is wonderful, not only because of the coding agent integrations, but also because it uses libghostty under the hood. So no terminal-emulator-inside-another-terminal-emulator shenanigans.
Now I’m interested. Does it have basic feature parity? How does it compare to tmux in your experience?
I was able to have a language model configure herdr with the same bindings that I was using in tmux.
It was a very easy transition from one to the other.
I started using it last week, the tui interface is very polished and it is mouse-friendly. It also allows you to configure the notification channels. Its a different beast from tmox, I'd say its quite more user-friendly and gives you a list of your running agents and their status directly on the interface.
herdr is by far the most polished tool in its category. Software geared towards agents is usually vibe coded -- and you can tell. There will be bugs and edge cases and it feels like no thought/care was put into it.
herdr doesn't feel that way to me. The marketing/landing page definitely has LLM-isms, but the application itself is very stable and well thought out.
A true UI is the next logical step and they seem to have done the obvious things. The one surprising bit that nobody seems to be talking about (yet) is the entire UI looks like its controlled via "recipes", so you can customize the UI in ways that you couldn't with traditional software: https://herdr.dev/layouts/
I hope this means an official mobile app is on the horizon!
Playing with this for a bit, the customization you can do is really cool. You can spin up an agent, tell it to add some functionality, and it all reloads instantly.
For example, I wanted to be able to hide chats from providers when my usage is out for the 5h/weekly period
I'm not sure how they're doing this considering it seems to be written in Rust
Having used herdr since its release, the recent 'Emacs is 50' made me decide to go back to it and just vibecode herdr features i use into an emacs package.
It works great so far. I can just ask it to update its layout whenever i think something better is possible. I wont be going back, but the one thing that might change that is a mobile app.
The Herdr website [1] has one of the best demos I have seen, one that I think would blow away those who aren’t nearly as AI-brained as I am. Why are we locked into old, boring UIs when I can just ask the agent for something like cows in a pasture or Windows 98?
I mean one where you can say to herdr, make that look like Windows 98. Still can’t think of a good example that’s not already from Windows 98 unfortunately.
Fantastic news, I may have to switch back (or combine this with Paseo on my phone). I hope the RAM usage is a lot better as Paseo tends to OOM now and again (the desktop app).
Supports SSH to remote machines out of the box, cool. I wonder if the protocol is more efficient than the TUI over SSH, would be nice on crappy connections when traveling.
It is, but if you send more efficient deltas, batch packets more intelligently, and introduce non-blocking UI tricks, the experience can be improved by quite a bit. mosh demonstrates some of that.
Nice! I have been using herdr for a few months, love it and for me it is a step up from years using tmux. The new native Herdr app is yet another step up. I use multiple Macs with Tailscale connections and the Herdr app makes jumping around to different projects and different machines easier.
Is anyone else finding that it doesn't pick up Claude Code agents? My Agents pane stays empty no matter how many instances I start and work in. Appears to continue to work fine in herdr, though.
Haven't used Herdr before - was looking at README and was looking to check screenshots and documentation. However, Chrome reports the SSL cert to the site https://herdr.dev as invalid. Will wait till it gets resolved.
It works now. Haven't restarted browser/mac - so not sure what went wrong.
Anyways, Herdr looks powerful - will try it soon. One thing I find missing in every single one today, is that they do not allow using a different AI account based on the workspace/project you are on. It would come in handy in case of shared family machine.
I don’t think they need to “allow” this specifically. Every new pane opens in a shell prompt. You must start the agent from there, so you can start each agent with different keys/accounts already.
herdr is moderately well known if you look into agent multiplexers. IMO it is the best one from what I have tried (Paseo and Conductor are competitors in this area)
It's not a harness -- it's really more like a tmux for agents.
Your comment is so comically dumb.. Herdr is yet another recently vibe coded ai helper in a niche category. You wouldn't miss anything about frontier ai or coding agents if you don't use herdr and/or terminal multiplexers in your workflow.
I have been using herdr for a few months. Then i bought a new machine, installed claude code and asked it to setup herdr. Shockingly claude said it has no idea what herdr was. This was weird.
If you like the idea of herdr, but want something that isn't opinionated on terminal vs. desktop app and has mobile support, you might like https://github.com/codealong/codealong
Darn, title had me thinking they released a mobile app to compliment the TUI daemon.
termux+mosh is fine, but especially on a phone I'd love a slightly more intuitive (or really, efficient) UI. Especially as mosh breaks touch/mouse input on the remote host.
I've never understood the point of the desktop GUI harnesses to run TUI (or at the very least, primarily text-based) programs anyway, but perhaps they're better for onboarding less tech-savvy users.
Moshi is pretty fantastic. I’ve been using it for several months and it works great. The developer is also launching fixes and improvements every week. It’s gotten materially better over the time I’ve been using it and it started out pretty great.
+1 I tried quite hard to make things work with tmux, zellij, and even some light custom stuff, but if you have multiple agents running on multiple boxes herdr just works unreasonably well. I really didn't want to like what seemed like a random mix of features, but they've stabilized it to a sensible capability set.
If you like Herdr, you might also appreciate https://github.com/BrokkAi/mjolnir/, which is similar in its multiplexing features (although built on ACP) but offers cross-provider subagents, memory and session log sync, live migration of sessions across profiles and providers, and load balancing across multiple subscriptions.
herdr is great, and the original runs-in-a-terminal vision was cool, but at least on OSX it has a ton of selection management bugs that are pretty sucky.
I don't think I need it, but Herdr has been absolutely rock solid for me. And I have this app Pairfob that I can check things up on the phone if I really want to. And while I don't use it quite as often, seems to be more solid then Chatgpt (Codex) and other apps.
I have 2 machines and laptop linked together and running things have never been easier.
I really enjoyed herdr at first but ever since they got VC funding I am avoiding it. Enshittification and cloud features due to vc/monetization pressure incoming.
Which of these various new multiplexers (herdr, cmux, etc) work over ssh, and which have protocols underneath?
I've been scripting tmux for a while now, and it's not the greatest. And when I have a bunch of opencode sessions rolling along often my tmux could usage is smoking. I'd be happy to try other things. But I'd way rather get into something with protocols, that is open to play.
feels like they're trying to get ahead of superlogical's rex.
took all of installing it on windows and setting up my mac as an SSH machine to see the slop all through the UI. i'll just wait for rex's windows client i guess.
Herdr is truly awesome. Game changing almost. If you think of all the overly complex agent setups[1] and overly complex software factories[2] to write code... herdr and a pick-your-coding-agent replaces all that with a very simple one thing which just works.
There are many ways to do what herdr does, like tmux, and rex, but in a nutshell:
You launch cli things (claude code, cli tools etc) anywhere inside a herdr process. On your own laptop you magically stay connected to all of them and can monitor, send commands etc. And those processes can talk to each other and control each other too if u want!
For a single person with herdr+tailscale, you can make your own evolving software thingamajig across all the possible computers u have access to (pls don't call it a factory, we didn't call your fingers a factory in the dinosaur days did we).
p.s if someone from cloudflare reads this, would love to have a herdr process in a worker so it appears on my laptop as a thing i can do stuff with. while idle it goes dormant, i send a keystroke and it wakes up, stays awake for a bit.
p.p.s herdr team if u read this can you have a built in so i can instantly launch a vm in one of the many provide a instant vm (or sandbox or whatever the cool kids call it these days). I have been using the railway TS sdk to quickly spin up and throw away sandboxes, but why not just integrate <choose-your-sandbox-provider> in herdr and that is one way to charge money - pay herdr or provide my API key for vm/sandbox provider. Bonus points if it can sleep and charge less. Sort of like fly's sprites but more awesome.
My current anecdotal example: if you're building cross-platform native apps, you need to run agents on macOS and Windows, because xcodebuild only runs on macOS and the Windows SDK is only available on Windows.
If you prefer GUIs, I can recommend herdr-gpui which connects to a herdr daemon. It has a bunch of goodies like remote phone pairing, and a built-in browser integration to send screenshots and notes to coding agents.
https://github.com/penso/herdr-gpui
Now I’m interested. Does it have basic feature parity? How does it compare to tmux in your experience?
herdr is by far the most polished tool in its category. Software geared towards agents is usually vibe coded -- and you can tell. There will be bugs and edge cases and it feels like no thought/care was put into it.
herdr doesn't feel that way to me. The marketing/landing page definitely has LLM-isms, but the application itself is very stable and well thought out.
A true UI is the next logical step and they seem to have done the obvious things. The one surprising bit that nobody seems to be talking about (yet) is the entire UI looks like its controlled via "recipes", so you can customize the UI in ways that you couldn't with traditional software: https://herdr.dev/layouts/
I hope this means an official mobile app is on the horizon!
For example, I wanted to be able to hide chats from providers when my usage is out for the 5h/weekly period
I'm not sure how they're doing this considering it seems to be written in Rust
This space seems to be heating up, everyone wanting to build the single pane of glass for agentic work.
It works great so far. I can just ask it to update its layout whenever i think something better is possible. I wont be going back, but the one thing that might change that is a mobile app.
Herdr Studio - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49652188 - Sept 2026 (20 comments)
Connecting the machines - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49612818 - Sept 2026 (35 comments)
Herdr now connects to multiple servers with a single client - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49602323 - Sept 2026 (3 comments)
Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49201003 - Aug 2026 (189 comments)
Herdr: One terminal to rule them all - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48756578 - July 2026 (178 comments)
Herdr: Agent multiplexer that lives in your terminal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48714802 - June 2026 (110 comments)
[1] https://herdr.dev
To me this is a valid signal.
Anyways, Herdr looks powerful - will try it soon. One thing I find missing in every single one today, is that they do not allow using a different AI account based on the workspace/project you are on. It would come in handy in case of shared family machine.
It's getting very difficult to keep up with all the agent harnesses coming out. I love ai but wow its hard to keep up.
It's not a harness -- it's really more like a tmux for agents.
So I wouldn’t blame the commenter above.
termux+mosh is fine, but especially on a phone I'd love a slightly more intuitive (or really, efficient) UI. Especially as mosh breaks touch/mouse input on the remote host.
I've never understood the point of the desktop GUI harnesses to run TUI (or at the very least, primarily text-based) programs anyway, but perhaps they're better for onboarding less tech-savvy users.
Tui-in-guis like orca are nice mostly because of sensible keybinds without prefix or leader
ignoring ALL the AI/agent features, herdr has been a decent replacement for tmux with saner defaults
so much so that i'm reaching for installing herdr instead of tmux and i would like to not be locked to a "desktop app" for it
Edit: oh neat! Its self editing.
herdr is great, and the original runs-in-a-terminal vision was cool, but at least on OSX it has a ton of selection management bugs that are pretty sucky.
Probably a good idea if you work with sensitive data (and you’re already on Zero Data Retention)
I have 2 machines and laptop linked together and running things have never been easier.
I've been scripting tmux for a while now, and it's not the greatest. And when I have a bunch of opencode sessions rolling along often my tmux could usage is smoking. I'd be happy to try other things. But I'd way rather get into something with protocols, that is open to play.
At work I do much of my work on a ec2 box via ssh with herdr
took all of installing it on windows and setting up my mac as an SSH machine to see the slop all through the UI. i'll just wait for rex's windows client i guess.
There are many ways to do what herdr does, like tmux, and rex, but in a nutshell:
You launch cli things (claude code, cli tools etc) anywhere inside a herdr process. On your own laptop you magically stay connected to all of them and can monitor, send commands etc. And those processes can talk to each other and control each other too if u want!
For a single person with herdr+tailscale, you can make your own evolving software thingamajig across all the possible computers u have access to (pls don't call it a factory, we didn't call your fingers a factory in the dinosaur days did we).
[1]: https://www.8090.ai/ [2]: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...
p.s if someone from cloudflare reads this, would love to have a herdr process in a worker so it appears on my laptop as a thing i can do stuff with. while idle it goes dormant, i send a keystroke and it wakes up, stays awake for a bit.
p.p.s herdr team if u read this can you have a built in so i can instantly launch a vm in one of the many provide a instant vm (or sandbox or whatever the cool kids call it these days). I have been using the railway TS sdk to quickly spin up and throw away sandboxes, but why not just integrate <choose-your-sandbox-provider> in herdr and that is one way to charge money - pay herdr or provide my API key for vm/sandbox provider. Bonus points if it can sleep and charge less. Sort of like fly's sprites but more awesome.