Terminal-first makes a lot of sense for anything that runs on remote servers. I've been on helix+tmux for about a year and the main friction is onboarding teammates who are VSCode-native. Nice to see projects pushing in this direction. Does it handle multi-pane debugging or is that still a manual tmux split?
Interesting, but I wonder if this shifts too much complexity onto the user.
tmux is powerful, but not exactly approachable, and "multi-agent orchestration" on top of it feels like something that could get hard to reason about quickly. Curious how you think about UX here.
Good points and indeed thinking about this quite a bit. Currently leaning towards a CLI first approach so that Claude/Cursor/[insert coding agent] can configure and control the ide. Feels a bit meta, but also makes it extremely user-friendly.
Tmux is pretty easy to pick up and build muscle memory by learning a few keyboard shortcuts from a basic youtube video and it's handy when you don't want to switch screens between multiple terminals just for one thing.
The abilty to split and divide the screen pretty simply with a few keys is handy, and the abilty to save that layout for the shell items you're using to load up easily again the next time is valuable too.
Multi agent orchestration likely just means keeping track of a few different windows all on one screen.
I'm so married to my existing tmux workflows and layout that I'm not sure whether I'd ever feel open to trying out something like this. At the same time, orchestrating multiple agents with native tmux and git worktree does feel cumbersome.
I'm also trying to build something similar for agent orchestration where one terminal is controlling multiple terminals. I tried using tmux but it's very good at sending the initial text to the tmux sessions, but I've not been able to get an agent to have a proper back and forth controlling multiple tmux sessions. I know we can use send-keys, but reading the session or knowing when that session is complete is kind of up in the air. And then if the main orchestrator terminal has checked all the sessions to see if they're actually working and doing things, the main session kind of stop so I've kind of been thinking about a cron that periodically checks in and nudges it to check the sessions again. Are they still working? Do they need more guidance? Essentially having one terminal control others, but having that back and forth with the terminals has been pretty challenging to achieve. Have you gotten anywhere with this?
Looks like a great implementation. I want to question the basic user story, which seems to be: "I am a software developer who wants to improve productivity by running multiple simultaneous agents that are roughly isomorphic to a human software developer team."
I am burning a lot of tokens every day at work and on personal projects. It's helpful. I generally work in tmux with github copilot in one pane, and a few other terminal panes showing tests and current diff.
I find it really important to avoid the temptation to multi-task by running multiple agents. For quite varied tasks, productivity gains from multi-tasking have proven to be illusory. Why would it be different with writing software?
I love cmux! ironically you can use tmux-ide within cmux. The idea is to make it an agent development environment that's great when ran on a remote machine :).
most surprising was that something this lightweight made such a big impact on my productivity. its really nice to have persistent Claude teams on my remote machines that I can always access no matter what.