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Show HN: Tmux-IDE, OSS agent-first terminal IDE

tmux.thijsverreck.com

21–30 of 49 posts

Re: Show HN: Tmux-IDE, OSS agent-first terminal IDE

#21
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.

Re: Show HN: Tmux-IDE, OSS agent-first terminal IDE

#23
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?

Re: Show HN: Tmux-IDE, OSS agent-first terminal IDE

#24
post #21

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.

Re: Show HN: Tmux-IDE, OSS agent-first terminal IDE

#25
post #21

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.

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 ability to split and divide the screen pretty simply with a few keys is handy for anyone who spends enough time in a shell - 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.

Re: Show HN: Tmux-IDE, OSS agent-first terminal IDE

#28

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…

I recently built something just like this: https://github.com/sethdeckard/atria

It supports tmux, but you can use it without via embedded terminal. It also has native integration with a few select terminals that expose the right kind of APIs.

Installs as single binary (written in Go) with no external dependencies.

Re: Show HN: Tmux-IDE, OSS agent-first terminal IDE

#29

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.

What tools do you use on tmux to achieve your workflow ? Do you do just prompting or do you code too ?

Re: Show HN: Tmux-IDE, OSS agent-first terminal IDE

#30
Thank you for sharing your work. Really cool.

From my perspective, this is cool, but since tmux is kind of permanent, you open your layout, set 1,2,3 screens for agents, you might add gemini and opencode. then open vite for server and one for shell for example. Then you can just close it and reopen whenever you want to work on it.

And that is it. If I am missing something, processes taking memory or such, I have a machine with memory (I know, flexing how expensive things are), please explain.

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