Show HN: Rmux – A programmable terminal multiplexer with a Playwright-style SDK • Hacker News Board

Show HN: Rmux – A programmable terminal multiplexer with a Playwright-style SDK

#1

Post by shideneyu » Thu, May 21, 2026, 9:22 AM UTC

Author here. RMUX started from a frustration: I've used tmux for years and got tired of scraping output with grep and sleeps to automate anything. So I rebuilt the multiplexer from scratch in Rust, with a programmable layer on top.

Two surfaces: a tmux-compatible CLI (~90 commands, your keybindings just work), and a typed async Rust SDK on the same daemon — stable pane IDs, structured snapshots, locator-style waits. The idea is Playwright-style automation, but for terminals.

Native on Linux, macOS, Windows (real ConPTY, no WSL).

Demos and docs at rmux.io. Happy to answer questions about the daemon protocol, ConPTY, or the SDK design.

Show HN: Rmux – A programmable terminal multiplexer with a Playwright-style SDK
github.com

Re: Show HN: Rmux – A programmable terminal multiplexer with a Playwright-style SDK

#2

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 21, 2026, 9:22 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Rmux – A programmable terminal multiplexer with a Playwright-style SDK

#3

Post by Sirental » Thu, May 21, 2026, 9:42 AM UTC

The website is a little too obviously made by Claude. The first thing I noticed is the classic "pill with pulsing green dot that says something is active or live" claudism.

Re: Show HN: Rmux – A programmable terminal multiplexer with a Playwright-style SDK

#4

Post by redrove » Thu, May 21, 2026, 9:43 AM UTC

Sirental wrote: post #3

The website is a little too obviously made by Claude. The first thing I noticed is the classic "pill with pulsing green dot that says something is active or live" claudism.

I’m genuinely interested in what you find to be the problem with that?

It’s a landing page.

Re: Show HN: Rmux – A programmable terminal multiplexer with a Playwright-style SDK

#5

Post by small_model » Thu, May 21, 2026, 9:50 AM UTC

Never had the need to do playwright automation for tmux, so not sure why I would use this above tmux which works well.

Re: Show HN: Rmux – A programmable terminal multiplexer with a Playwright-style SDK

#6

Post by shideneyu » Thu, May 21, 2026, 9:56 AM UTC

Sirental wrote: post #3

The website is a little too obviously made by Claude. The first thing I noticed is the classic "pill with pulsing green dot that says something is active or live" claudism.

The video of the front page is assisted by AI, I am not a vfx artist; please check rmux code architecture instead, I put a lot of efforts on it

Re: Show HN: Rmux – A programmable terminal multiplexer with a Playwright-style SDK

#7

Post by kosolam » Thu, May 21, 2026, 9:56 AM UTC

Hey, I automate tmux all the time with send keys and capture.. how is your project improves vs tmux or zellij?

Re: Show HN: Rmux – A programmable terminal multiplexer with a Playwright-style SDK

#8

Post by shideneyu » Thu, May 21, 2026, 9:57 AM UTC

small_model wrote: post #5

Never had the need to do playwright automation for tmux, so not sure why I would use this above tmux which works well.

with rmux you can finally do acceptance/integration tests on your terminal user interfaces. tmux is made for humans, rmux is made for both humans and machines

Re: Show HN: Rmux – A programmable terminal multiplexer with a Playwright-style SDK

#9

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 21, 2026, 10:01 AM UTC

kosolam wrote: post #7

Hey, I automate tmux all the time with send keys and capture.. how is your project improves vs tmux or zellij?

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Rmux – A programmable terminal multiplexer with a Playwright-style SDK

#10

Post by cultofmetatron » Thu, May 21, 2026, 10:04 AM UTC

a week ago I was using cmux but its osx only and doen't work on remote terminals. then I switched to herdr which is great so far except its not s great at managing panes. I can't move them around or change ordering. now another terminal multiplexer. I'm getting whiplash.

all that said, none of the existing solutions are perfect and rust codebases are nice. how easy is it to reorder panes? is there a cli that lets me control the panel layout via a skill file and allow my opencode session to target and send data to other panes?