Live data from Hacker News

Herdr: One terminal to rule them all

herdr.dev

81–90 of 189 posts

Re: Herdr: One terminal to rule them all

#81

I'm a big tmux fan, but admittedly I've found myself switching between a lot of sessions recently and wishing it was a little bit more mouse friendly. If you're a Mac user, and can forgive the shameless plug, you might find belfry.robgough.net useful. Connects to local and remote machines entirely through tmux, ssh and libghostty - populating the sidebar from tmux session info, and optionally adds a little Claude vis…

> wishing it was a little bit more mouse friendly Can you explain what you struggle to do in tmux with the mouse? I'm using it as we speak and everything is clickable, panes are resizable, right clicking a windows give you a context menu... Not sure what else is missing?

Quickly switching between multiple sessions, and seeing which sessions are waiting for input.

I generally run a session per project. Then within each session, a window for Claude, a window for running whatever dev server/logs, a window for neovim, and finally a plain terminal window for things like kicking off deploys etc.

Re: Herdr: One terminal to rule them all

#82
post #18
post #8

So I've tried to figure out why you might want to use this over Tmux, and essentially I think it comes to down to: - everything is mouse clickable - tmux style display-popups are used for friendly UI interactions everywhere - it has a UI for agents running in panes, with a cool status (idle/working) display - has opinionated defaults like automatic clipboard copy on mouse text select - makes nested sessions easier &…

Mobile support?

If there was a mobile app or at least some kind of agent agnostic telegram integration then I'd be more interested.

Re: Herdr: One terminal to rule them all

#83
post #52
post #8

So I've tried to figure out why you might want to use this over Tmux, and essentially I think it comes to down to: - everything is mouse clickable - tmux style display-popups are used for friendly UI interactions everywhere - it has a UI for agents running in panes, with a cool status (idle/working) display - has opinionated defaults like automatic clipboard copy on mouse text select - makes nested sessions easier &…

I wanted to mention that `zmx` is a beautiful piece of minimal software that basically has gotten rid of my tmux and zellij use. Uses a ghostty-based terminal emulator for each session, supports pretty much all of these features by leveraging ghostty. I truly don’t see the benefit of something like herdr over this minimal, robust setup. If I really wanted a lot of customization for AI assistants, I’d consider using O…

Thank you for mentioning zmx. Reading through their repo, it’s like someone read my mind, took my instinctive, almost pre-verbal, half-formed/quarter-baked preference for `screen` over `tmux`, beautifully and precisely formalized it into an actually lucid opinion, and then instantiated it as an actually real piece of software. I’ve used it for an hour and it already feels like second nature; I somehow have muscle memory for features that I didn’t even know it had until I instinctively used them and they were right where I expected them to be. Seriously, thank you.

Re: Herdr: One terminal to rule them all

#84

I've been using tmux historically and it eventually became too cumbersome since my typical workflow started being a lot more AI-agent heavy. I now run over 10 agents at the same time and they're all working on some multi-hour workstreams that I occasionally need to check in on or unblock. Tmux was not making this particularly easy and I would occasionally lose an agent or forget about it until much later only to real…

I thought that was where I was going to end up, but that's where Claude's remote control or copilot's agents tab spared me.

The hitching is compounded for me because I tend to run the agents in squads: the agent I talk to operates a strict no-coding 'producer' mode, it tasks a sub-agent to do the research or coding, then the results go via a file to a critic or review agent; keeps the producer context very minimal and lean. Not convinced it's as necessary as just starting new contexts frequently with Fable etc.

My general rule is that I won't commit code a human hasn't seen/reviewed to production codebases, and I know I won't maintain that rule if I have to read all the slop that gets generated first time round without an AI reviewer pass.

So far my producer skill has survived 4.6 thru fable in succeeding to treat the review/critic output skeptically, as a likely yes-man or team player.

The key is to remember that, as of Fable, the size of the training corpus segment representing people responding to AI-generated content is still relatively tiny. Telling Sonnet 4.6 "this is code an agent produced" has a near decorative effect with no apparent significance, Sonnet 4.8 shows some misgivings, and when I experimented with Fable it seemed to do well at anticipating the kind of slop 4.6 would throw you.

Interestingly, to me, telling Fable that code a previous Fable agent wrote was AI generated seemed to raise some kind of "I'm being benchmarked" flag; expanding the reasoning finds it being evasive and mistrusting; look past the null derefence because this must be a trick question type thing.

Re: Herdr: One terminal to rule them all

#85
post #5

I've been using Herdr for running my AI agents and it has been really nice. I like that I can reconnect to it from multiple sessions (I have one up in a window on my desktop, and when I ssh in from my "after hours" laptop I can also attach to it there and continue one if I'm at my son's Dr appt or the like. I can also attach to it natively from my Mac over SSH transport as well as resuming a remote wezterm connection…

How is this different from sshing into a server and attaching to a tmux session? I don't see the benefits in switching over.

Using mosh to do the same (which is helpful if you're on a laptop and you want to survive lid closes or ip roaming)

Re: Herdr: One terminal to rule them all

#90
post #83
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to mention that `zmx` is a beautiful piece of minimal software that basically has gotten rid of my tmux and zellij use. Uses a ghostty-based terminal emulator for each session, supports pretty much all of these features by leveraging ghostty. I truly don’t see the benefit of something like herdr over this minimal, robust setup. If I really wanted a lot of customization for AI assistants, I’d consider using O…

Thank you for mentioning zmx. Reading through their repo, it’s like someone read my mind, took my instinctive, almost pre-verbal, half-formed/quarter-baked preference for `screen` over `tmux`, beautifully and precisely formalized it into an actually lucid opinion, and then instantiated it as an actually real piece of software. I’ve used it for an hour and it already feels like second nature; I somehow have muscle mem…

My pleasure. Make sure you check out the thriving ecosystem of tools around it as well. I’ve seen a few projects building on it in a prettt creative way.
Post reply on HN