[HN Gopher] Show HN: Tmux-IDE, OSS agent-first terminal IDE
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Show HN: Tmux-IDE, OSS agent-first terminal IDE
Hey HN, Small OSS project that i created for myself and want to
share with the community. It's a declarative, scriptable, terminal-
based IDE focussed on agentic engineering. That's a lot of jargon,
but essentially its a multi-agent IDE that you start in your
terminal. Why is that relevant? Thanks to tmux and SSH, it means
that you have a really simple and efficient way to create your own
always-on coding setup. Boot into your IDE through ssh, give a
prompt to claude and close off your machine. In tmux-ide claude
will keep working. The tool is intentionally really lightweight,
because I think the power should come from the harnesses that you
are working with. I'm hoping to share this with the community and
get feedback and suggestions to shape this project! I think that
"remote work" is directionally correct, because we can now have
extremely long-running coding tasks. But I also think we should be
able to control and orchstrate that experience according to what we
need. The project is 100% open-source, and i hope to shape it
together with others who like to work in this way too! Github:
https://github.com/wavyrai/tmux-ide Docs:
https://tmux.thijsverreck.com/docs
Author : thijsverreck
Score : 48 points
Date : 2026-03-18 17:46 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tmux.thijsverreck.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tmux.thijsverreck.com)
| bwestergard wrote:
| 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?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_multitasking
| theturtletalks wrote:
| 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?
| SparkyMcUnicorn wrote:
| It sounds like maybe you haven't seen agent teams mode, which
| this project is using.
|
| https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-teams
| thijsverreck wrote:
| yup core to this project!
| theturtletalks wrote:
| Oh will definitely look into this! I ditched CC for Pi a few
| months ago so maybe there's an equivalent feature.
| sethd wrote:
| 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.
| garymiklos wrote:
| I built a very similar one that I use every day, smux:
| https://github.com/gergomiklos/smux. Took only 1 hour with
| claude.
| mlboss wrote:
| Can somebody develop a mobile app that natively supports tmux
| deadbabe wrote:
| For all the hype of AI agents, you never see people taking on
| _real_ challenging projects like this. Just low hanging fruit.
| jrop wrote:
| I assume that you've tried Termux and somehow that doesn't meet
| your needs? (Also, you didn't specify whether you are on
| Android/iOS)
| thijsverreck wrote:
| both ish and termux are great options on mobile/iPad!
| 0dayman wrote:
| https://cmux.com/
| thijsverreck wrote:
| 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 :).
| cyrusradfar wrote:
| Congrats on getting this out. What was the most surprising part
| of the build?
| thijsverreck wrote:
| 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.
| quanwinn wrote:
| 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.
| thijsverreck wrote:
| if you want you can file an issue with your current workflow?
| happy to see if we can do a PR to support this natively in
| tmux-ide
| TheRoque wrote:
| What tools do you use on tmux to achieve your workflow ? Do you
| do just prompting or do you code too ?
| ekropotin wrote:
| So basically tmuxinator?
| operatingthetan wrote:
| If this supported Gemini and Codex I would find it useful. I
| never run more than one Claude, it's always a mix.
| thijsverreck wrote:
| Both are supported! You can customize the startup command in
| ide.yml. I will update the docs to highlight that :)
| selixe_ wrote:
| 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.
| thijsverreck wrote:
| 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.
| j45 wrote:
| 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.
| devcraft41 wrote:
| 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?
| AtxWrk70 wrote:
| the token costs are real. we switched to smaller models for 80%
| of tasks and barely noticed
| jamesvzb wrote:
| open source alternatives are catching up fast. give it 6 months
| desireco42 wrote:
| 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.
| behrlich wrote:
| https://github.com/ehrlich-b/wingthing Here's my take on this
| idea, also FOSS. Does tmux style sessions so you can come and go.
| It also exposes a web terminal so you can get remote access - but
| you can also run fully locally for less latency.
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(page generated 2026-03-18 23:00 UTC)