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

26 points by thijsverreck ago | 16 comments

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

ekropotin |next [-]

So basically tmuxinator?

quanwinn |next |previous [-]

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 |root |parent [-]

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

0dayman |next |previous [-]

https://cmux.com/

thijsverreck |root |parent [-]

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 |next |previous [-]

Congrats on getting this out. What was the most surprising part of the build?

thijsverreck |root |parent [-]

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.

theturtletalks |next |previous [-]

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 |root |parent [-]

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 |root |parent [-]

yup core to this project!

bwestergard |next |previous [-]

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

mlboss |next |previous [-]

Can somebody develop a mobile app that natively supports tmux

jrop |root |parent |next [-]

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 |root |parent |next |previous [-]

both ish and termux are great options on mobile/iPad!

deadbabe |root |parent |previous [-]

For all the hype of AI agents, you never see people taking on real challenging projects like this. Just low hanging fruit.

garymiklos |next |previous [-]

I built a very similar one that I use every day, smux: https://github.com/gergomiklos/smux. Took only 1 hour with claude.