Herdr: One terminal to rule them all

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• Hacker News
• "hurr durr"
  by r-w
• Vibecoded. Nope.
  by ori_b
• i mean the app is for vibe coding, what did you really expect?
  by andhug
• Good call. Break up with her first before she breaks up with you.
  by jatora
• Everything is vibecoded now, better get used to it.

  Aside from that, the quality of the project is great. Vibecoded doesn't automatically mean bad.

  by nullbio
• That ship has sailed boss.

  I don't think you can avoid those much longer.

  by reddit_clone
• I read the website and still don't understand what this solves.

  Doesn't tmux and zellij do all of these things that 'herdr' does?

  by colesantiago
• yes but this does it wrapped up together.
  by fragmede
• Yes, but better.
  by nullbio
• tmux and zellij are compared here https://herdr.dev/compare/
  by kkapelon
• This 6-minute video (linked from the website) demoes it nicely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnIu-Xu64H0

  It sets up a bunch of panes for you and tracks your agents' status and everything is clickable. You could probably do much of the same by setting up tmux appropriately. Or you could use this, which is already set up.

  I tried herdr today, and it's not bad. Better than my previous many terminal tabs. Copy-and-paste is wonky (and it's ridiculous that copying is documented in multiple places in the docs, but pasting is never mentioned). And when an agent is waiting for a shell command, it shows as "idle", which IMO is wrong. Still, seems OK so far, I'll stick with it for a while.

  by derdi
• > Each runs in its own real terminal, on a server that keeps it alive when you close the laptop.

  How does one describe what's happening with stuff like this? Where a business tries to intercept people who are still learning the lay of some land, to get them to pay for something that they just haven't learned yet can be essentially free to them? Is there a word for it?

  by beepbooptheory
• another example of people inventing something that Emacs already has.
  by faustlast
• I've been working on Hyperia, which is very similar: https://github.com/deepbluedynamics/hyperia. Hyperia is a fork of Hyper Terminal. Both are open source. Competition is good for this space, I think, especially for the user. There's also cmux and Intelligent Terminal (by Microsoft).

  I do separation of concerns with the agent orchestrator (Nemesis8): https://github.com/deepbluedynamics/nemesis8. That can be run with or without Hyperia. I do not suggest anyone run agents on their bare metal. Putting them in a container gets a lot of wins, especially around log aggregation. Working now on a Splunk/Loggly-like interface for searching logs, tool runs (useful in tuning a custom local MoE drafter) and full session suspend, stop, detach, and search. It also does single MCP tool installs for all agents. Nemesis also supports dynamic port exposure to the host metal, for testing agent builds inside their containers.

  Hyperia has a lot of extra features as well that I have found personally useful:

  - Sticky notes (search too) - addressable panes in addressable tabs, tabs in windows, multiple windows - full ACLs across panes, notes, tabs, windows - Poke-a-pane to keep an agent going (any agent, not just CC which has a timer function) - webpanes with markdown extraction, JavaScript injection - directory pickers for people who find cd'ing to things confusing or those weary of typing nearly the same directory path over and over again in new terminals (not perfect, but I'm iterating on it) - a built in agent loop (in the Rust sidecar) that allows using local models for tool calls (needs a trained drafter to make it viable) or using a local model for token maxxing (compresses reads of panes by frontier models) - pane splits down/up/left/right and quick layouts.

  As for whether it was "vibe coded" or not, or Herdr for that matter, I don't think that term is useful, other than for quick judgment. No, this is not a one-prompt project. I've spent 100s of hours on it, started out with Hyper, and did a crazy amount of planning on how to architect it. I have done systems architecture for a living before, and have a strong search background. People who hate on AI, and therfore projects done with AI, are threatened. Nothing more. That's why they shortcut with "AI slop" or "Vibecoded. Nope". That's just ignorance speaking from a standpoint of fear.

  Slop, whether AI or human, is an effort problem: https://deepbluedynamics.com/blog/ai-slop-effort-problem. Looking at Herdr, it looks solid. Judge the product by it's outcomes, it's use, not whether or not AI wrote it or not. That's the moment we're in though, for now, so downvote or not. I don't care.

  by kordlessagain
• Cool that you're using Hyper Terminal as a starting point! What was the reason why you've added MCP to this? How is the intended use? I launch Claude Code on Hyperia and then Claude Code can open as many tabs as it wants inside of Hyperia? Or m I missing something
  by orliesaurus
• > Hyperia is a fork of Hyper Terminal.

  I couldn't click fast enough, then discovered that "Hyper Terminal" has nothing to do with "HyperTerminal" and couldn't click "close tab" fast enough.

  by wolrah
• how does this compare to superset and conductor?
  by anr0
• Conductor is a more fully-featured app rather than a TUI (some people might prefer one or the other), and is Mac-only.
  by scubbo
• There is a whole page just on this subject https://herdr.dev/compare/
  by kkapelon
• i tried giving tmux a go but there is a period where you're kinda going in and out of a tool, maybe not coming back to it for weeks at a time, this is why imo herdr is a really good tool - it doesn't punish you for not remembering the bindings, everything is clickable and as you go you can decide which bindings to learn and commit to instinct when required. I believe all TUIs should be like this from now on. This is also what makes opencode so great/sticky. Great work herdr team, I've only used it for a few days but I know I will be using this for a long time to come.
  by smashah
• Zellij has context sensitive hint bar that shows possible key bindings. You can turn it off, but by default it's there.
  by ihateolives
• So it's like mosh + tmux?
  by kfsone
• I cant figure out how to make subagents work with herdr, tried to email the maintainer and got no reply back (yet) - has anyone figured it out?
  by orliesaurus
• Can you elaborate a bit on what you're trying to get to work?
  by nlh
• I'm happy with tmux - can use it on my phone.
  by pshirshov
• sure, but you can use this on Windows!
  by stronglikedan
• Does it support port forwarding like ssh -L ... ?
  by figomore
• I get why folks use tmux/herdr, but I already use i3wm/Hyprland for window/workspace management, and want to have "shared first class windows" instead of dual binds of "super-based binds for i3 windows ... oh wait control-a based binds for tmux panes".

  Has anyone got a tool/setup that is tmux-like but the remote terminals/panes are all local/native windows?

  by stephen
• Yeah... Herdr. Used in thin client mode connecting to remote server.
  by bitbang
• Something like this would be great. It seems what one really need is just persistent terminal session. So this thing probably can be built on top of zmc with a few scripts.
  by chaoxu