Birbla

Discussion summary

Herdr is a terminal app that combines features of tmux and zellij, aiming to simplify terminal management. The discussion includes mixed opinions on its usefulness and quality.

What the discussion says

  • Some users find it useful for vibe coding and combining terminal tools.
  • Others are skeptical about its necessity, comparing it to existing tools like tmux and zellij.
  • There are comments about the app's quality and purpose, with some dismissing it as unnecessary.
“Everything is vibecoded now, better get used to it.”
— nullbio
“yes but this does it wrapped up together.”
— fragmede

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  • Hacker News
  • I’ve been using tmux (with the wonderful iTerm2 integration) for almost a year now to manage agents as well as organize my workspaces. I initially wrote this off but looking closer I think I’m going to give a shot. My mobile experience is acceptable (Blink shell + tmux) but not ideal and the monitoring of agents is nice. Currently I rely on a hook+Pushover to alert me when my attention is needed which works but has not been without frustration.
    by joshstrange
  • I've been using tmux for several years and I just tried this and I'm pleasantly surprised! I definitely see myself using this as my goto. Couple of questions:

    - Do you plan to support viewing file-diffs for the cwd? Currently I keep zed / vscode open on the side to view diffs. It would be great if we could fold those into herdr as well

    - Is there an easy way to reconfigure the prefix? For tmux i've been using ` for years now, so going back to ctrl+z is a bit of a struggle

    Great execution btw, congrats!

    by ramnique
  • Is there git worktree support?

    With the long waits for agents to do stuff I really don't see how one can get anything done without multitasking with multiple worktrees in parallel. So I'd want support for listing the worktrees and then have a list of agents within each worktree.

    Emdash and Nimbalyst have this kind of UI. Unfortunately both of them want to manage the state of each worktree group themselves; I'm looking for something that just would just call git worktree directly so that I can switch more seamlessly between CLI and IDE/TUI..

    by dagss
  • what is the advantage of git worktree vs using a git remote set to a local file upstream.
    by dv_dt
  • git worktrees are managed by git, not the IDEs. e.g. at agentastic.dev, we use git's worktree command to create them, and they should be portable to any other IDE or app.
    by ahmadyan
  • I haven't been able to use worktrees because when there are major conflicts I find the ai can't handle it. Often it ends up dropping a lot of code.

    How do you manage that? How do you successfully navigate complex merges using ai?

    by tim-projects
  • I use this bash script that creates tmux windows and panes in a worktree and then undoes the process:

    https://gist.github.com/iaindooley/cc8a61a1ff0fe23526c850906...

    You include a script .worktree in your repo that does any copying or symlinking to setup the target directory.

    It also has a headless mode so that it does the worktree operations without the tmux which I use for executing pi -p prompts in worktrees.

    by dools
  • Yes, it seems that it does though I have not yet tried it: https://herdr.dev/docs/configuration/#worktrees
    by linsomniac
  • 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
  • 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 that is running herdr.

    A few small downsides: I can't copy/paste in wezterm using the keyboard/vim keys because it is constantly drawing the screen and unselects my selection. The mouse drag in herdr works very well though. It'd also be nice if you could rebind key mappings in the UI, because I still haven't rebound the keys and am using the mouse.

    by linsomniac
  • > I can't copy/paste in wezterm using the keyboard/vim keys because it is constantly drawing the screen and unselects my selection.

    Oh wow, that's bad. Copy/paste between terminals is a significant part of my workflow.

    Do you know if that's specific to wezterm (my daily terminal emulator) or applicable to any terminal emulator that's using Herdr?

    by vantassell
  • How is this different from sshing into a server and attaching to a tmux session? I don't see the benefits in switching over.
    by dbl000
  • Herdr did a lot of things really well. It have a great landing page where you can see and interact, and that really made me try it, and a few of my friend was also captured and immediately understood what it is for. I basically do everything remote, never on my own machine.

    Once I tried it, I can never go back. It is so simple and worked exactly as I thought how it should work.

    I would say it is just a modern version of tmux but really thought about user experience of more novice users. For people who come from the mouse world, moving to this is quite seamless.

    Also, coming to the comments, I would think maybe `zellij` would also work well. Or use `zmc` and build something on top. `zmc` is great, as the then the tab/window management can be handled by the desktop or TUI, depend on what someone want to use.

    by chaoxu
  • 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 visibility in there for good measure.

    There's even an iOS/iPadOS version – though for the moment you'll need to build that yourself. Source is all on Github.

    by robgough
  • > 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?

    by monk_grilla
  • I still don't fully get the additional value over tmux, beside notification regarding the agent status?
    by 3abiton
  • I couldn't ever for the life of me incorporate tmux into my muscle memory, tmux came naturally so did herdr that just clicked.

    Can't tell you what it is, brain wired like that or smth.

    by Trufa
  • Their page has a live view of the amount of GitHub stars, arguably the most important metrics in the universe.
    by wadim
  • You can create per-pane titles now in tmux. I'm sure you could pipe status to that. I use it for installing machines.
    by she46BiOmUerPVj
  • There is a whole page about this https://herdr.dev/compare/

    For me the killer feature is the git worktree management.

    But in essence it is tmux on steroid (Specifically for agents)

    by kkapelon
  • For me, that was the big selling point. If you aren't working with multiple agents at once, I'm not sure you'd pick Herdr.
    by linsomniac
  • I've just added herdr support for TermRover at https://termrover.sh

    Tmux is still the default, but you can switch to herdr if you're a herdr fan.

    by ptgamr

  •     > Popular with engineers from... (bunch of logos)
    > Individual engineers, not company endorsements.
    Bold haha. Maybe that's fine with the disclaimer, but feels like lawyer-bait.
    by graypegg
  • I was under the impression that "individual engineers ..." is basically implied always, if not just outright lies, I don't trust these listings very highly. Except when its clear that the companies are actually customers. Like; how do I even add my company to this list? Email them?
    by logdahl
  • I think this is actually the norm.
    by camgunz
  • To be precise, it takes 1 employee to say "used in X". It takes corporate decision to say "used by X". And it takes a written agreement to be able to use the trademarked logo of X on your page. (I know, because I have collected more than 60 such agreements to show logos on a page).
    by zvr
  • Everyone does that. Some random startup "We're used by Google!". More often than not some random engineer signed up for a trial or some tiny department somewhere is using it for some internal thing
    by nijave
  • I've seen a lot of companies list logos if just a single engineer or team is using the product.
    by obmelvin
  • 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 realize it's been sitting idle waiting for me to approve something for a few days.

    I've tried Cmux, but it didn't do it for me, since the agent statuses were displayed on the workspaces and having multiple agents in the same workspace would sometime produce confusing results.

    I've been using Herdr since the start of the week and so far it's been the best in terms of visibility of what my agents are doing and which of them need attention. The only wart I've noticed so far is that the performance is not always great — sometimes I see the text appearing with a noticeable delay as I type it.

    by bloody-crow