Tmux grew up and learned to babysit AI agents

What it does

Herdr is a Rust terminal multiplexer with workspaces, tabs, and panes that also watches your AI agents. It shows a sidebar with states—blocked, working, done, idle—so you can scan a whole fleet at a glance. Detach and reattach like tmux; agents keep running in the background. No GUI, no Electron, no macOS-only wrapper.

The interesting bit

The agent awareness is zero-config: Herdr reads foreground process names and terminal output to guess state. For supported tools like Claude Code, Codex, or Grok CLI, optional socket integrations make reporting more reliable. There’s also a Unix socket API so agents can orchestrate Herdr itself—spawning panes, reading output, waiting on state changes.

Key highlights

• Mouse-native throughout: click, drag, split panes
• 18 built-in themes including Catppuccin, Tokyo Night, Kanagawa, Rosé Pine
• Works over SSH; remote attach without opening a shell first
• Session persistence with opt-in pane restore after restart
• Experimental --handoff flag tries to migrate live panes across binary updates
• Single Rust binary, no dependencies, runs inside tmux

Caveats

• Linux and macOS only; no Windows support mentioned
• Update handoff and agent session restore are flagged experimental or opt-in
• Some agents (Pi, Kiro CLI) have partial or missing blocked-state detection
• Gemeni CLI and Cline are detected but not fully tested

Verdict

Worth a look if you run multiple terminal-based AI agents and want tmux-style persistence without losing track of which one is stuck waiting for your approval. If you already live in tmux and don’t use coding agents, this adds little; if you use GUI agent managers, this is the escape hatch back to the terminal.