A native window for your terminal herd

What it does It’s a native macOS (and experimentally Linux/Windows) desktop client for a Herdr daemon you install yourself. The daemon owns the terminals, workspaces, Git worktrees, and agent sessions; the GUI attaches to its client socket, paints the terminal surfaces it’s sent — split panes included — and sends semantic input back. Close the window and everything keeps running underneath.

The interesting bit It doesn’t embed or wrap a terminal emulator; it repaints the daemon’s terminal cells directly in GPUI, Zed’s UI framework. That’s the boring-sounding part that makes it fast: unchanged cells trigger zero new text-shaping calls, and glyph caching plus batched background painting cut hover p95 from ~51 ms to 12 ms on the dev’s M4 Max.

Key highlights

• Signed, notarized macOS app with a Homebrew cask whose in-app updater defers to brew upgrade so Homebrew’s records stay honest
• Browser tabs are a GUI-only feature — agents in panes can open URLs via herdr-gpui browser open URL over a local socket
• Built-in performance fixture: 160x50 dense terminal, 40 workspaces, 40 agents, real mouse events, calibrated budgets
• Linux packages (.deb, .rpm, Arch, tarball) are CI install-tested on Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora; ARM64 Arch is built but not tested
• Apache-2.0, with vendored protocol parts attributed upstream

Caveats

• Windows is explicitly experimental: no native window, renderer, or live daemon has been exercised there, and several features (SSH hosts, updates, GitHub credentials) are unavailable
• Linux builds need glibc 2.39+, a Vulkan driver, and ALSA; packages never self-update
• Unaffiliated with Herdr or herdr.dev — you supply and maintain the daemon yourself

Verdict Worth a look if you already run Herdr and want a proper native window over your agent herd instead of a pile of terminal tabs. If you’re not in that ecosystem, there’s nothing here for you — it’s a client, not a standalone tool.