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Comment by jelder | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't seem like a niche that isn't filled. Am I missing out on something by still just using iTerm2 and tmux?

You are missing out a bit, but stay content. :)

Multiplexers have a lot of little papercuts and limitations when you want consistent and native-to-the-OS behavior to flow all the way between the OS and the apps and connections in the multiplexers. For example, gesture scrolling in a tmux/zellij pane is hard because the right events don't flow through. It's an itch to scratch like designing a good terminal lib (like ghostty.)

And then, there's all the unifying and smoothing out of data connections--I imagine they'll be a lot to make sure that, e.g., an ssh session or a Claude code session in a pane can be seamlessly reconnected or never drop when the pane is closed. This takes a lot of hacking to make look seamless in most setups right now.

Like mitchell, I write a lot of software around multiplexers, and I've thought about making something similar, but I don't have quite the same level of personal wealth or angel investor connections. :)

herdr and mosh are a couple of reference points for this, there are others.

> gesture scrolling in a tmux/zellij pane is hard because the right events don't flow through

I'm not sure what is meant by this, I can mouse over a pane in zellij and use two-finger scrolling to scroll only that pane without any problem.

Yes, but you can't, for example, transfer momentum vectors through zellij to the app.

If the app is offering what appears to be momentum, it's implemented its own acceleration/deceleration algorithm. That's a lot to ask of an app, and they aren't equally good.

Detecting a wide range of underlying terminal support for a CLI app is a pain and prone to errors/drift.

There are various plugins that attempt to solve this, but it'd be nice for someone to solve it once and for all, and then upstream those layers into open source as this project is promising to do.

I've wondered this myself. I stuck with iTerm2 for a really long time but recently switched to Ghostty. Ghostty definitely seems to renders faster (I say "seems to" because I didn't benchmark or anything).

I don't actually use a multiplexer. I'm not sure I understand the use case when most terminal emulators supports tabs + windows (like iTerm2 does). Or you could just launch multiple windows and use your OS's window manager to "multiplex". Are the terminals connected in some way that I'm missing?

Regardless, I think Ghostty is a reminder that you can win in a space that's crowded. There's probably a lot of widely used software that would get dropped en masse immediately if someone had the guts to make a better alternative.

Typically, the benefit of the mux over just more windows or tabs is the ability to detach sessions from a term and have them continue to run. But yea, the “split a term window into multiple terms” doesn’t have quite as much value in a world of lots of tabs. That said, you can do it under program control on the remote host, so it does save remote login overhead, etc. But for local, less value.

I don't get it either. What's wrong with Terminal and tmux, screen or what have you?

I don't get the whole GPU rendering thing for ghostty either. Its a terminal emulator. It shows plain text. Why would I need GPU acceleration? I never felt "yeah, this terminal needs faster rendering".

Maybe I'm just an idiot

I imagine something more like herdr, but done at the terminal level, not inside. But that’s cmux…

If you like terminals and tmux, can I suggest you spend a few hours playing with herdr? It clicked for me in a way that a lot of other orchestrators didn't.

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