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Comment by loveparade | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry but I am still confused. What specifically does herdr give me over tmux? "It is designed for agents" is just marketing speech, it means nothing. Ok, it has mouse support, fine, I don't care about that one but I can see how it's useful to some people. That has nothing to do with agents though. zellij also has a better user experience than tmux, so you could just use that or any of the other dozen multiplexers.

I understand it has the agent pane on the left that tells you what is running but... that's it?

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You can check their own AI-generated comparison here: https://herdr.dev/compare/

Realistically, what I use about its agent stuff is:

- reliable notification pings either via what your terminal app uses (e.g., ghostty's) or system or just within herdr only

- if absolutely necessary, be able to tell agent sessions to observe and run commands on a herdr pane (security beware, for obvious reasons)

- herdr --remote which is basically a quick SSH -> attach to herdr on a remote

- prefix+g (equivalent to prefix+w in tmux) presents itself nicer, has binds for agent state filtering and its /search imho is mildly nicer than tmux's

Arguably, you can have the same points in others if you know how to configure tmux or zellij already, so if you're comfortable with that then you really don't have to use herdr.

There is a cross platform terminal notification cli that I used to vibe code notifications in like 5minutes and I have traffic light indicators on my tmux panes showing when an agent is waiting. The other things are also all possible. An agent is super happy to remote control tmux, it knows all the commands!

Yep, I did similar stuff too! Used something like ntfy to push notifs to an Android or just whatever commands are available on the OS you're in (e.g., `notify-send`). And for state reads herdr has `herdr pane read` while you can happily accomplish similar results with `tmux capture-pane` or similar.

Herdr holds potential in stuff like their socket API ( https://herdr.dev/docs/socket-api/ ) and whatever enhancements they wish to bring (e.g., https://herdr.dev/docs/agent-automation/ ) so if that appeals to others, it's worth a shot.

But for most regular users, tmux and other multiplexers work just fine.

IME yes that’s basically it. Other features haven’t really been significant value add for me. Some of the keybindings are different in minor ways. It has some mouse support but I have found that it doesn’t work well with certain apps/selections (eg: less).

It’s fine.

When running many agents something like the “idle/working workstreams” gutter is honestly helpful though.

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