Show HN: Saggar, a Mac terminal that keeps sessions and your attention organized | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Saggar, a Mac terminal that keeps sessions and your attention organized

saggar.marginalutility.dev

70 pointsmcclowes61 comments

Hi HN, like many of you talented folk, I’ve been building more, faster than ever. I built Saggar after my terminal stopped feeling like a tool and started feeling like a tab-management problem. Let me know you think!

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I created something similar, fully open source, using the ideas behind scrolling window managers. There's currently no website as I'm actively using it to work on a different project. It has features such as a shortcut (command+.) to open an overlay menu that allows you to switch to any split just by typing a letter and a number. Throughout the app. It also has optional vim bindings, support for different models and agents (e.g Claude, Codex, etc via ACP), and much more. There're bugs, but if you run into any, feel free to let AI create a PR. Goes without saying that it's vibe coded.

https://github.com/terhechte/Cormac

Looks cool! I like the embedded web panel. Good luck!

This looks really cool, especially on the remote control part. I've experienced exactly the same problem, but ended up building my own tool through an opposite architectural approach than Saggar.

The main difference is that I want to keep my existing workflow in Kitty and tmux/zellij. Since all of them provide solid remote control protocol, I wrote captain-miao (https://github.com/hyperlogue/captain-miao) which is a standalone TUI app that runs inside these terminals, observing the agent sessions, managing tabs and windows, and allow me to quickly jump to the exact window/tab that needs my attention. The sessions are still native windows/panes inside the terminal/multiplexer that I configured and polished for years.

One difficulty I found when trying to expanding the agent support beyond claude code and codex, many agents don't provide a good way to inject hooks to listen to the session status change. wondering how Saggar solves this problem. do it infer state from the screen buffer?

Looks great, well done! Kitty is great too, makes sense.

I have purposefully kept things quite tight for my own sanity, but I think it makes sense market-share wise at the moment.

At the moment I'm also assuming that if someone is using Cursor AI tooling/Grok, they're probably using Cursor IDE and terminals in there.

I am planning on looking into integrating Pi.dev, which I love the philsophy of (though don't use personally just because API usage costs so much).

Just an anecdata: I really dislike the Cursor IDE's session/worktree handling, but my company only provide Cursor licences. So I'm using herdr, cursor cli ("agent"), a custom workflow skill that reads a manifest of the repos I work with + the setup commands they need.

Ah interesting! Thanks for sharing.

The remote control appears to use a third party relay, and I don't see encryption mentioned.

I really want to use this, but I definitely don't trust a vibe coded relay to my shell.

Fair concerns! The third party is Cloudflare, and it is encrypted

We have something very similar to this at my company, with the biggest difference being that it integrates with our Jira instance and can organize things around tickets.

I really like your omni search / command bar at the top though, I find it annoying to do something randomly quickly in our app. Now I want to fork it and add that…

Thanks for sharing, it’s really cool and looks nice.

Oh interesting. I do have a feature I've played about with that pulls through GitHub issues/Jira tickets (kind of mirroring the kanban board), and makes it easy to throw AI at it - does your tool go further than that?

Thanks :)

Nice design, I look forward to trying it out when I get back to the computer. I don't like kicking off some web server process on localhost and then forgetting about it if I close the browser window.

Any special reason it's Apple silicon only? This seems like something that'd be handy to have on any machine.

Thank you! If there's interest I could look into other OS', I don't rate electron apps and I'd want to do that natively. Plus, I'm personally a Mac user haha.

I still get use out of Intel Macs too and wondered if there was some technical reason that made it harder to implement on other hardware.

Ah right! There's a bit of extra work, I was looking into it last week, I paused as I saw a lot of articles like this https://www.techradar.com/computing/mac-os/apple-quietly-kil...

I'll look into it again!

Why was this comment marked [dead]

> Requires macOS 26 Tahoe or later

Why? Tahoe hasn’t even reached its first birthday and plenty of us are still on Seqouia not wanting to put up with apple’s disaster release. There’s nothing a terminal needs from Tahoe specifically.

Not a purposeful exclusion, macOS 26 simply the lowest version I currently build and test against.

It's a great call out, I'll take a look at that shortly.

About your product, nothing to add abt it. It's an incredible idea! Everytime I use my terminal I usually get lost with the many windows I open and I'm pretty sure your platforms can solve this issue!

About your website I'd just suggest that the landing page animation could be something about how the terminal windows are scattered and then, when you gather them all in, let's say, a box it'll then show Saggar logo!

Thank you for the enthusiasm!

I like the idea! I will try making something just like that :)

The remote control is cool in theory - for now I'd prefer you let me launch "rootshell" instead of the internal terminal. But also if lets me answer and send simple messages from the "list view" would be great.

Love the idea and the features. One thing that makes it hard for me is I use cmux browser. Having a similar browser feature would go a long way towards helping me switch to your app.

Looks nice. It didn't add fish shell, only zsh and rather difficult to get it to use it as default.

If I had had fish setup in the /etc/shells correctly, it probably would have used it but after the fact, I can get it to load but it doesn't stick.

1. Cannot create account because the CSP policy on the site blocks its own captcha. 2. The github repo URL is a 404, as is Releases and Issues links.

I was hoping this would satisfy a need so I didn't have to build a full tool myself. Kiln looks interesting, too.

Apologies for that false start! Sign up should be working again.

I've been testing out herdr, how would you compare this featurewise?

Similar kind of idea, similar in terms of features. Obviously there's a big difference in feel, Saggar being a mac app with terminals, rather than living in your existing terminal app, and I think Saggar really makes the most of that difference.

Beyond the UI, monitor & quick run windows, and rich command palette, I think the way Saggar orients your activity around your projects (e.g. a git repo) is really intuitive over the workspace model.

I'm still working on coverage for Pi and OpenCode though!

My suspicion is that Herdr will go this way with the YC relationship; they are keeping the runtime open source - the thing their terminal UI is built on- and there’s no reason cli needs to be their only target. Your app is very nice looking!

They may well do!

Thank you!

I love this but I can’t figure out how to have my two computers have remote control sessions at once from a single phone browser session. Is it possible?

ooh I have not built for that yet, let me take a look at that. Great request.

Ok! This is a killer feature / a must for me. I can use Claude code’s remote control, but I can’t do that across my multiple accounts. So having the ability to manage any and all sessions remotely is my goal with a tool like this, if it matches your goals I’d love to see it added. Thanks!

I haven't got a second device to hand to test this right now, but there's was only a small bit of code forcing 1-1 pairing so this SHOULD work now. Feel free to try, or I'll post again once I've had a chance to verify.

Seems to work! The UI for switching boxes is a little fiddly but it does work. Thanks!

usecase is I have a Mac laptop and a windows laptop because I need to support both platforms.

Ok, I don't support windows yet :/

I'm not asking for that, just illustrating a reason why some of us have might be looking for an app that supports a many:1 mapping.

Looks great. My only nitpick is "Know which terminal needs you." should be "Know which process needs you."

Why

I really like the aesthetics and the design, though I wish it was open source and did not require an account.

Oh, you don't NEED an account dw. There's only a few features that need it (e.g. remote control).

I open source a lot of projects (https://github.com/mcclowes) so my first instinct was to, and I'll consider that in the future!

Sweet, thanks for replying. I'll follow your github and try it out down the road if it goes open source! Nice work :)

i've noticed recently that some agentic TUIs have introduced a dashboard of sorts for different sessions that you access by just pressing left arrow. i wonder if they are trying to solve some of the problems mentioned by the author and whether that would ultimately be the best solution.

I used those dashboards extensively, they are useful! But found that they put visibility at the wrong level. I wanted a view across all my terminals, regardless of which agent or provider they’re running, including terminals where I’m working manually.

how's this compare to CMUX?

EDIT: I'll probably ask this exact question everytime someone posts a new agentic terminal manager.

EDIT EDIT: looks like there's some form of companian app, that's kind of cool. Will have to check this out later.

Similar in terms of features. I'd see the most meaningful advantage is the user experience, I find myself working significantly faster with Saggar. Beyond the UI, monitor & quick run windows, and rich command palette, I think the way Saggar orients your activity around your projects (e.g. a git repo) is really intuitive over the workspace model.

cool. I'll give it a go. the Companion app sounds like it could be a great way to control this, since my only option right now is directly to controlling only claude sessions.

Looks cool, I'll give it a try

Before you try stuff like this, from an unknown developer, do you run the codebase through AI to scan for malware, backdoors, etc and build it yourself? I'm always skeptical about running stuff like this now a days.

If it helps at all, here's who I am - https://github.com/mcclowes | https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxclaytonclowes/

Your GitHub overview ends with missing a wo

Not pedantic; helpful! You seem nice.

Super helpful! Thanks mate

Tried to sign up with an account and the confirmation email never arrived. I tried twice. Using fastmail, didn't hit the SPAM folder either.

Sorry you're experiencing that! It's just you and one other users email addresses specifically! Not quite sure why but it seems to be the email sending service not trusting me, specifically when sending to you :/

Where did the name come from?

As a herdr user, the disposable terminal made me drool. Nice work. Would need to be able to fully customize the colors/font/sizing to make this usable as a daily driver; I take it it's not open source, or I'd put up PR. Good luck with it; nice to see product thinking and sweating the details in dev tools.

Specifically for a terminal, i'd really prefer it to be open source. Primarily for security reasons, but also just so it's easier to avoid slop, in times like this with heavy LLM usage.

In general, lots of code equals lost of bugs.

> What says no is the account: nothing pairs that is not signed in as you.

I am begging Claude to stop treating the English language this way.

agreed, that load bearing colon is doing a lot of work there.

I will admit I've been more focused on the app itself!

Claude's RLHF has gone really over the top in recent versions. If you browbeat Claude enough you can get it to start self-censoring, but it takes a lot of training and memory creation. I almost feel bad for it, given the amount of brow-beatings I've performed.

Some people claim setting the writing style will help, but what ever finishing training is provided to Claude seems to leak through no matter what.

Yes, and also possible they've gone too heavy on verifiable rewards (RLVR) for agentic coding work, and too light on human feedback (RLHF)

I had a funny language issue with Gemini Notebook. The “podcast” it created was pretty good but the “hosts” kept using the word exactly as a response to the other. After the 10th or so time it got annoying.

When I generated another one on the next chapter I prompted it explicitly not to use the word exactly as a response. The male host said something and the female said, “Exactly! I mean… 100%” It’s like it can’t help itself but then tries to correct itself.

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