Show HN: Rmux – A programmable terminal multiplexer with a Playwright-style SDK

The key idea is to have many differently named shells. Typically, I group them by project (common prefix name), and the projects live in directories. I have some hacks to organize ibuffer, to split frames, to reflow buffers in the existing windows (eg to organize related project buffers (shells, magit, dired), or to show shells from multiple projects, or selected buffers, and so on). Emacs’ natural frame splitting and buffer selecting/switching commands are good enough if you dont display more than four buffers at a time, but soon you may need to show 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 16, 18, 20, 24 or have funky arrangements, so you may collect functions to help along splitting n*m grids or keeping useful splits. The shells work very organically inside Emacs and you can still use it as a text editor. The so-called “dumb terminal” in M-x shell is a thing of beauty as it really is just a text buffer like any other; I think of it as a bash repl. If you are used to curses TUI commands it may not work, so for these rare occasions I also use eat (but tend to avoid). See also answer to a sibling comment.

Not sure, tbh. I use emacs -daemon to start a server; emacsclient -nw to connect. I use ssh and start a server on the remote. I spawn multiple shells with infinte buffer size and dumb terminals (M-x shell) so I can seamlessly edit. (These are based on comint, a neat command interpreter.) I use my own hacks for named shells (https://github.com/pjj/Emacs-nsh) and for rearranging/splitting windows, but any of the latest powerful LLMs can help with ergonomic modifications to M-x shell or the various improved terminal emulators (vterm, eat, ansi-term) or with renaming and moving/splitting windows. The Emacs manual is excellent but long; worth it IMHO, but focus on things you use. The tutorial is quick; worth it. I avoid curses programs (fancy TUI) or write wrappers around some of them. I love the -p option in codex/claude/copilot.

It's just too bad Emacs doesn't also include a decent text editor, right?

FWIW, I did suspect AI was probably used when looking through the README, but it also didn't really impact my opinion much because the value proposition of "I can use a Rust library to control this through the same primitives the tool itself uses instead of writing a bunch of shell scripts" far outweighs that. I haven't had a chance to try it out yet but plan to later today, and ultimately the experience I have is going to matter a lot more to me than what tools you used to generate the README visuals.

I've tried out plenty of things that seemed promising but turned out to have sloppy implementations before the LLM days, and I've also used some things that are ostensibly vibe-coded but had shockingly high quality of UX compared to the alternatives because the creators put in time and effort into polish beyond what people who make software the "traditional" way tend to, so to me, the important signal is what level of care went into the creation of the software. I'm hoping that this project turns out to be one of the good ones, and if it is, the people who dismiss it because of vibes (pun intended) will be the ones missing out.

For what it's worth I genuinely loved your landing page. I casually clicked through and got an immediate unexpected chuckle at the giant animated crab.

It's obviously AI assisted but I interpreted it as a nod to itself on that and really appreciated it.

I wouldn't worry too much about it. I think the big AI standout (not your fault) is the classic GenAI lightning that behaves more like a weird viscous liquid. Another one I see a lot is the number of avian creatures flapping their wings with all the subtlety and grace of an ornithopter going in reverse.

Feedback

Your site needs some work on the responsiveness. At around 1200 pixels width on my browser, half of the video just gets cut off. It just doesn't scale correctly.

If there’s anything I don’t mind being done with AI, it’s a product landing page. There are only so many ways to creatively design one, so who cares how it was made?

And the site is actually quite cool I believe , I put a lot of efforts in the design.

The usual answer is some handwavy nonsense about "well if you were too lazy to write the text, why should I read it?" said by the same people too lazy to write the code...

Isn't lisp getting advertisement every couple months here or so. After so many decades I don't believe the reason lisp doesn't have traction is just marketing.

you don't like parallax effects ? maybe I'm too 2010 for you

I'm not saying don't use AI. It's alright to use AI in my books, I'm just saying watch out for obvious hints. Some people translate that to "this product is cheap" even if it isn't at all the case.

I understand you've put a hell of a lot of work into this. You might want to have a look at https://www.awwwards.com/ and take some inspiration for some of the designs, then write up a general spec sheet of how the website should look and feed that into Claude.

Otherwise Claude just does what a language model does best, and regurgitates a lot of the same styles.

@jarym what don't you like with the homepage ? I am curious how I can improve

But wait, I’m a user of tmux or zellij which for me was basically another tmux and I went back to tmux eventually. I’m not looking to develop another tmux or something. Is this project more of a library to create tmux like apps?

windows support + async + public sdk. You can rewrite zellij with rmux, but not the opposite. rmux is a multiplexer engine

Fair point, given it is more unconventional design, it is a riskier way in order to get something that works.

my plan is to eventually move my entire workflow to a remote workmachine over ssh. with kernal, I can automate all my smoketests entirely from a headless machine rendering my laptop overkill to run agentic workflows. I'd rather be using it to watch movies, learn new stuff or hand code in my downtime. if your workflow requires cmux, you're stuck running your agents on your local machine.

To be clear, That doesn't make cmux bad. if you WANT to do everythign on your mac, cmux is fantastic. its just not designed with the remote ssh control use case in mind.

nice, zmx is a very nice approach. I did not want to take risks and change the expected behavior of the renown tmux. My main goal was 1) to rewrite tmux the modern way more elegantly (async, rust) and give it windows support 2) to give it a SDK. I think 1 window = 1 session is the right way, but it's a risky market move I didn't want to tackle for adoption. Maybe on a breaking v2 !

so far really liking it. if I had one critisism, I'd say a less awkward meta combo would be nice. ctrl-b feels awkward and I have caps remapped to ctrl. something on the same row as the caps lock would be way easier to learn from a muscle memory perspective.

that said, really appreciating the world you're putting into it!

@ogulcancelij rmux author here. I just tested herdr, I really liked it !

well it looks great so far but Its a no go for me for now until you have at least a cli that a coding harness can use to drive it. thats going to be the killer feature going forward for all these multiplexers. last week I vibecoded a plugin that lets me open a line specific input box that sends the context of my code along with my prompt into my opencode session running on a seperate pane. its a game changer when it comes to moving faster.

excited to check back in on the progress as you work on it though! I think these kinds of tools are going to be much more relevant going forward as we all move to agentic workflows.

And what are you automating regarding your tmux sessions exactly actually? I use tmux daily, but I never feel the need to do any automation of managing my tmux panes.

Hehe. I am building a multi agent orchestration system of course ;) I believe this is the future, agents speaking to one each other. It's very dirty with tmux