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

sshideneyu about 3 hours ago 49 commentsRead Article on github.com

HI version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

Author here. RMUX started from a frustration: I've used tmux for years and got tired of scraping output with grep and sleeps to automate anything. So I rebuilt the multiplexer from scratch in Rust, with a programmable layer on top.

Two surfaces: a tmux-compatible CLI (~90 commands, your keybindings just work), and a typed async Rust SDK on the same daemon — stable pane IDs, structured snapshots, locator-style waits. The idea is Playwright-style automation, but for terminals.

Native on Linux, macOS, Windows (real ConPTY, no WSL).

Demos and docs at rmux.io. Happy to answer questions about the daemon protocol, ConPTY, or the SDK design.

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

85% Positive

Analyzed from 1248 words in the discussion.

Discussion (49 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

btown•24 minutes ago

Very cool! I think the hype around “agents are so good that you never actually need to see the underlying commands they are running or interact with the terminal session that they’re running” misses out on a lot of very important use cases, particularly around long running processes that may be shared across multiple agents. This will be very cool to see how best practices evolve!

shideneyu•9 minutes ago

Same ! TUI are becoming more and more mainstream so there is a need for automated multiplexing , not used by humans but by programs (and agents)

pama•about 1 hour ago

Congrats on the launch. If emacs was unavailable and I needed tmux, I would try it. I am old school, and use emacs daemons for all shell multiplexing. The agents dont need explanations and know how to use emacsclient to create, read, or send inputs to named buffers that run the shells. Elisp is powerful, so manipulating windows is a breeze. Lots of people on tmux would benefit from this design though.

florianist•about 2 hours ago

The paragraph on the website inviting us to switch to rmux from tmux claims that tmux is programmed in C++. tmux is made in C.

shideneyu•about 2 hours ago

wupsy ! thanks, I just fixed it

kloud•about 1 hour ago

Cool project, I like the idea of having tmux-compatible CLI. I used Zellij to get better UX, but many agent tools integrate with tmux. This way agent tools can still integrate tmux as a defacto standard for programmatic interface while having better interface for users.

But I wonder if tmux/rmux design is suboptimal since it couples session persistence and window management together. Do you have an opinion the design which separates the responsibilities? An example that pioneered this approach is abduco, and libghostty-based zmx being a modern implementation.

shideneyu•39 minutes ago

I thought I was too zealous because I created 11 crates respecting single responsibility principles.. I would have been all in to risk it further and separating responsibilities for session and window management but it would have diverged too much from tmux. I wanted a 1-1 port for now

kloud•9 minutes ago

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

Sirental•about 3 hours ago

The website is a little too obviously made by Claude. The first thing I noticed is the classic "pill with pulsing green dot that says something is active or live" claudism.

ookblah•about 1 hour ago

"site made by ai" is the new "bootstrap template" criticism that honestly gets tiring after a while. just read the content.

shideneyu•about 3 hours ago

The video of the front page is assisted by AI, I am not a vfx artist; please check rmux code architecture instead, I put a lot of efforts on it

redrove•about 3 hours ago

I’m genuinely interested in what you find to be the problem with that?

It’s a landing page.

cultofmetatron•about 2 hours ago

commonlisp (sbcl) is one of the best sleeper techs out there. one of those if you're in the know type industry secrets. part of it is because their website looks like something out of the 90's. clearly having a nice website and some level of marketing is necessary to get adoption. Im more than happy to see devs use AI to automate that so they have more time to focus on their creations.

alcasa•about 2 hours ago

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.

Oras•about 2 hours ago

and why this is a problem? I found the landing page covering exactly what the product does, with nice demos and examples.

stefanfisk•about 2 hours ago

Not to mention those absolutely horrible scroll animations.

shideneyu•about 2 hours ago

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

jarym•about 2 hours ago

So?

shideneyu•about 2 hours ago

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

FergusArgyll•about 1 hour ago

I like it

notorandit•about 1 hour ago

Scriptable terminal multiplexer?

Interesting portable scripting thingy. But it would only work with portable tools, not just everything. Especially with Windows tools.

shideneyu•about 1 hour ago

I wrote it for rust apps in mind, same usecase as for Ratatui. You’re right maybe I need to expose more tools with the cli

0x1ceb00da•about 1 hour ago

Getting this error when installing from git bash:

$ curl -fsSL https://rmux.io/install.sh | sh rmux install: unsupported OS: MINGW64_NT-10.0-26200

cultofmetatron•about 3 hours ago

a week ago I was using cmux but its osx only and doen't work on remote terminals. then I switched to herdr which is great so far except its not s great at managing panes. I can't move them around or change ordering. now another terminal multiplexer. I'm getting whiplash.

all that said, none of the existing solutions are perfect and rust codebases are nice. how easy is it to reorder panes? is there a cli that lets me control the panel layout via a skill file and allow my opencode session to target and send data to other panes?

qudat•about 1 hour ago

I built https://zmx.sh to make it easier to interact with your terminal sessions programmatically. 1 window = 1 session which might feel like a negative but it makes programmatic access easy and agents can use it just by pointing it at the zmx help command. Basically, an agent just needs 2 commands (run and write) for full control and the commands are synchronous so you don’t need to do any polling.

Oras•about 2 hours ago

I started using cmux a month ago and it had made my life a lot easier. Finally I have a pane with all my projects open all the time, I can switch between them, have multiple terminals for each one.

What do you mean by remote terminals?

cultofmetatron•about 2 hours ago

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.

lawrencechen•about 1 hour ago

I'm one of the creators of cmux. I'm moving a lot of my own dev work to Mac Minis, so I'm starting to feel quite a lot of the pain you mentioned... will try to make this better!

shideneyu•about 2 hours ago

no skill file, you get the same 90 commands of tmux. and if you build a rust app you can have many more cool stuff like "wait for" some text to appear, asyncly

cultofmetatron•about 2 hours ago

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.

shideneyu•about 2 hours ago

ok will check it out then ! Thank you, putting it on my todo list

cat-whisperer•about 1 hour ago

I used to use ghostty's applescript and built that into a claude skill. It worked like a charm. But this feels super interesting for programmability

yes_but_no•41 minutes ago

Floating panes seems not possible, or are they?

shideneyu•38 minutes ago

Not part of the current version, it’s on my roadmap :)

luizfwolf•about 3 hours ago

I found the project quite interesting but what's the advantage over just using tmux with a hotkey to send keys?

shideneyu•about 2 hours ago

windows support, and the sdk. native async "wait until" something appears on your terminal, so you don't spam send-keys

kosolam•about 3 hours ago

Hey, I automate tmux all the time with send keys and capture.. how is your project improves vs tmux or zellij?

shideneyu•about 2 hours ago

rmux is much faster than tmux or zellj, I did some internal benchmark and it's promising. rmux is a multiplexer engine, meaning that you can rewrite entirely zellij using rmux.. I created a mini zellij in a few hundred lines of rust. You can check the demoes on the repo

kosolam•about 2 hours ago

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?

shideneyu•about 2 hours ago

As of today you can replace tmux by rmux. Its behavior should be 1-1 iso; tmux is more stable though, it has been battle tested with a dozen of years of edge cases refinement. rmux is a faster and more elegant clone of tmux + windows support + programmable sdk

Galanwe•about 2 hours ago

I don't get it as well, everything mentioned in the readme is already trivially possible with tmux or zellij

shideneyu•about 2 hours ago

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

noodletheworld•about 3 hours ago

I mean, the obvious immediate answer is “windows”, which tmux flat out doesn't support (except via WSL and a shared mount).

small_model•about 3 hours ago

Never had the need to do playwright automation for tmux, so not sure why I would use this above tmux which works well.

shideneyu•about 3 hours ago

with rmux you can finally do acceptance/integration tests on your terminal user interfaces. tmux is made for humans, rmux is made for both humans and machines

DeathArrow•about 1 hour ago

1. ask Claude to rewrite X in Rust

2. ask Claude to make a website and claim R is better than X because it's Rust

3. advertise on HN, X and Reddit

4. ???

5. profit!

miroljub•about 1 hour ago

If the tokens are already burned, it's better for the environment to share the result for everyone to use it.

elromulous•about 2 hours ago

Can someone describe the pros/cons vs zellij?

shideneyu•about 2 hours ago

You can rewrite Zellij entirely with rmux , that's the main difference. I put a demo on the repo. Because rmux is an engine. I wrote it to be the multiplexer of multiplexers