Show HN: Waffle – Native macOS terminal that auto-tiles sessions into a grid

oolleeolleeollee 2 days ago 19 commentsRead Article on waffle.baby

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Hi HN. I built Waffle because I kept ending up with 15 terminal windows scattered across three spaces with no idea what was running where.

Splitting/merging in iTerm kind of works but it never felt intuitive to me.

With that in mind, I built something to suit my workflow:

Waffle is a native macOS terminal (Built on Miguel de Icaza's SwiftTerm) that tiles your sessions into an auto-scaling grid automatically. 1 session is fullscreen, 2 is side by side, 4 is 2x2, 9 is 3x3. Open a terminal, it joins the grid. Close one, the grid rebalances. No splitting, no config.

I've been using it a lot recently and one thing I've found really useful is that sessions detect which repo they're in and group accordingly. Each project gets a distinct colour. Cmd+[ and Cmd+] flip between groups. If you have three repos open across eight terminals, you can filter to just one project's sessions instantly. Also, no accidentally closing a window with CMD-W as it gives you a confirmation and requires a second CMD-W to close.

Honestly, if you live in tmux, this probably isn't for you but it's really helped to speed up my workflow.

Other things: It comes with a handful of themes (and has support for iTerm themes), bundled JetBrains mono, has keyboard shortcuts for everything. Free, no account, opt-in analytics only. macOS 14+.

There's a demo on the landing page if you want to see it in action.

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

100% Positive

Analyzed from 347 words in the discussion.

Discussion (19 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

yeonsh•about 3 hours ago

Great tool — the auto-tiling grid and repo-based grouping are exactly what I've wanted. As smcleod mentioned, publishing the source would go a long way. A terminal has access to files, environment variables, and credentials by nature, so open source is often a prerequisite for adoption in developer workflows. Even a read-only mirror would help. Thanks for building and sharing this!

smcleod•1 day ago

I like the tiling concept but I don't see the source code linked, is this closed source? There's no way I'd run a terminal that didn't have publicly inspectable source, there's just too much that could go wrong.

olleeolleeollee•about 13 hours ago

Fair! I certainly could publish the source. It’s more or less just a wrapper for Miguel de Icaza‘s SwiftTerm:

https://github.com/migueldeicaza/SwiftTerm

SeriousM•about 13 hours ago

I'm on Windows and I would love to see such a easy solution for the windows terminal.

olleeolleeollee•about 13 hours ago

This is just something to scratch my own itch, I’m afraid, so no plans to build for any other platforms sorry!

LimeLimestone•1 day ago

omg, the DMG weighs 3MB and the installed app is only 9MB. Amazing

olleeolleeollee•about 13 hours ago

Thanks for noticing

olleeolleeollee•about 10 hours ago

Emoji got stomped, so ;-)

replwoacause•1 day ago

Looks really nice! Super clean site too. How did you make the animation at the top?

olleeolleeollee•1 day ago

Thanks! Glad you like! The logo animation is an SVG with CSS keyframe animations.

jamesgresql•1 day ago

This is great, no more lost terminal screens!

olleeolleeollee•1 day ago

Thanks! Let me know if there’s anything I can do to make it more useful. I thought in the next update I’d work on custom key bindings but if there’s anything more glaring, I’d love to hear it.

Yizen•1 day ago

Tried it, lean and elegant, amazing tool ! I like the "omarchy/wayland" auto focus of the tab when moving the mouse over, saves a click, this could be added as an option.

olleeolleeollee•about 9 hours ago

Thanks for giving it a shot! We do track hover state already but it's just visual right now — not wired up to actually focus the terminal. Focus-follows-mouse is a great idea though, should be easy enough to add in. Will explore.

Yizen•about 1 hour ago

Thanks ! Another nice to have would be window reordering, but so far, really enjoying it as-is :)

billylo•1 day ago

love this. thanks for sharing!

olleeolleeollee•1 day ago

Thank you! Give me a shout if there’s anything I can add or change that would make it more useful for you.

throwaway290•1 day ago

> Honestly, if you live in tmux, this probably isn't for you but it's really helped to speed up my workflow.

Fresh honesty, nice.

olleeolleeollee•1 day ago

Haha, I mean ever since launching this I’m learning of a zillion alternatives I should have probably tried earlier but for me the auto tiling is really the main thing and, as far as I can see, no other alternatives really do that for some reason? Maybe there’s a good reason but it suits my workflow anyway