Herdr launches a desktop app that keeps your terminals running after you close the window
Herdr has released native app
Herdr is a new desktop app for terminals and coding agents, built around spaces, tabs, and panes. An agents sidebar shows which workers are working, blocked, done, or idle, and closing the window leaves terminals running in a separate core. It supports SSH machines, JavaScript mods, custom layouts, and a CLI for agents. Installers are available for Linux, macOS, and Windows.
The window arranges terminals. The core runs them. Closing the window leaves them running; closing a pane or tab ends its terminals.
- flippant
I switched to herdr this year after a decade of using tmux, and I haven't looked back since. Herdr is wonderful, not only because of the coding agent integrations, but also because it uses libghostty under the hood. So no terminal-emulator-inside-another-terminal-emulator shenanigans.
If you prefer GUIs, I can recommend herdr-gpui which connects to a herdr daemon. It has a bunch of goodies like remote phone pairing, and a built-in browser integration to send screenshots and notes to coding agents.
- shepherdjerred
Really happy to see this!
herdr is by far the most polished tool in its category. Software geared towards agents is usually vibe coded -- and you can tell. There will be bugs and edge cases and it feels like no thought/care was put into it.
herdr doesn't feel that way to me. The marketing/landing page definitely has LLM-isms, but the application itself is very stable and well thought out.
A true UI is the next logical step and they seem to have done the obvious things. The one surprising bit that nobody seems to be talking about (yet) is the entire UI looks like its controlled via "recipes", so you can customize the UI in ways that you couldn't with traditional software: https://herdr.dev/layouts/
I hope this means an official mobile app is on the horizon!
- ajvs
I've been using Orca for this as it's the most popular on GitHub and seems to have more features. Is there anything notable that this offers over it?
- withinrafael
Anyone using this or similar with self-hosted models/engines (not on local machine)? Didn't immediately see anything about that anywhere in the documentation.
- athrowaway3z
Having used herdr since its release, the recent 'Emacs is 50' made me decide to go back to it and just vibecode herdr features i use into an emacs package.
It works great so far. I can just ask it to update its layout whenever i think something better is possible. I wont be going back, but the one thing that might change that is a mobile app.
- dang
Related:
Herdr Studio - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49652188 - Sept 2026 (20 comments)
Connecting the machines - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49612818 - Sept 2026 (35 comments)
Herdr now connects to multiple servers with a single client - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49602323 - Sept 2026 (3 comments)
Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49201003 - Aug 2026 (189 comments)
Herdr: One terminal to rule them all - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48756578 - July 2026 (178 comments)
Herdr: Agent multiplexer that lives in your terminal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48714802 - June 2026 (110 comments)
- indemnity
In this vein I’ve started using Tern (https://stencil.so/tern), but it’s closed beta, from the creator of Oh My Pi.
This space seems to be heating up, everyone wanting to build the single pane of glass for agentic work.
- cedws
I've been building something similar except it uses iroh for P2P instead of SSH. Would really like to use this but I don't want to use SSH.
edit: nevermind I see it presents a console rather than wrapping the agent with a native GUI. This won't work well on high latency connections.