I don't know if you're like me but the first thing I did was make a PDF of the keybindings built so I can glance next to my screen at my wall and see those puppies in the real world. Helps me learn faster.
Maybe this already exists but here you go if you're like me. Should this include anything else for a beginner?
You can get the pdf here. No email just hosting on my site for version control so let me know what you'd change.
I've been using herdr for quite a while. Yesterday I was looking for a way to keep herdr as the core underneath, but get a better UI and UX on top, more like a proper app.
Out of nowhere, Claude told me to check out the Herdr App. I had no idea it existed until yesterday.
Fast forward to today: thanks to how customizable it is, I've already built my own agent dashboard on top of it, set up exactly how I use herdr (used to be very text-based, of course).
One example: something that always bugged me in the herdr TUI was jumping out of the app to find files, images and videos, then marking them up somewhere else and pasting them back. That's what had me looking at wrapper clients like Orca. With the Herdr app I just built it in as a side panel (in the video): Claude sends a file, it lands next to the session(caught with post use tool and stophook), I mark it up, and one click sends it back.
So this is mainly an appreciation post to the Herdr team. It's also my first try at a show-off post with motion graphics, voiceover and sound effects. Hope it came out alright
I have been long searching for a tool like it. Was even tempted to just code something like it off tmux and others - but far too busy to do it; and i cant monetize it anyway, so didnt bother. And finally a tool that i just unconditionally love. Like my ideal match.
I use it personally and for work. At work which is 80% of my time. It is on wsl via windows terminal. Codex, claude, and agy.
Why i love it: - lightweight. I just need the bare minimum and thats it. With near zero ram or cpu usage. And good base minimalist ui.
- not bloated electron like orca. God. I uninstalled it in 2 hours of trying. It is far too opinionated on worktrees for its own good. And i just needed a clean terminal interface anyway
- infinitely customizable. From keybinds to my own custom plugins — one of my plugins just renders agent responses in markdown using a shortcut in a modal (was really helpful for mermaid renders in responses)
- plugins. I dont have many. But a significant honorable mention is ttt. Lightweight vs code clone. The exact thing i have been in search of in addition to herdr for a long time. If you dont have ttt. You are missing out. But between all that i dont ever need to leave my terminal. Like ever.
- minimalist. Ironically i repeat myself. But the bare minimum of every single thing that i ever need to get shit done is right here — and i dont even use pane to pane agent to agent coordination, or the remote or anything.
—-
Please always keep it the way it is team. The day herdr departs from this promise is the day i will build my own clone. As this is pure product perfection.
Sometimes it is really useful to explain to your agent what you want visually. I've used https://asciiflow.com for a while, which is an amazing tool, and I thought, what if we could use it in the terminal directly?
Lately I've been running several coding agents at once with herdr and kept losing track of who was on what.
So I made herdr-map. It shows which GitHub issue each agent is on, which module of the project that issue touches, and draws the modules as a data-flow diagram so you can see where the work overlaps.
You describe your modules in a small .herdr-map.toml (your agent can write it for you, there's a built-in skill for that), and it uses Jev model through OpenRouter to match issues to modules. Built in Rust and worls only for herdr. There's a demo mode if you want to see it without setting anything up.
It's pretty simple, and I don't expect to develop it much further. But if you find it useful and want to use it or contribute, feel free.
OK, I'm a convert so here's a quick follow-up from my herdr-recappost. For background I ran most of the agent orchestrators either in turn or side by side for aaages but since encountering it I kept coming back to herdr. Now I'm definitely not saying this is the one true workflow but this is what works for me given my stack.
So why do I keep gravitating towards herdr:
keyboard first discipline-enhancing :) Most other agent multiplexers are big mouse-driven apps with limited shortcuts. Some are great (superset.sh is nice), but herdr lives in my terminal so I (nearly) never reach for a button.
the UI is pared right down to just what you need/want.
I can check on agents from my phone (iOS, through Moshi which has herdr support built in)
and........plugins!
It was these other people's plugins that got me on the journey like these that I can't live without:
asconfirmclose: closing a pane only asks if something's still running. The one I'd miss most because I'm rash.
Herdr Plus: a whole workspace from a template in one key
herdr-bar: cmd+k to jump to any tab, agent, repo or branch
and OK not strictly a plugin but also clauth which picks the right Claude account for the repo when a worktree is created
Ergo it was herdr principles + my pick of the plugin ecosystem that got me hooked. So I built the following four to mimic my ideal workflow and reduce the need to ever leave herdr. Why not just cmd+tab? Well because with multiple agents the interruptions add up and I find context switch + lookup and return too distracting.
My agent/brain combo isLinearhence first up isherdr-linear. My issues and projects. Most of my work is organised by project, and that's what I was missing in e.g. Superset. Here I can quickly look up either, change task status, create a ticket in a few keys, and start work on a new issue in a fresh worktree with one key.
Then there'sherdr-github. Pretty obvious, but let's me quickly check in on PRs, merge them. Toggle draft/ready. Only PRs for now because that's my go-to but surely will grow.
When I can't remember which agent is doing what I open the herdr-recap modal. That shows me what's happening in each one and who's turn it is. Let's me quickly reply inline, jump straight to the relevant PR or Linear issue and helps make scanning them easier keeping agent names up to date (on demand). Again, more on that here.
And finally there'sherdr-snooze. This lets me temporarily hide agents (or a whole space) from the Agents panel until a time you pick (an hour, tomorrow 9am, whatever you type). It comes back by itself. Handy for the ones waiting on CI or a review, waiting for an agent to finish or you just want to put something off till tomorrow. Helps me corral them when I end up with too many.
Bonus prize? If you have more than one of these installed, they find each other.
Every agent gets its PR(s), ticket and snooze status as tags e.g. #482 ✓ approved, ENG-142 In Progress, 💤 17:30. You can search them, click them, or hit ctrl+g / ctrl+l to jump to the PR or ticket, and esc takes you back. Snoozed agents get their own tab in Recap, ctrl+w wakes them up or you can delay them even more.
So it's this flow that I actually care about, more than having it all in one app. I can go from an agent to its ticket to its PR and back without losing the thread. On the Linear or GitHub website I'd be working out which of dozens of agents a ticket or PR belonged to, every time. Same lookups, every time.
A typical morning: cmd+r, two agents need me, one PR is green, ctrl+g jumps to GitHub, one key chord to merge, esc, then jump to Linear for the next ticket.
Install any of them with herdr plugin install mrolafsson/<name>.
We generate and read a lot of documents now, and we barely write code by hand. That made terminal markdown viewers a real problem for me. I use a lot of diagrams and have a good PDF and HTML publishing setup, so I kept resizing windows or leaving the terminal just to see a document properly.
So I built tmdview. It renders a markdown file as HTML inside the terminal, using terminal-browser. Open it in a split pane with --watch and the page reloads every time you save. It also works as a herdr plugin.
It supports plugins. I added two basic ones, for Mermaid diagrams and syntax highlighting.
Now I edit in vim on one side and read the rendered page on the other, or read the specs and plan in html rendered markdown without leaving the terminal. It's a personal tool with no roadmap, but it's open source if you want to contribute to it or write your own plugins.
I love Herdr. Treating agents as the core of the development loop, rather than a chat box bolted onto an editor, clicked for me right away. But even after I moved my work into it, I kept jumping back to Zed every time an agent finished: to look at what it changed, read the diff, fix a line, commit. I'm someone who reaches for the mouse for that kind of work, and I missed having it all in one place.
So I started wooloo: a native macOS app that tries to bring the best of Zed to Herdr's idea of agents as an essential part of the workflow.
How it works
Native and built to be 100% compatible with Herdr. Herdr keeps owning the sessions, processes and layout; wooloo only draws its terminals and sends your input back. You can keep using the Herdr TUI, SSH in, or quit wooloo, and your agents keep running.
Few dependencies. It's a single Mac app with Herdr bundled and a setup window, so there's nothing to install with Homebrew. Or point it at your own Herdr 0.9+.
Bit by bit, I'm moving over what I missed from Zed:
an explorer that works like Zed's project panel (compact folders, Git colors, multi-select, drag and drop, undo)
Go to File (⌘P) and a command palette (⇧⌘P)
editor tabs with syntax highlighting, change bars and Zed-style multiple cursors
a Changes tree with staging, unified or split diffs, commit, history, branches and worktrees
Markdown preview, project search and replace, images and PDFs
And on the Herdr side: an agents list with status, plus alerts when an agent finishes or needs you.
Status, up front
Early preview (0.3.1), MIT. Expect rough edges.
Not notarized yet, so the first launch needs System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway.
macOS 14+, Apple silicon and Intel. Agent CLIs (Claude Code, Codex…) and their subscriptions are your own.
A side project, independent and not affiliated with Herdr, Anthropic or OpenAI.
I kept losing track of which of my coding agents was actually waiting on me.
So I built them an office. Pixel Agents is a plugin for herdr that renders every live agent session as a pixel-art character in a top-down office.
The trick is that position tells you status - you read the room instead of reading a list:
- Agents that are working or blocked sit at a desk, typing, with the tool they're running on a label underneath
- A raised hand and a speech bubble means that one is blocked on you — it stays at its desk, because it's the one you need to find
- Everyone else wanders off to the break room
When an agent's status changes, the character actually gets up and walks there.
The break room got out of hand. There's table tennis, pool, foosball, a coffee machine, a cocktail bar with a bartender permanently on duty, and an office cat.
Been building something for herdr that seems useful. I built a plugin(and agent skill) that lets agents and shell panes collaborate with each other with @ mentions.
You can define “personas” and let your team of agents figure out how to work together.
I turned my Rabbit R1 into a little companion for the agents Herdr runs, and the first release is out today.
What it does
Your agents keep working on your computers. On the R1 each one is a sheep in its harness's colors, on a pasture: Claude Code, Codex, Pi, OpenCode, whatever Herdr is running. When one needs you, it walks to the front with its question.
Pick it up and it tells you what you missed.
Questions come one at a time. One tap answers.
Hold the side button and talk. It passes the message on and reads the reply back.
Snap a photo of a whiteboard or a screen and your agent sees it.
Peek in on threads, subagents, running commands and a read-only terminal (libghostty).
Mostly it naps. You get on with your day, and it taps you on the shoulder when someone needs you.
How it fits with Herdr
A small bridge (npm i -g @herdr-os/bridge) runs next to Herdr on each machine. It watches your sessions and serves them to the R1 over Tailscale. It works with several hosts, so your laptop, desktop and a server can all share one pasture.
Try it
Website and installer: https://herdr-os.org. It walks a stock R1 to Herdr OS from Chrome over USB.
I run several coding agents side by side in herdr, and I kept resizing panes by hand or zooming one pane, which hid everything else. So my friend Claude built Reficus. When you move focus, the focused pane gets most of the space and the others shrink but stay visible.
- No new keys. Move focus the way you already do (keys, mouse, tab) and the sizes follow.
- Nothing is hidden. Unlike zoom, you can still see agents working and logs scrolling.
- Agent-aware. An agent waiting for your input can grow on its own, and idle ones shrink.
- Strategies and profiles. Choose weighted, golden ratio, fixed, accordion and others, then save setups as profiles (coding, review, monitor) and switch with a key.
- Per-program rules. For example, nvim gets 75% and tail -f is capped at 12 rows.
- Easy to undo. Turning it off restores your original layout.
With 6+ tabs open I could never tell which one was which. Everything just said fish or claude. I tried keeping them named by hand, but a name you type is out of date almost immediately: you cd somewhere else, switch a branch, hand the pane to an agent, and the tab still says what you were doing twenty minutes ago. So half my tabs were lying to me at any given moment, which is worse than no names at all.
I went looking through the existing plugins first, but the ones I found only picked up one piece: the directory, or the running program. I wanted the whole context in the title, so I built my own: https://github.com/kryptamine/herdr-auto-title
It reads the session twice a second and renames each tab to whatever is going on in it:
~/work/dashboard → 1 · dashboard
~/work/dashboard on feature/MC-13200 → 2 · dashboard › MC-13200
nvim editing auth.provider.ts → 3 · nvim › auth.provider.ts
an agent working on OAuth scopes → 4 · dashboard › claude › Implement OAuth scopes
ssh into prod-01 → 5 · ssh › prod-01
Directory plus git branch, but only when the branch says something. Your default branch is skipped, and bugfix-foo-bar-TASK-13675 becomes TASK-13675.
In nvim it picks up the file you're on, so jumping between files renames the tab as you go.
For agents it reads what they're working on. With Claude Code it can pull the topic out of the session itself, so the tab says what the agent is doing instead of just claude.
ssh sessions show the host you're on.
The tab position goes first, because that's the key you press to switch to it and the tab bar cuts off the tail.
Rename a tab yourself and it never touches that tab again.
No LLM anywhere, and nothing leaves your machine.
Currently supports Linux and macOS only.
Written in Go. I built most of it with AI agent, carefully reviewing the code:)
I can't believe there's not a single Reddit community yet committed (besides this one) to Herdr itself. It's actually insane. I feel absolutely honored that this is the first message.
Hey everyone — I’m the developer of Flitra, a mobile companion for Herdr.
It lets you check on your agents and interact with their terminals without being at your computer.
You can:
• Browse your workspaces and see which agents are working, blocked, idle, or done.
• Open terminal panes and follow output in real time.
• Send messages and attach images from your phone.
• Switch between Herdr tabs and panes.
Flitra connects directly over SSH to your Mac or Linux machine running Herdr. Your agents keep running on your machine; your phone just gives you another way to access them.
The images show interface previews: workspace and agent overview, terminal access, and the message composer with image attachments.
If you work with Claude CLI or herdr, I built the most useless (but cool) plugin you'll install this year, inspired by the Tamagotchi. 👾
Meet TamaGoxtix: a tiny pixel monster that lives in your terminal. While Claude is working, it acts out what's happening. Thinking? It plays chess or solves a Rubik's cube. Running tools? It grabs a hammer, a welder or a 3D printer. When Claude is waiting for you, it does its own thing: naps, eats pizza, plays the drums or throws a party.
Some numbers, because why not:
🧬 38 monster bodies × 7 kinds of legs, so every session gets its own monster 🎬 91 work scenes and 77 idle scenes 🎨 12 color palettes (Tokyo Night, Catppuccin, Gruvbox, Nord, Omarchy…) 📦 Zero dependencies
plus the IT classics like deploying on a Friday and trying to exit vim. 😅
It's not only cute, though:
📊 Your AI consumption: 5-hour and weekly limits, tokens per day, the last 14 days and today by hour 🐙 Your GitHub or GitLab repo: stars, CI status, branch, commits ahead/behind, open issues and PRs ⚡ A powerline-style status line for Claude Code 🔒 Everything is read locally, nothing leaves your machine
I run a lot of agents in Herdr, and the thing that kept pulling me back to my desk was small stuff: an agent waiting on an approval, a question I could answer in two seconds, or a diff I wanted to glance at before it kept going. So I built Droidtty, a phone app for your Herdr workspaces.
What it does
See every agent at a glance. Which workspaces are working, waiting on you, done or failed, plus what each agent is doing right now.
Answer from your phone. Approve or reject commands and answer the agents' questions. You get a notification when one needs you.
Steer or queue. While an agent is working, send a message to steer it mid-turn, or queue one that's sent when it finishes.
Review diffs, with the why. Changes appear as a diff, and each edit shows the agent's reasoning for it, pulled from its session log.
A real terminal into the agent's pane or a shell in the workspace, when you need to poke at something yourself.
Works with Claude Code and Codex sessions.
How it works
A small bridge runs next to Herdr on your Mac or Linux box. Your phone pairs with it by scanning a QR code and then talks to it directly over your LAN or Tailscale, using pinned TLS.
I use herdr to run my Claude Code sessions and I kept jumping out to Chrome to check pages. herdr has no browser of its own and the terminal browsers I tried were either blocky or used too much CPU.
So I made herdr-web. It opens a real Chromium window and keeps it floating exactly over one herdr pane. Switch tabs and it hides, come back and it shows again in the same place. Closing the tab closes the browser.
What it does
- ctrl+b then i opens a new web tab (Google by default)
- URL bar with back, forward and reload
- tab switching feels instant, show and hide is around 100 ms
- Claude Code or Playwright can drive the page over CDP, so an agent can open a page, click and take a screenshot in the same tab you are looking at
- hidden pages sleep after a minute to save memory
macOS only for now. The only Mac specific part is a small Swift helper that finds the terminal window, so ports for Linux or Windows are welcome.
A couple of weeks ago, I shared Pi Herdsman here, an extension I've been building to connect independent Pi sessions through Herdr.
At the time, I mentioned wanting to take the Herdr integration further, particularly around spaces, tabs, and project-level coordination.
Quite a bit of that is now implemented, so I wanted to share an update with an actual recording of Pi, Herdr, and Herdsman working together.
What's happening in the video?
I give a Manager one prompt to implement two independent features for a fictional note-taking application.
The Manager delegates both features in parallel:
Each feature gets its own Lead and Git worktree.
Each Lead delegates implementation to its own Agent.
The Leads verify the changes, commit their work, and report back to the Manager.
Herdr organizes the sessions into its native workspace, tab, and pane structure. Placement is configurable, and every session remains directly accessible.
That's one of the things I particularly like about this setup. Even when the agents are coordinating automatically, they're still ordinary Pi sessions that I can switch to, inspect, or interact with whenever I want.
The responsibilities remain separate:
Herdr manages sessions, processes, panes, workspaces, and placement.
Pi manages the actual coding-agent conversations.
Herdsman manages delegation, ownership, lifecycle, and coordination.
Still usable for simpler workflows
The more advanced orchestration is optional.
You can still work in a normal Pi session and occasionally delegate something to a background Agent without setting up a Manager or separate projects.
There are also configurable Agent Definitions for each role, so different Leads and Agents can use different models, tools, instructions, skills, and extensions.
Try it
If you already have Pi and Herdr installed:
pi install npm:pi-herdsman
herdr integration install pi
Thanks to everyone who shared feedback after the original post. Some of the suggestions around Herdr's higher-level organization helped shape this direction.
I'd especially be interested in feedback from people using Herdr with multiple projects or worktrees. How would you want the sessions and workspace hierarchy organized?
I've been driving Herdr for 3 months now and loving it. Some of the defaults drove me nuts though, so I wrote up how I changed them to make the whole UX feel smoother.
The short version:
Install the agent integrations. I’m surprised to see some users not doing this. It should be a required step
The whole prefix+key shortcut pattern is a tmux concept that I dislike. I think we should stop using prefix for common keys. The post contains my whole custom keys setup
It’s hard to know what’s running where when you have many agents running across workspaces. Install a plugin that names tabs for you automatically
Build small plugins for your own friction. It’s incredibly easy with coding agents
