A Development Environment with tmux as its backend.
TmuxDE (Tmux Development Environment) is a self-hosted DE built on top of tmux. tmux is the backend. It owns your sessions, windows, panes and every process running in them. TmuxDE is the IDE around it, in your browser, on a desktop or a phone.
- Features
- Why
- Who it is for
- Is this yet another slop?
- How it works
- Showcase
- Install guide
- macOS agent setup
- Development guide
- Credits
- Your full tmux workflow, themes and configuration in the browser and mobile.
- Connect remote machines through TmuxDE agents, each with its own tmux, files and Git.
- You can hide all UI and features and just use your tmux in the browser
- Files and git integration at the current focused pane / window / split.
- One command palette with Ctrl/Cmd+K: open views, sessions, windows, panes, tmux actions, appearance, snippets and recent commands.
- Find files with Ctrl/Cmd+P and search retained terminal history across all machines with Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+F, in the same palette.
- Optional speech to text at your tmux cursor.
- No phone home, ever.
- No telemetry, analytics or crash reporting.
- No update checks.
- No accounts, cloud services or external APIs.
- No CDN assets. Fonts, syntax highlighting and the editor ship in the bundle.
DISCLAIMER: Personal opinion
For good or, probably, for worse, coding agents changed the job. Most of the day is reading what a dozen processes produced across many repos and deciding what each does next. The traditional IDE was built for a different job and a different thought process. We also don't think that any of the "modern" and bloated new variants is a practical and usable answer to that problem.
tmux already runs the agents. It keeps them alive when the lid closes, it does not care whose agent sits in a pane, and it has been doing this on remote boxes long before any of this. The machine doing the work is not the one in your hands anymore anyway. What tmux never had is a way to see what all those panes did to the code. TmuxDE is that. Switch pane or cd and files, repo, branch and diff move with you. There is no workspace to set up and no state to lose.
TmuxDE is for people who were in tmux long before agents showed up and see no reason to leave now. Nerds, hackers, engineers who want the process, the shell and the diff in plain sight and distrust anything that hides them. It is a tool, not a product. The people who built it were going to use it every day either way, and that is the only roadmap it has.
Most of the code here is written by agents. What is not, these days...? That does not make it slop by default, and it does not make us any less engineers. Design, architecture, the security model and the process behind every change are ours.
This is also the most fun and the most stressful building software has been in years. A few people with a few agents in tmux panes ship what used to take a corporation, and they do it from a phone on a train if they want to. That is the workflow TmuxDE is built for. It is also the workflow it was built with.
flowchart LR
browser[Browser IDE] <--> server[TmuxDE server]
server <--> local[Local tmux]
agent[TmuxDE agent] <-->|Connects to server| server
agent <--> remote[Remote tmux]
server --> speech[Speech service, optional]
Same Go binary runs as server or agent. Server serves browser UI and manages local tmux. Agents connect remote machines, each with its own tmux, files and Git. One browser controls them all. Optional speech service turns dictation into text at your cursor.
Native tmuxde archives target Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD on amd64 and arm64, plus DragonFly BSD on amd64. Install guide covers platform setup. Bundled tmuxde-stt speech service and container images target Linux only.
TmuxDE is a fork of mtmux by Gagandeep Singh. We kept the web client and the message protocol. The Node relay became a Go server, and the CLI, pairing, hosted broker and accounts are gone.