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

Yes exactly. And it enables integration testing too. I hope it will foster the release of more cool TUIs.

Are there any guides on accomplishing this with Emacs? Perhaps something that might be useful for someone coming from Tmux?

I didn't know you could do this with Emacs

wupsy ! thanks, I just fixed it

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

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)

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

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

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

It’s a landing page.

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.

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

Not to mention those absolutely horrible scroll animations.

As someone new to this site, I understand wanting to keep the AI Slop at bay, but for some of us, it's been a boon to get our ideas into an actual working application. I have decades of IT/Network/Enterprise experience, but creating and writing a complex tool would have been well beyond my abilities or patience. I had a friend say that AI is a "scourge on the intellectually lazy" and I couldn't really refute that, but I had to add that it is a boon to a lazy intellectual, which I consider myself to be.

So?

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.

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?

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

Writing shell scripts to orchestrate things is not a particularly great experience. "Shell scripts are annoying to write compared to the programming languages we use for other things" isn't a universal opinion, but it's not exactly uncommon; I've heard plenty of people talk about switching to Python as soon as anything gets even moderately complex. (I often tend to go with the lines "my bar for when to switch to a real programming language is as soon as I have to write an if statement" and "the number of times I've had to write a for loop in bash is the same as the number of times I've had to google the syntax for a for loop in bash", which are only slight exaggerations). Having an actual library for interactions that isn't just a wrapper around the CLI seems like it would be a huge improvement for anything that isn't a one-off interaction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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