I don't really get it either. I installed it to try it out, but I still don't understand why it's getting so much attention. I don't even use tmux. My window manager already gives me workspaces, splits, and tiling, so I don't need those features there. I also prefer focusing on a single project instead of juggling five at once. And I don't really care about notifications. I just switch back to the relevant workspace and check on things when I want to. So apart from the agent sidebar, I'm not seeing what problem it solves for me either.
you miss the multiplexer part. multiplexers are awesome if you have them on a persistent machine like a server you SSH into. To me herdr feels more like a modern alternative to tmux or zellij with the agent features being a nice add on.
I rebuild herdr from master every few days to gauge the direction it’s moving in.
What herdr gets right over zellij:
- Default keybinds don’t conflict with helix. Even the leader key mode in zellij keeps alt-bindings around. Herdr keeps things nicely tucked away.
- There’s beta support for the kitty image protocol. Three years on, we’re still waiting in zellij.
- Notifications get passed correctly through to the terminal.
As for herdr’s killer feature, agent status monitoring, there is apparently a zellij plugin.
Big win for zellij: the docs and code feel human. By contrast, herdr’s docs have all the tells of a vibe coded project. Not to say the maintainer hasn’t put care into it! But I’m getting burned out on LLM docs.
I started to use tmux-claude-session-manager (https://github.com/craftzdog/tmux-claude-session-manager) in tmux, to have a pop-up to see all active sessions. I don't have many in parallel, so usually I don't even need, but if I'm lost or forgot one, it's really helpful.
