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.
