I'm ditching tmux for herdr!

Hey gang, I have some news to share with

you. After about 10 years, I'm saying

goodbye to a close friend of mine. That

friend, of course,

is tmux. I'm sorry, was that a little

too dramatic?

>> [laughter]

>> But seriously, check this out. This is

Herder. Herder is a new terminal

multiplexer reimagined from the ground

up. It has all the amazing keybindings

and features that you would want in a

terminal multiplexer like tmux, but it

comes with one little twist. Okay, it's

actually a really big twist, and I'm

going to talk about it in this video.

So, let's get into Herder, gang.

>> Yes.

>> Now, before I get into all the

nitty-gritty details with Herder and the

setup that I have right here, which is

awesome, I want to show you something

really quick that I just learned. You

see, if you have a cursor agent and you

prepend a command with ampersand, it

actually moves that command to a cloud

agent. You don't know what that is?

Well,

let me tell you about this week's

sponsor, Cursor. Cursor's cloud agents

are amazing. You can kick off a cloud

agent like this, and it will start up a

new development environment in the cloud

that has all of its libraries, all of

its context, all of its development

information needed so I can work

independently. And the best part is that

your agent will continue to work without

your input. I can kick off this agent,

shut my laptop, go touch some grass.

I mean, who am I kidding? I'm probably

not touching grass, but needless to say,

the agent will keep working without my

input on its own. And one of the coolest

parts about Cursor's cloud agents is

that they return so much information. I

mean, they don't even just give you the

results of what they did, you actually

get back pictures and videos. I mean,

check this out. This is the initial

setup to my application, and the Cursor

agent actually built the app, ran it in

a local server on its dev environment,

and started taking a test on

typecraft.dev. How amazing is this? If

you want to learn more about Cursor and

cursor cloud agents, then check the link

in the description. It's pretty awesome.

Okay, let's get back to talking about

Herder. Now, Herder as a piece of

software is amazing. It is a terminal

multiplexer as I mentioned before, and

it was built from the ground up as I

mentioned before with Rust and I believe

someone also used Zed to build this

project, at least one of the developers,

and it has a Nix flake. Awesome, very

based. But, Herder is amazing. Now, the

installation of Herder is actually

pretty straightforward. There's

Homebrew, there's a Nix flake, which

again, very based, and there's a script

that we can use to install. The script

is probably the easiest, so let's go

ahead and use that. We can copy and

paste the script. It just pipes a

installation script into your shell, and

there you go, you're already installed.

So, Herder is installed and it's ready

to be run. We can just type Herder and

there we go. This is Herder. It is a

terminal multiplexer and it has amazing

features. Now, the cool thing about

Herder is that it has basically a

one-to-one implementation of almost all

of the Tmux things that you might be

used to if you're coming to it from

Tmux. This is something that I really

love about Herder, but it has a couple

of goodies that Tmux does not have,

except for maybe with some plugins. Now,

you'll see on the left-hand side here,

there's a little bit of a pane that

shows my spaces and my agents, but I'm

going to get to that in a little bit.

First, let's take a little tour through

Herder, some of its key bindings, and

just how it works day-to-day. The first

thing about Herder you might notice is

that when you press the leader key,

which is control B by default, just like

Tmux, you'll see a little bar pop up at

the bottom here. This gives you a little

bit of a preview of some of the key

bindings you can do and what Herder will

offer you. My favorite thing is if you

hit question mark, it opens up a

floating pane that shows you all of the

possible key bindings and what they do.

This is a great way to get started on a

new piece of software and Herder

implements this amazingly. There's a lot

of different ways you can navigate your

workspaces, your agents, which again,

we'll get to in a second, and all the

common uses that you would use for a

terminal multiplexer like tmux. And so

you might be asking yourself right now,

well, if it's just like tmux, can I get

all my tmux bindings from tmux into

herder? And the answer is, yes, you can.

For me, I actually already mapped my

leader to control S. That is a better,

more ergonomic way to hit the leader key

for me. And you can do all the things

that you would want from tmux in herder

when it comes to managing panes. And

another key binding I love is that I

found you can toggle this pane on the

left here if you don't want to see it

all the time. I bound it to leader P. So

you can toggle that pane on and off, no

problem. So you have like a little bit

of a zen mode going on here with herder.

Right? So we have our new pane over here

on the right. That's great. That's

control S percent. And control S and

double quote will make a new pane on the

bottom. I know these are kind of

esoteric and weird commands, but coming

from tmux, this is just ingrained in my

muscle memory. And it's nice to see that

herder can implement this really easily.

And speaking of configuration files, the

configuration file for herder is

actually really easy to read and manage.

It's built with Rust, so the

configuration file is a dot toml file.

If you're familiar with that format,

it's a pretty easy to read file format

for configuration. And herder provides a

lot of different configurations, and

they're all super straightforward. And

herder, on top of a great configuration,

offers a lot of color schemes. You can

actually choose your favorite color

scheme by using the theme name space in

your toml file, and setting the name

equal to whatever color scheme you might

want. They implement my favorite color

scheme, which is catpuccin. So I can

write this, I can quit, and then I can

just do herder server reload dash

config. Herder has a lot of great CLI

options. And there we go, I've reloaded

my config. It was already showing the

catpuccin theme, but if you're switching

themes, this would switch it for you.

And again, as I said before, if you hit

your prefix with a question mark, this

floating pane will show you all the

possible key combinations and key binds

you would use in your normal day-to-day

workflow. So, it's really easy to

discover the key bindings that you would

want to use when it comes to actually

using Hurder. But, hold on cowboy. If

you look at the homepage for Hurder, you

see that they mention coding agents

right off the gates. This is in the

first sentence. And that's because

Hurder treats coding agents like Claude,

Cursor, tons of other agents as

first-class citizens. And what does that

mean? Well, you see Hurder has by

default this pane on the left-hand side

of your screen here. You can see it. And

you can see down below I have an agents

pane. There's two groups, one for your

workspaces and one for your agents. Now,

it's really interesting because Hurder

does a lot with agents that I think a

lot of different programs don't do and

tmux certainly does not do. So, first of

all, I'm in my dotfiles repo. If I start

up Claude, I can see here at the bottom

I actually got a new agent in my

dotfiles workspace called Claude. You

see I have another one called Cursor

right above in my learn directory. And

there's a lot of cool things that Hurder

will do with agents that I think help

with your overall development if you're

using coding agents. Now, let me just

show this off really quick. I'm going to

tell Claude to

look over my Hurder config

and make suggestions.

I didn't type that right, but I'm sure

Claude will figure it out. Now, I can go

to a different pane. I can go to my

browser here and I can just wait.

Did you hear that? That was Hurder

telling me that my agent needed

something. So, I can go back, see that

my agent needs something. Well, actually

where is my [music] agent? I navigated

into a different pane here. I don't know

where my agent actually is. So, there's

a couple cool things you can do. Hurder

is mouse native, so if you are a mouse

user, which ew, by the way, but if

you're a mouse user, you can just click

on the agent and it goes right to that

agent in your workspace. But, if you

like using your keyboard, there's

actually a really, really great key

binding that I found. Leader G opens up

a fuzzy finding panel that will go

through all of your agents and your

workspaces. [music]

You can type slash and just start typing

something like Claude and that will

fuzzy find the agent that you're looking

for or the workspace itself. I can also

type slash.files and it'll go to my dot

files workspace and I have my pane one

and Claude right here. But the coolest

part about this floating window is it

gives you keybindings to allow you to

navigate your different agents based on

the current state. So if I know that one

of my agents is currently blocked, you

can see at the bottom right here there's

some letters and then it says the word

state afterwards. If my agent is blocked

and I just heard that sound go off, I

can type B and it will show me all of my

blocked agents. I can also type W for

working agents,

>> [music]

>> I for idle agents. My cursor agent here

is currently idle, D for done agents and

A for everything. That's amazing. This

is a super easy way to navigate not only

your workspaces, but your agents as

well. And this actually replaces

something in tmux that I always loved,

which was the session management. I

always had it under leader S and that

would pull up a pane very similar to

this one that allowed me to fuzzy find

all of my sessions and to also move up

and down. By the way, you can use J and

K in this pane here to go up and down

all of your panes, workspaces, and

agents. Navigating everything in Herder

is super simple with this pane. I love

it. Also, something really cool about

Herder and it works the same way in tmux

is that it runs on a server that runs on

your machine. So if you close Herder,

it's actually still running in the

background. So if you kick off an agent

and it's doing some work and you close

Herder, you haven't lost any work. Your

agent is still going. Let me show this

off really quick. Now I can go to my

Claude agent right here. I can just hit

yes or whatever, yes again, and then if

I close Herder by typing prefix Q, if I

look for the process of Claude,

I can see Claude is actually still

running right now. That's because Herder

is still running Claude even though I

closed the window that Herder was

running in. Now all I have to do is type

Herder again, it'll automatically attach

to where I just was and all of my work

is still here. The agent was still

running, it was still doing its thing,

nothing is lost. This is what I mean

when I say Herder treats agents as

first-class citizens. It works amazingly

with any coding agent you could think

of. As I mentioned before, Herder

supports a lot of agents. These are all

the agents that they currently support,

and I'm sure they're adding more all the

time. And along the lines of having

agents be first-class citizens in

Herder, Herder actually offers an agent

skill file. This enables your agents to

use Herder when it needs to open up new

panes or workspaces to run tests or

whatever it may be. It's super easy to

install. It's a simple NPX command. And

when you install this with NPX, it

actually asks which agents you're using,

so you can install the specific skills

for those agents. I already installed

everything I need, so I am going to

Actually, you know what? I'll install

OpenClaw. I don't use it, but I'm just

going to try it. And the installation is

super straightforward. We proceed, it

symlinks a skill file to wherever

OpenClaw looks for these skill files,

and you will be good to go. Next time

you use OpenClaw, you can tell it to

open a pane in Herder and do whatever it

needs to do. In fact, let me show this

off for CloudCode. I have CloudCode

running right now. I can just say, "Make

a new pane in Herder

to um write "Hello world." Now, Cursor

actually loads the Herder skill, and it

knows how to make a new pane in Herder.

And there we go. [music] It made a new

pane. Pretty sweet. If you can't tell,

I'm still a noob with coding agents. I'm

trying to learn, but it's been fun.

Now, let me explain probably my favorite

feature of Herder. This is available in

tmux as well, but it's just implemented

so well. Let me go over a little bit of

a scenario with you first. Let's say

you're one of these cool agentic

programmers. You're working on your

loops, your graphs, and your agentic

workflow, but you've got something to

do. Let's say your wife calls, and one

of the kids is sick. Now, normally you

can't leave your computer, your agent

needs you. If you shut it, that agent

turns off. But with Herder, you can

actually put all of your stuff on a

remote box. You can SSH into it, run

your Agendic workflow, and then you can

just leave whenever you want. So, if

your wife calls and one of the kids is

sick, you can finally be a responsible

father again, which is something that I

look forward to personally. Let me show

off how this works. Right now, I have a

droplet on Digital Ocean. I'm going to

copy this IP address. I'm going to tear

this down after this video, so don't

worry about it. And I'm going to quit

Herder. Now, I can SSH into this remote

box that has Herder already installed.

Now, all I have to do is type Herder

{dash} {dash} remote, my username at

this IP address. This will SSH into the

box and run Herder. Now, if Herder is

not already installed on this machine,

it will install it in this command right

here.

And there we go. It installed Herder,

and here I am. I'm actually on a remote

machine. And the coolest part is my

color schemes and my configuration are

being used from my local machine. So, I

can use my great leader key that I love,

which is control S. The color scheme is

Cappuccine, which I love. And everything

works the same [music] exact way that it

does on my local machine. So, I can use

Herder on a remote box. I can just have

my laptop be a thin client, and I can

use my Herder instances from wherever I

may be. This is a workflow that I

personally love, and I'm definitely

going to set up and start using in the

near-term future. So, stick around for

that, because that's going to be a fun

build. Either way though, now that I'm

SSHing into this machine, if I kick off

an agent, I can just get up and leave. I

can shut my laptop. I can turn it off.

It doesn't matter, because Herder is

running somewhere else. All I have to do

is SSH back into it at another time. And

finally, I can pick up my kids from

school again. They've had to walk home a

lot. Personally, I love Herder. It's

ergonomic. It makes sense to me, and it

works with Agendic workflows, which is

something that I'm trying to get into

myself. But Herder is huge. This is just

scratching the the

They have so many plugins built by the

community already. Herder is fairly new,

but look at all of these plugins.

There's Herder Navigator, Herder Command

Pallet, Smart Tab Rename. There are so

many plugins. The community is behind

Herder. It's a fantastic program, and

personally, I love it. I'm definitely

ditching tmux for Herder. As much as it

pains me to say that, this is just

implemented so well. I don't see any

other way. So, check out Herder. It's

awesome. Subscribe for more Linux, Vim,

and interesting videos on tech. And hey,

thanks, as always,

nerds.