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Show HN: I made Niri-like terminal colm (cmux alternative)

Developer al3rez released colm, an MIT-licensed Linux terminal workspace manager for coding agents built as a fork of the Ghostty terminal, according to a Show HN post. colm adds a workspace sidebar, a niri-style horizontal column strip, a live column overview grid, SSH remote workspaces with tmux-backed persistence, and a JSON-RPC unix socket for scripting, and it integrates permission and plan prompts from agents including Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, and aider. The project requires Zig 0.15, GTK 4.16+, and libadwaita 1.5+, and runs on Wayland and X11.

read1 min views1 publishedSep 19, 2026
Show HN: I made Niri-like terminal colm (cmux alternative)
Image: source

The terminal for

  A Linux workspace manager for coding agents, built on
  [Ghostty](https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty).
  Workspaces live in a sidebar, terminals live in a horizontal column
  strip, and everything is scriptable over a JSON control socket.

FEATURES #

  • Workspace sidebar. Pin, mute, group, and drag-reorder workspaces. Each row shows task status, git branch, agent activity, and a live notification preview.
  • Column strip. Terminals tile horizontally like niri. Split, zoom, and jump between columns without leaving the keyboard.
  • Column overview. A native-style grid of live column thumbnails — search, click, or arrow-key to any tile in the active workspace.
  • Agent aware. Permission prompts, exit plans, and questions from Claude Code and friends surface as cards you can answer from the feed sidebar.
  • Remote workspaces. Attach whole workspaces to remote machines over SSH with tmux-backed persistence.
  • Scriptable. Every window, workspace, and pane is addressable over a JSON-RPC unix socket — create, focus, split, close, snapshot.
  • Ghostty core. GPU-accelerated rendering, fast startup, and the full Ghostty terminal engine underneath.
  • Open source. MIT licensed, like the Ghostty it stands on.

INSTALL #

git clone https://github.com/al3rez/colm
cd colm
zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast -p ~/.local/opt/colm

Requires Zig 0.15, GTK 4.16+, and libadwaita 1.5+.

FAQ #

How is this different from Ghostty?

colm is a fork focused on managing many agent sessions at once: a workspace sidebar, a niri-style column strip, live overviews, and an automation socket. The terminal underneath is unmodified Ghostty.

Which platforms?

Linux with GTK 4 and libadwaita. Wayland and X11 both work.

Which agents?

Anything that runs in a terminal. Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, aider — permission and plan prompts integrate with the feed when the agent supports it.

Is it free?

Yes. MIT licensed, no accounts, no telemetry.

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