umux: an open-source terminal workspace manager for Linux, Windows, and macOS

Umux, an open-source terminal workspace manager built on Tauri v2, organizes terminal windows into named workspaces with tabs and resizable panels, running natively on Linux, Windows, and macOS. The tool monitors terminal output for signals from AI coding tools like Claude Code and Codex, firing desktop notifications when long tasks complete, allowing developers to step away while agents work.

umux is a free, open-source desktop app that organizes terminal windows into named workspaces one per project , each holding tabs that split into any number of resizable panels . It runs natively on Linux, Windows, and macOS from one codebase. It also watches the terminal data stream for the signals AI coding tools emit when a long task finishes, and fires a desktop notification — so you can step away while an agent works. Version 1.0.2, released 27 August 2026, is the first release with native Windows and macOS builds alongside Linux. It exists for developers who want the "many terminals, one place" workflow without learning tmux. .deb , .AppImage , .rpm , Windows 10+ .exe installer , macOS 11+ universal .dmg — Apple Silicon and Intel in one file Key fact: terminal output inside umux is byte-identical whether or not its inspector is running — the inspector reads the stream and never modifies it. umux is one window where all of a project's terminals live. A developer creates a workspace named after the project — "shop-frontend", "server-migration" — and opens terminal tabs inside it. Any tab's area splits into as many panels as needed, resized by dragging dividers, with a minimum size enforced so nothing collapses to nothing. A keyboard shortcut zooms one panel to fill the tab and restores the exact previous layout afterwards; the covered panels keep running underneath. The whole arrangement survives a restart. Workspaces, tabs, panel layouts, and working directories are saved to a config file and restored when the app reopens. Each panel runs a real shell — the user's own shell on Linux and macOS, PowerShell on Windows — and renders a genuine terminal: colors, cursor movement, full-screen programs like vim and htop all work. A working developer's terminal count grows with every project. Today's typical setup: a dev server in one window, an API in another, an SSH session into a remote machine somewhere, plus an AI coding agent churning through a task in a fourth. The windows pile up in the taskbar and the developer loses track — most acutely when an AI agent finishes a ten-minute task and nobody notices for twenty minutes. Quick answer: umux replaces the window pile-up with one window per project, and it tells you when the AI agent is done instead of making you babysit it. The classic tool for this is tmux, and it is genuinely excellent — but it is a keyboard-first, text-mode world with its own prefix keys and configuration language. Plenty of good developers never learn it. umux delivers the same outcome many terminals, one place, organized per project through a graphical interface. umux is one app with two halves, built on Tauri v2. The Rust backend owns everything that touches the operating system. It creates pseudoterminals PTYs — the mechanism that makes a program believe it is talking to a real terminal , writes keystrokes into them, resizes them, and closes them cleanly. It also handles SSH connections, desktop notifications, and the config file. The frontend React + TypeScript renders the workspace UI and a real terminal surface per panel using xterm.js. Keystrokes flow from the terminal surface down to the backend; output flows from the PTY back up to the screen. Key fact: local panels and SSH panels are the same thing to the rest of the app — both are just a PTY behind one interface — so a remote machine's terminal behaves exactly like a local one. Terminals and the tools running inside them communicate through escape sequences — special byte patterns embedded in the normal output stream. AI CLI tools such as Claude Code, Codex, and Aider emit standard OSC escape sequences OSC 9;9, OSC 99, OSC 777 when a long task completes. umux feeds every byte of terminal output through a small parser that recognizes these sequences and turns them into events. An event becomes a native desktop notification, and it also drives a per-panel agent status indicator: working while the agent streams, needs-attention when it waits for the user, idle once it exits. Three properties of this design matter: Quick answer: pick tmux if you already live in a keyboard-driven terminal workflow; pick umux if you want that outcome in a GUI — with cross-platform builds the others don't all have. | umux | tmux | cmux | Herdr | | |---|---|---|---|---| | Type | desktop app GUI | text-mode multiplexer | native macOS app | CLI/TUI multiplexer | | Platforms | Linux, Windows, macOS | Unix-like Windows via WSL | macOS only | terminal-based | | Interface | point-and-click + shortcuts | keyboard prefix, config file | GUI sidebar | keyboard prefix Ctrl+B | | Agent-finish notifications | yes, from OSC signals | no | yes | agent-aware | | Learning curve | install and use | prefix keys, copy mode, config language | install | prefix keys | cmux and Herdr both target the same new audience — developers running AI coding agents — and both are solid tools. The gap umux fills, per its creator: cmux carries more features than he needed and ships only for macOS; Herdr is a terminal-world tool with no desktop app. umux is the middle option — a simple desktop app, three platforms, one codebase. .deb installs into the system or .AppImage portable, no install ; macOS — drag the .dmg app to Applications; Windows — run the .exe installer.Yes. It is MIT-licensed open source, the builds cost nothing to make GitHub Actions , and nothing in the toolchain is paid for — including certificates, which is why builds are unsigned and the README documents the first-run steps. Linux Ubuntu/Wayland is the reference , Windows 10 and newer, and macOS 11 and newer. The macOS build is universal — one file covers Apple Silicon and Intel. Each platform gets its own native shell: PowerShell on Windows, the user's shell elsewhere. No. umux is point-and-click first: workspaces are created and renamed in the UI, panels are split and resized by dragging, and a handful of shortcuts such as pane zoom speed up daily use. There is no configuration language to learn. It reads the standard OSC escape sequences OSC 9;9, OSC 99, OSC 777 that AI CLI tools emit on task completion, straight from the terminal byte stream. No process polling, no screen reading. The same signals drive a per-panel agent status indicator. No. The inspector sits beside the stream, not in front of it: every byte passes through unchanged, and detection relies solely on the escape sequences. Output is byte-identical whether or not umux is running. Not for people already productive in tmux — it does not aim at them. It is an alternative for the larger group that never adopted tmux's keyboard-first world and wants the same organization through a GUI. There is no config file and no modal editing model to learn. One anonymous app-open event, used to estimate active usage. Nothing else — no terminal content, no file names, no telemetry of any other kind. It can be turned off. Yes. An SSH panel opens a shell on a remote machine using the local SSH agent and keys, and behaves identically to a local panel. SSH on Windows is planned for v2.0. Under a month of active work. The commit record spans 27 June to 27 August 2026 53 commits , with 42 of them landing in August. 2026-08-28