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█▀▀██▀▀██▀▀█   a   t o w n   f o r   y o u r   a g e n t s

A terminal multiplexer built for AI coding agents. Like tmux, but every pane has its own tab strip, every tab shows whether its agent is idle / working / blocked / done, and you get a desktop notification the moment one finishes or needs you — one that says which agent and what it wants, and takes you to its tab when you click it.

The mental model: a pane is an agent's slot. The agent CLI, a shell in the same directory, the dev server — they're tabs behind one pane. Your screen layout maps to "which agents am I running", not "which windows are open".

The hierarchy is profile → workspaces → panes → tabs: a profile is a session, each workspace is its own pane layout switched instantly with everything kept alive, and a sidebar lists both — plus every agent running anywhere in the profile.

┌ 1:claude ✳ ×  2:zsh × + ───────┬ 1:claude ⚑ ● ×  2:lazygit × + ─┐
│                                │                                │
│  (claude working…)             │  (claude blocked on a          │
│                                │   permission prompt)           │
│                                │                                │
├────────────────────────────────┴────────────────────────────────┤
│ ⌂ main  ▣ code  ⎇ master  ✳ 1  ⚑ 1                     zsh  C-a │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Run

bun install
bun run start                      # start the mux (session "main"), or reattach
bun run start -- --session work    # a second session
bun link                           # optional: global `gt` command

Requires Bun ≥ 1.2 on macOS or Linux. All native pieces (PTY, terminal emulation, renderer) ship prebuilt — no toolchain needed.

Sessions run in a background daemon: plain gt starts one, prefix d detaches (everything keeps running), running gt again reattaches with the screen intact.

Keys

Prefix is Ctrl+A, tmux-style. The essentials:

Key	Action
| / -	split right / down
h j k l / arrows	focus pane by direction
T / n / p	new tab · next · previous
A	new tab running your agent ([general] agent, default claude --dangerously-skip-permissions)
w / a	fuzzy-find a workspace / an agent
C / N / P / z / 1–9	new workspace · next · previous · last one you were in · workspace N
s	profiles: switch, add, rename, delete
d / R / Q	detach · reload the TUI · quit every profile (asks)
?	the full list, merged with your config

Mouse works throughout: click a pane or tab to focus, drag the gap between panes to resize, drag a tab along its strip to sort it, drop a file to type its path. Full table, plus the finders and the sidebar: docs/guide.md.

What you get

• Per-pane tab strips. Tabs live inside each pane, not above it — so a pane is one unit of work with everything that job needs behind it.
• Agents found, not announced. The daemon walks each pane's process tree, so a claude sitting idle at its prompt is listed the moment it starts — no hooks, no setup. Every agent in the profile, across every workspace, each with a live line of what it is working on and a glyph that pulses while it thinks. Rows hold still — they sit where they sit, and shift+J/shift+K sorts them.
• Dev servers you can bounce from the sidebar. The same poll finds the next dev/vite/npm run dev/swift run in every tab of the profile and puts the buttons on the row of the workspace each one serves — two at most, and which pair answers "is my app up?" at a glance. While it serves: ↻ stops it and runs the same command again in the same shell, × stops it and leaves the tab at its prompt. While it is stopped: [▸] starts the last server that workspace had, in the directory it ran in. That memory is saved with the layout, so it survives a restart: a profile that comes back with nothing running is one keypress from serving again. No setup, and it works for servers you started yourself long before the sidebar noticed them.
• Zen mode. prefix m gives the focused pane the whole terminal — sidebar, status bar, tab strip, other panes all out of the way, with the pty resized to match. A toggle: the same key brings everything back, and so does the zen × chip in the top-right corner. While it is on it follows the focus, so jumping to another pane or workspace fills the screen with that one.
• Status you can trust. Explicit reports from Claude Code hooks (gt hooks setup) are authoritative; output heuristics are the fallback. blocked never comes from scraping spinner text.
• Notifications that take you there. Title, workspace, and the agent's own words; clicking one switches workspace, focuses the pane, selects the tab and raises the terminal. Nothing for the pane you are already looking at, and [notifications] events decides how much of an agent's narration counts as news — ["done", "blocked"] is only when it finished or wants you.
• A log you can read afterwards. Bounded and on by default: every status change with the signal that moved it, and every notification sent or dropped, with the reason. gt log --grep notify answers "what beeped at me just now", which nothing on screen can.
• Reload keeps your panes. The PTYs belong to the daemon, so prefix R rebuilds the UI from source and every shell and agent survives — a reload costs a repaint. Crashes and reboots fall back to a layout snapshot.
• Scriptable. Everything the UI can do is a JSON message over a Unix socket, and the gt CLI is just a client — so agents can drive the mux they live in (gt split -- claude, gt read-screen, gt notify).
• Config that applies on save. Keybinds, themes, gaps — watched and merged live, no restart.

How it differs from what's out there

vs. tmux / Zellij. They're general-purpose and agent-blind: a pane shows you text, not state, so you are the dashboard. ghosttown adds the agent model — per-tab status, the agent inbox, notifications — and keeps the tmux muscle memory. It is not yet a tmux replacement for everything: scrollback view and search are phase 2, and there's no session sharing.

vs. cmux, Muxy, agterm, Zentty (native macOS apps). Same layout ideas, but they're GUIs you install and live inside. ghosttown runs in the terminal you already have, over SSH, and detaches like tmux.

vs. herdr. The closest thing in spirit — terminal-native, Rust, socket API. The difference is the hierarchy: herdr is workspaces → tabs → panes (a tab contains panes); ghosttown is profile → workspaces → panes → tabs, so each pane carries its own tab strip.

vs. claude-squad / workmux. Those orchestrate agents across git worktrees on top of tmux — you get isolation, not a layout. ghosttown is the mux (worktree-per-agent is on the roadmap).

vs. openmux. Same stack (Bun + OpenTUI + libghostty-vt), and proof it ships; openmux is a general-purpose mux with master-stack tiling and no agent model.

Similar projects

• herdr — agent multiplexer in the terminal (Rust)
• cmux — Ghostty-based macOS terminal with vertical tabs for agents
• claude-squad — manages agents in isolated git worktrees over tmux
• openmux — Bun + libghostty-vt mux, master-stack layout
• tuidoscope · vanish · ykmx — other libghostty-vt muxes

More of the ecosystem: awesome-libghostty.

Development

bun run dev        # live reload: the TUI restarts on save, panes keep running
bun test           # unit tests (layout, VT queries, status engine, pty host)
bun run harness    # headless end-to-end: drives the real TUI in a PTY
bun run typecheck

Stack: Bun · @opentui/core + @opentui/solid (native Zig renderer, Solid runtime JSX) · libghostty-vt via ghostty-opentui · bun-pty · newline-JSON over Unix sockets.

Docs

• docs/guide.md — every key, config option, gt command, and how profiles, snapshots, notifications and the sidebar work
• PLAN.md — architecture, design principles, roadmap
• config.default.toml — the shipped defaults, documented inline

MIT.