Herdr Gets a Desktop App: AI Terminals Finally Don't Have to Open a Host Terminal First

Herdr has released a desktop app. In a tweet, Laogui made a bold claim: it kills the AI terminal competition. That claim is debatable, but the user experience he lists is very concrete.

First, some background. What developers call a terminal is the window where you type commands; a TUI is a text interface that runs inside a terminal; an AI agent is a program that can execute tasks automatically. Herdr wants to put multiple agent sessions into a single workbench.

Laogui rounds up the terminals he has used over the past six months: Otty is half-dead and slow to iterate; Rex is still early and somewhat disappointing; Tern only supports its own OMP well and is heavy overall; Orca is terminal-based but even heavier in form; Luvus, like early Herdr, is a TUI, so you have to open a host terminal first every time. Now that Herdr has a standalone desktop app, it is click-and-use, removing one layer of friction.

There are currently four areas where its integration with agents feels especially smooth.

Agent hires agent: through the underlying hc, Claude Code can spin up Codex in the background to review or run tests, and the results are sent directly back to the main input stream, eliminating manual copying across windows.

Precise state awareness: based on the open OSC 7501 protocol, Herdr does not modify your Agent Hooks files. The sidebar accurately highlights tasks awaiting confirmation, saving you from constantly switching tabs. OSC 7501 can be thought of as an agreed-upon status channel between the terminal and the client.

Daemon and cross-machine aggregation: it runs on herdr-core underneath. Whether you close the GUI window or connect to a remote server via SSH, sessions remain persistent and are managed together in the same sidebar.

Natural-language UI refactoring: layouts and plugins are all plaintext files under ~/.config/herdr-app, and it ships with AGENTS.md. Through direct conversation, you can have an agent rewrite the client interface in real time.

The official website is herdr.dev.

In the replies, JinJieBeWater made a personal preset for the Herdr app. He admits that at first the default UI had a bunch of bugs and was disappointing; after studying it carefully, he found that the core is a completely free-form GPUI layout engine. He borrowed T3 Code's interaction design, with the idea of focusing only on content that truly needs you. The presets are already available: full version, layout only. The original tweet is here.

Laogui saw it and said he liked it a lot, but pointed out that the in-progress task design in the bottom-right corner of T3 is not in a fixed position. Once the task list exceeds one screen, it gets pushed off-screen, and he often forgets there are still tasks in progress, so he turned this feature off. This detail says more about the problem with terminal tools than a feature list does: once status reminders are unstable, attention slips through the cracks.

Some commenters also mentioned that they switched from tmux to Herdr TUI and Orca, and now use Herdr GUI; someone else treats it as an AI tmux, leaving it running persistently on a remote Mac mini. Terminal tools turn over every six months, and the one that remains is usually the one that feels most handy. Herdr's desktop app fixes one layer of friction first; the rest will depend on multi-session handling, context management, and stability.