helvesec/rmux

RMUX is a Rust rewrite of tmux, the long-running Unix tool that lets you keep terminal sessions alive in the background and switch between them. The author's stated goal is to support a new use case: running AI agents and other long-lived programs over SSH or locally, without losing their terminals, while also letting code inspect and drive those terminals. It is published under MIT or Apache 2.0 and is at version 0.2.0 as of May 2026. The project keeps tmux's command-line surface, with all 90 tmux-compatible commands implemented, so a tmux user can largely continue working the same way. What is new is a typed SDK in Rust that talks to the RMUX daemon over a local protocol, so a program can create sessions, send keystrokes, take snapshots of what is on screen, and wait for specific text to appear in a pane. There is also a widget for Ratatui, a Rust terminal UI library, which lets you embed a live RMUX pane inside another terminal UI. Unlike tmux, RMUX runs natively on Linux, macOS, and Windows. The Windows support uses Named Pipes and does not require WSL. Install is a one-line curl script on Linux and macOS, an iwr command on Windows PowerShell, or cargo install for Rust users. The SDK is added with cargo add rmux-sdk and cargo add ratatui-rmux. The README links to five example demos in a sibling repository: orchestrating multiple agents, broadcasting commands to many panes, a small Zellij-like multi-pane UI, mirroring a terminal to a browser, and driving Playwright browser tests from a terminal session. Internally the project is split into many crates: shared types, IPC protocol, OS helpers, the SDK, the Ratatui widget, plus support crates for PTY handling, sessions and layouts, and the Tokio daemon itself. The author notes that bugs are expected at this stage and asks users to file issues.