Thurbox

• Several coding agents at once, side by side in one terminal — Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, opencode, aider, or any CLI you describe yourself.
• A persistent multiplexer session behind every agent — they survive crashes, restarts and reboots, so quit thurbox and every agent keeps working.
• Agents on other machines too — sessions on a remote host over SSH, or in a WSL distro, sit in the same list under their own host, beside the ones running here.
• One session, several repos — put any of them on its own git worktree of a shared branch, so agents never fight over your checkout.
• Agent-neutral — thurbox launches the vendor CLI unmodified and knows nothing about its model, prompts or tools, so new agent features arrive the day that CLI ships them.
• An interface that is not compiled in — every pane, the session list included, is a Lua file in a directory you own; move it, turn it off, rewrite it, or install one somebody else wrote.

Installation

Linux / macOS:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Thurbeen/thurbox/main/scripts/install.sh | sh

Windows (PowerShell):

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Thurbeen/thurbox/main/scripts/install.ps1 | iex

That installs both binaries — thurbox (the TUI) and thurbox-cli (the headless one) — with checksum verification and platform auto-detection.

You also need tmux ≥ 3.2 (or psmux ≥ 3.3.7 on native Windows), git, and at least one coding-agent CLI. RMUX ≥ 0.10.0 is an opt-in alternative, tested with thurbox on Linux. Install it separately, then select RMUX after tmux in the new-session picker (Ctrl+N); it appears locally when rmux is on PATH. See multiplexer requirements and setup for verified versions, config defaults, host support, and limits.

Nix / NixOS:

nix run github:Thurbeen/thurbox                # try it
nix profile install github:Thurbeen/thurbox    # install it

On NixOS, add github:Thurbeen/thurbox as a flake input and import thurbox.nixosModules.default with programs.thurbox.enable = true;. The Installation page has the full snippet, the overlay and the Home Manager module.

Homebrew, the AUR, winget, Chocolatey, building from source, pinning a version and changing the install directory are all on the Installation page.

Uninstall: removing the binaries is not enough — sessions keep running in the selected multiplexer, and thurbox wires hooks and a skill into your coding agents' own directories. Follow the uninstall steps.

Your first session

thurbox

First launch seeds ~/.config/thurbox/ — the agents thurbox knows, the themes, and the interface itself — then draws a session list on the left and an agent terminal on the right.

1. Ctrl+N opens the repo picker. Space toggles a repo, w puts it in worktree mode (you are asked for a base branch and a new branch name), Enter confirms. Name the session, then pick an agent.
2. Talk to it. The right pane is a live agent CLI; every key goes to it.
3. Ctrl+N again for a second agent on a second branch. Ctrl+J / Ctrl+K move between sessions — the one you are not looking at keeps working.
4. Ctrl+Q leaves the TUI without killing anything. Run thurbox again and both agents are still mid-task, or attach raw with tmux -L thurbox attach.

That is the whole product in four steps: parallel work that keeps going when you stop watching it.

F1 lists every key and is rendered from the live registry, so it cannot drift from what is running; Ctrl+P is a command palette over the same actions. For the same walkthrough with screenshots, see the tutorial.

What else it does

• Global search (Ctrl+/) — find a session by name, agent, branch or repo, and by the text on its screen, which is the half that finds it by the error in it.
• Fork and lead/worker trees (Ctrl+F) — branch a conversation; children nest under their lead.
• Worktrees and multi-repo sessions — one session can span several repos, each on its own worktree of a shared branch. Ctrl+S syncs them with their base.
• Remote SSH and WSL sessions — declare hosts in hosts.toml and sessions run there while the TUI stays local.
• A headless CLI — thurbox-cli creates, drives, captures and tears down sessions from a script, over the same database the TUI is reading.
• Automations and tasks — scheduled agent runs and a todo list whose items can be handed to an agent. A tmux heartbeat fires them whether or not thurbox is open.
• Inter-session messages — an agent-neutral mailbox so one agent hands another a payload instead of scraping its terminal.
• Extensions — opt-in add-ons that are data, not code: a manifest declares the agents, files, sessions and automations it wants, and one command installs and self-heals them.
• Session lifecycle hooks, OS notifications, 36 themes (Ctrl+Y) and full mouse support.

Wiring a fleet of agents at once — operators, developers, reviewers, from one script — is the monorepo recipe.

Make it yours

The binary boots a kernel, reads a directory, and draws whatever Lua it finds there. Panes live in ui/plugins/*.lua, the arrangement in ui/layout.lua, and F10 reloads both from disk. Agents, hosts, hooks, themes, chords and settings are each a file under ~/.config/thurbox/.

You do not have to learn Lua for any of it. Thurbox ships a built-in ui-skill extension that teaches whichever CLI you run how the interface is put together, so from inside any session you can just ask:

Add a pane on the left with CPU and RAM usage. Move the search strip to the bottom and make the session column 30% wide.

Press F10 and the change is on your screen. If a pane breaks, Ctrl+, then ] is chrome rather than a pane, so it cannot be edited away — r restores a shipped file, space turns yours off.

The Interface → · Writing a pane → · Configuration →

Plugins → — official and community panes, extensions and other add-ons, with install commands and submission details.

Documentation

thurbox.thurbeen.eu/docs is the manual: installation, tutorial, features, keybindings, configuration, agents, the interface, orchestration, architecture, a comparison with similar tools and an FAQ.

The rationale behind the decisions is in this repository, under docs/: CONSTITUTION (non-negotiable principles), ARCHITECTURE, FEATURES, CONFIG, KERNEL, PLUGINS, ORCHESTRATION, DEVELOPMENT and RELEASING.

Contributing

CONTRIBUTING.md is the full guide — the Nix dev shell, the just tasks, the test discipline, and the conventional-commit rules that decide what gets released.

git clone https://github.com/Thurbeen/thurbox.git
cd thurbox
nix develop          # or ./scripts/install-dev-tools.sh
just build && just test && just lint

Community

• Discord — questions, setup help, and showing off your interface. Ask in #help, one thread per problem.
• GitHub Issues — confirmed bugs and concrete feature requests.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Built on ratatui, tui-term, vt100 and tmux.