Dev who gave HashiCorp its name returns with a faster terminal multiplexer

HashiCorp cofounder Mitchell Hashimoto has launched a new startup to build a server-side terminal multiplexer that allows programmers to switch between multiple persistent work sessions. Superlogical promises its terminal multiplexer will be faster and keep better track of user jobs. And it could be instrumental to building …

[JessicaRabbit]

I'll stick with tmux, thanks. I'd take ISC and slow over corporate and fast any day.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, 7 tmux sessions open each with multiple panes and applications running live updates in the panes - next to zero resource usage.

[Kurgan]

NOO!!! You don't understand!!!

This needs a GPU (which is super expensive), is made for agentic AI (which is expensive and useless), and has this thing that state is maintaned on the server and somehow sent to the client, like, you know, IBM 5250 terminals from 1977.

We are well over the "reinventing the wheel" phase. We are reinventing a square wheel made of stone, to be used in a boat instead of on a road. Expensive, proprietary, utterly complex, and totally not needed because cheap, free solutions already exist, which are screen, tmux, mosh, and tssh.

But we need it for agentic AI. We absolutely need it. (not)

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

But it doesn't use a blockchain?

[J.G.Harston]

<jazz hands> BLOCK CHAIN! </jazz hands>

[CrazyOldCatMan]

But it doesn't use a blockchain?

Of course not! That's so 2025 and all the vulture capitalists are not interested in last years buzzwords!

How do you expect him to extract maximum cash from the credulous angel investors using last years buzzwords?

[Henry Wertz 1]

I mean really...

I can get screen up to using significant cpui usage if i dump 100s of MB ro it. But how much of a problem is this really? Best of luck to them but to me this looks like a solution in search of a problem.

[Clausewitz4.1]

Re: I mean really...

Neither tmux nor screen were made to dump 100’s MB through it. If that’s the case, you likely missed a redirection to a file/fifo/devnull or something else

[bazza]

Re: I mean really...

Indeed, 100's of MB on something that was intended to be read by a human, or written into by a human, sounds like requirements creep!

So, like the OP, I'm a little lost on the "why?" of this...

[david 12]

Re: I mean really...

eed, 100's of MB on something that was intended to be read by a human, or written into by a human,

Correct. Target application is agents.

[Flocke Kroes]

Re: Target application is agents

Because agents are too stupid to pick a sensible tool out of the box for bulk transfers?

[Richard 12]

Re: I mean really...

Agents can't do that either, give them that much context and they hallucinate that the sky is green and the grass is pink.

[TimMaher]

Re: “grass is pink”

Ours is currently light brown and mostly dead.

Weather——>

Sigh…

[CrazyOldCatMan]

Re: “grass is pink”

Ours is currently light brown and mostly dead

ObPedant: Only the bit above the surface is dead (mostly). The roots actually go quite deep and survive for a surprisingly long time..

Bit of rain, it'll all be green again. Just in time for the next baking.

[cdegroot]

Im so happy that they finally built a fast terminal emulgator. I mean, the leisurely pace of mere hundreds to thousands of lines per second scrolling over my monitor was getting to me.

Not.

Oh well, kid is rich, he can have fun.

[Jamie Jones]

As well as agreeing with the above comments, I don't want a terminal emulator to render characters locally that haven't been processed by the server. I remember battling with old dumb terminals that did that, it was a nightmare.

Also, I recently hit the 100 concurrent session limit in "screen". It was still fast and responsive.

And latency to servers is better than ever these days!

[CrazyOldCatMan]

I remember battling with old dumb terminals that did that, it was a nightmare

Two modes:

Local terminal just echoes the local input. Press enter, string gets sent over X.25 (or other slow, old serial comms protocol) to far end. Sometimes it survives intact, sometimes doesn't. Forget anything interactive. (Been there, done that)

Local terminal send everything to the other end, waits for acknowledgement and echo. Single character keypress takes ages to perform. Mistakes get propagated, slowly and corrections take even longer because, by this time, you've got so frustrated with the whole thing that you are not waiting for the echo and carry on mashing keys, disrupting the local keyboard buffer.

Been there, done that. Hated it even more than mode one. At least with mode one you could (with most terminals anyway) make sure that the entry is correct at local-edit speed *before* you send it.

[DS999]

I used screen years ago

Running a terminal emulator on a souped up Mac Plus, with the sessions running on 50 MHz PA-RISC CPUs, over a 9600 bps modem.

That was pretty snappy, so I'm not sure what problem they are trying to solve in a reality 30+ years hence where my watch absolutely blows the doors off that PA-RISC workstation in every metric, let alone the Mac Plus!

I submitted a few fixes/improvements for screen back in the day, so when I saw this article title all I could think was "what's wrong with screen" lol

[Michael Hoffmann]

I read "agentic" in one of the first paragraphs, sighed "et tu?" and stopped reading.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hashimoto Implements Microsoft Recall for Terminal Sessions

Oh, joy.

I can hardly contain myself.

[BoHu]

Re: Hashimoto Implements Microsoft Recall for Terminal Sessions

Yeah! Can't wait to see this dishwasher multiplexer precariously balancing its stochastic heft one full three-legged stool level above the kitchen sink ... it'll right bring the surprise and excitment of 3-ring circus clowning straight back into IT, where it's always belonged! (or not?) The kids will love it ... ;)

[TJ1]

"GPU acceleration"

I had to dig through the documentation to figure this out for sure. There are several implicit prerequisites that are not-mentioned:

1. It is for local-only sessions (not remote sessions over SSH)

2. Must be using a graphical windowing system of some form

3. Must have a GPU

So for a typical use-case of tmux or screen where one SSH's to a remote (often headless - no GPU) host where the multiplexer is executing this won't help - won't even work.

[Rich 2]

Re: "GPU acceleration"

So in addition to being a stupid idea, it’s fucking useless too. Excellent!

[Anonymous Coward]

stupid idea and fucking useless

Which means they can expect to be assimilated by M$ any day now.

Linux can't be allowed to be the world's only rest home for stupid and useless ideas.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: stupid idea and fucking useless

Wait, I thought that was left to Windows?

[jake]

Re: stupid idea and fucking useless

I take it you are unaware of the systemd-cancer, wayland and gnome (etc.)?

There are plenty of stupid and fucking useless ideas under the Linux umbrella ... fortunately, one is not forced to use any of them.

[TimMaher]

Re: Wayland.

No way(land)!

X11 for me.

Now waiting for X12.

[CrazyOldCatMan]

Re: Wayland.

Now waiting for X12

I'm waiting for X25.

[Kevin McMurtrie]

Re: "GPU acceleration"

Background crypto mining as revenue?

[Rich 2]

I’m confused

“It does require that every connecting client be a very smart, high-functioning, compliant client,” such as one built on libghostty, Hashimoto said. But this approach sounds better than dispatching streams of raw ASCII hither and yon

So, replacing a (relatively) simple ASCII terminal client (like ssh) with something that is “very smart [and] high functioning” is a good (“sounds better”) thing?

Maybe it’s an editorial mistake - maybe the sentence is the wrong way round?

As others have said above, I’ll stick with tmux thanks

[Dan 55]

Huh?

Terminals or tmux/screen aren't fast enough? He appears to be solving a problem that doesn't exist.

[brep51r]

Re: Huh?

maybe my needs are too basic but never have i seriously thought “my terminal is too slow”. all the usual utilities are very efficient, too. i’ve been curious about alternative terminals but im just not finding an issue with the one that ships with macOS.

[skwdenyer]

Re: Huh?

As others have said, this isn’t for humans. The key thing seems to me to be terminals bottlenecking agent performance. Now whether pointing an agent at a tty, rather than an api, is a good idea is another discussion entirely…

[CrazyOldCatMan]

Re: Huh?

He appears to be solving a problem that doesn't exist

He's a tech-bro. Of course he is.

The *actual* problem(s) he's trying to solve is:

1. Lack of heft in his bank account and

2. Lack of adoration from his fellow tech-bros.

[Annoyed Grunt]

Yeh im in the same boat, dont get the use case for it.

If its the “must be agent aware” thing. then tmux can do this easily enough and if not then herdr is probably a better choice.

Otherwise, i’ve never heard anyone moan about tmux or screen nuking cpu or being slow.

Mind you I dont get ghostty either. Iterm2 is fine and doesnt need server side profiles to be installed to display text properly.

Seems like solving a problem that doesn’t need to be solved.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Next ist Ghospix

Ghospix:So you can run multiple pixel sessions!

Ghoswin: So you can run multiple graphical application sessions!

Ghosaud: So you can have multiple audio stream sessions!

Ghoswin²: So you can have multiple graphical-audio application session in parallel on one screen, and have multiple screens!

So within the next 20 years it will be somewhere between X-Windows, NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition (and its 'improved' follow-ups), and Citrix/Parallels. Of course with Agentic AI!

Then:

Ghosframe²: New name 'cause Microsoft sued and won the lawsuit over "win".

Ghosbox²: New name 'cause Shittrix still has a © of "Metaframe", and too similar.

Ghosx²: New name 'cause X is cooler!

Ghosy³: Spoken "GhosWhyCube", 'cause why?

[Crypto Monad]

Sounds rather like mosh

Mosh lets the application write into a remote text screen buffer, and then syncs it to the client. The client can disconnect and reconnect, even on a different IP address, and the screen refreshes and continues where it was.

If the mosh client notices keystrokes being echoed then it starts doing speculative local echo - which can be undone automatically with the next screen refresh. This means that it feels very fast for interactive use on long-latency connections. Also, if the server splurges large amounts of data to the console, you can hit ctrl-C and it finishes immediately, because you're not having to wait for the whole stream to catch up.

The main downside of mosh is that the remote screen buffer doesn't support scrollback, so you're basically forced to use something like screen or tmux as well - in which case you might as well just use that instead. The feature request has been open for 14 years.

As far as I know, mosh does not support GPUs or AI. Thankfully.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Sounds rather like mosh

If you are using mosh you are very little also running tmux, they are complementary not redundant.

[MrReynolds2U]

The new new new

It feels like this is something with VC ambitions, rather than genuinely commercial.

I also feel like many companies continually have to buy or invest in the new tech, or else someone will stop and ask whether the current tech was a good investment. So there's plenty of companies in the industry that rebadge or create the new shiny to enable this behaviour. Meanwhile, laughing all the way to the bank.

[MultipleMonomials]

Not that new of an idea

The idea of running a "terminal emulator" server-side is not a new one -- mosh (Mobile Shell) has been doing it for over a decade already. I imagine that using mosh + screen/tmux would get one pretty close to what they are trying to make here, but it's free and already available.

[karlkarl]

They can't compete with tmux. But perhaps a native Windows multiplexer could be competitive.

Mainly because the job control on Windows powershell... isn't actually job control. You can't resume interactively which is completely defective as a tool.

[strayling]

Feature complete?

Not unless it has nethack mode.

[uncredited]

Where can I invest?

This sounds so pointless and useless that it will almost certainly sell like crazy. I want to invest!