Newen
A native desktop app for working with coding agents (Claude Code, Codex,
OpenCode and Hermes Agent), written in Rust and drawn with
limn. No Electron.
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[!NOTE]
Newen is an independent, personal project. It is not affiliated with,
endorsed or sponsored by Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenCode or Nous Research.
It drives the agent programs you install and sign in to yourself, through
their own command-line interfaces, and presents itself as Newen, never as
another client. It uses none of their code, fonts or branding; an agent's
logo appears only to name that agent where Newen lists them.
Contents
What it is
Newen is one place to work with coding agents, whichever company makes them.
You pick an agent's program, open a folder, and talk to it in a session; Newen
shows what it does as it does it: each tool it runs, each command, each
permission it asks for, and each file it creates, changes or deletes.
It is a native program: two Rust executables (Newen and its editor,
newen-ide) whose whole interface is drawn by
limn on the GPU (wgpu). The one browser
inside is the built-in one, Chromium (CEF), for the pages you and the agents
open, never for Newen's own interface.
The architecture does not depend on any agent: everything outside the
newen-agent-<id> adapters speaks to an agent and knows nothing about who
makes it. Each adapter speaks its program's own protocol:
| Agent | Program | How Newen speaks to it |
|---|
| Claude Code | claude | stream-json over stdin and stdout, with its control protocol |
| Codex | codex | its app server (codex app-server, JSON-RPC) |
| OpenCode | opencode | the Agent Client Protocol (opencode acp) |
| Hermes Agent | hermes | the Agent Client Protocol (hermes acp) |
Every adapter offers the agent Newen's own tools, so sessions of different
agents can start, read, message, list and wait for each other: a Claude Code
session can hand part of the work to Codex and pick up its answer.
Screenshots
Newen 0.2.3 at 1600×1000 with Claude Code (Sonnet 5.5) working on a small
sample project; the person's name is a placeholder.
Features
- 🤖 Agents: Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and Hermes Agent, each signed
in with its own program. The model, effort and permission-mode pickers are
built from what each agent says it offers; OpenCode's model providers are
connected from Settings, with a key or by signing in, and its models are
grouped by provider.
- 🧵 Sessions: local sessions in any folder, resumed after a restart; a
sidebar with search, pins and archive (sessions idle for a while can archive
themselves); fork, rewind, plan mode, messages queued for later, and
sessions continued from another device where the agent supports it.
- 🔍 What changed: a record of each request's created, modified, deleted
and renamed files, kept in a shadow git repository so it works the same with
every agent; a diff panel, the changes of the turn on a card, the branch,
Create PR, and archiving a session once its pull request merges.
- 🛡️ Permissions: what an agent asks to do, on a card in the
conversation, allowed once or always, or denied; and each agent's
permission modes.
- 🗂️ Files: a tree with tabs and an editor beside the chat, Markdown
rendered, and spreadsheets and Word documents (xlsx, xlsm, xls, xlsb, ods,
docx, doc) read as tables and text.
- 🖥️ Terminal and browser: terminals in tabs, and a built-in browser
with a separate context per session, which the agents can drive too.
- 🔌 Connectors, skills and plugins: MCP connectors for one agent or for
all of them, a directory to find them, each with its logo; each agent's
skills and plugins in one Customize page; and a card when a connector you
have not connected could help with what you asked.
- 🔔 Desktop: notifications with Newen's own sounds, open at login, keep
the computer awake while agents work, read a reply aloud, and open a folder
in newen-ide or the editor you use.
- 💾 Storage: Settings → Storage (or
/storage) shows what Newen keeps on
your computer and frees what no longer serves: old sessions, unused file
history and worktrees, caches.
- ⚙️ Under the hood: every state change is written to SQLite before the
interface sees it, nothing blocking runs on the interface thread, and
updates come with a manifest signed with Ed25519, file by file, with a
"What's new" for each version.
What's new in each version is in its
release notes.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
