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 ≥ 3.3.8
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.
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.- Talk to it. The right pane is a live agent CLI; every key goes to it.
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.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,
,
() 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.
