Homebrew · recommended
brew install --cask hoangperry/herminal/herminalInstalls the signed + notarized build; brew upgrade --cask herminal keeps it current.
macOS · Apple Silicon · MIT
A native terminal for developers living in Claude Code.
herminal pairs libghostty — Zig core, native Metal renderer, sub-5 ms keystroke latency — with a Swift/AppKit shell that owns the Vietnamese IME, the agent dashboard, and the per-session notes you'd otherwise paste into Notes.app.
- Notarized
- No telemetry
- No account
- Local-first
The two daily realities nothing else covers
| Native speed | VN IME | tmux compat | Agent dashboard | Local notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| iTerm2 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Warp | ~ | ✗ | ~ | ~ | ✗ |
| Wave | ~ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Ghostty | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| herminal | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Every macOS terminal in 2026 misses part of the picture. herminal is everything iTerm2 gets right, plus the two things 2025-era terminals decided to skip.
Agent dashboard
See your agents at a glance.
When claude, codex, or aider runs in any
tab, the dashboard catches it within 2 seconds — including
npm-installed (npx @anthropic-ai/claude-code) and Python-wrapped
(python3 -m aider) processes that hide behind a generic
node / Python name.
- Argv inspection via
sysctl(KERN_PROCARGS2), not just process name - Status badge from per-PID CPU sampling + BEL / OSC 9 detection
- Tab attribution from process-tree walking (PPID → login ancestor)
┌──────────────────────────┐ │ AGENTS 3 │ ├──────────────────────────┤ │ ● Claude Code Tab 1 │ │ pid 53241 · running │ │ │ │ ● Codex Tab 2 │ │ pid 53244 · needs in… │ │ │ │ ○ Aider Tab 3 │ │ pid 53289 · idle │ └──────────────────────────┘
Sessions · v0.4
Pick up exactly where you left off.
The terminal built for living inside Claude Code remembers your work — both the conversations and the workspace around them.
⌘⇧C — Claude session browser
Reads Claude Code's own store (~/.claude/projects) and lists every
project you've run claude in, by recency, with the real working
directory and git branch. One click resumes the exact
conversation — claude --resume in the right cwd.
Session restore
Quit with three tabs and a split, relaunch to the same layout — each pane back in its last directory. No rebuilding your workspace every morning. Toggle it off in Settings if you'd rather start clean.
Named workspaces
Save a tab + split layout under a name (⌃⌘S) and reopen it any
time from Window → Open Workspace. Like iTerm2's window
arrangements — one for each project you bounce between.
Safe by default: restore replays the layout + directory only — no surprise
ssh connections or LLM resumes on launch. Opt into re-run ssh / claude
commands in Settings when you do want the whole session back. Read-only against
~/.claude, built on OSC 7 working-directory tracking — every pane knows
where it is, so the terminal can put it back.
Vietnamese Telex
tieesng vieejt → tiếng việt
First try, in vim, in tmux, in a fast-typing burst. NSTextInputClient
bridge verified against a 20-phrase smoke checklist before every release.
KR / JP / CN smoke matrices ready for the next audience expansion.
The Vietnamese IME ladder is the kind of thing macOS handles correctly out of the box and that Electron terminals reliably break.
SSH manager
Built around ~/.ssh/config.
One-click import
Reads your existing config. Wildcard + Match blocks skipped, concrete Host blocks upserted as rows.
One-click connect
Spawns ssh user@host in a new tab, inheriting your shell + Telex IME.
Zero stored secrets
Keys + passwords stay where you put them today. We add a UI layer, not a security boundary.
You're not migrating; you're skinning what already works.
Per-session notes
Notes that never leave your machine.
Each tab has its own SQLite-backed note. Autosaved. Markdown round-trip via File → Export / Import. The notes don't get shipped to a cloud, don't get scraped for training data, don't sync to a marketing CRM.
Lives at
~/Library/Application Support/herminal/notes.db
┌─────── Notes ────────────┐ │ ▌ scratch.md │ │ │ │ # debug session #4 │ │ - reproduced w/ M2 max │ │ - libghostty surface ok │ │ - check tick at 60Hz │ │ │ │ [⌘⇧N to toggle] │ └──────────────────────────┘
v0.3 polish wave
Native enough to forget it's there.
A terminal lives or dies on the surface you touch every second. v0.3 spent four releases making that surface feel like macOS, not like a wrapper around a render engine.
⌘F scrollback search
Live match highlighting, count chip, ⌘G / ⌘⇧G to walk hits. Powered by libghostty's own search engine — no buffer scraping.
⌘⇧P command palette
Fuzzy launcher over every action — tabs, splits, sidebars, theme, settings. Raycast muscle memory, in a terminal.
⌥Space anywhere
Global hotkey drops herminal in front of any app, then tucks it away. No accessibility prompt — Carbon-registered.
Drag-resize splits
Grab the divider between panes and rebalance. Ultrawide-friendly; the old fixed 50/50 is gone.
Real vibrancy
NSVisualEffectView background blur + 6 px content padding + spring animation. The chrome reads as one intentional macOS panel.
The little things
I-beam cursor over text, clickable URLs, right-click menu, shell-set tab titles, exit closes the pane. The details you only notice when they're missing.
Diagnosed brutally, fixed methodically — the full audit is at docs/research/09-polish-audit.md.
v0.5 · workspace
Splits that nest like tmux.
v0.5 rebuilt the pane layout as a real binary tree, then made it feel native: split any pane again along either axis, move focus by direction, always see where you are.
Recursive splits
Any pane splits again, nesting arbitrarily deep — editor left, two stacked shells right. ⌘D / ⌘⇧D split the focused pane in place. The old single-axis limit is gone.
⌥⌘ + arrow focus
Move focus to the nearest pane in a direction, spatially — the way iTerm2 and tmux do. Cycling stops being enough once panes nest.
Focused-pane outline
A thin accent border marks the active pane, so you always know where the keyboard goes. Mouse-transparent — it never eats a click or a divider drag.
Tabs open where you are
⌘T and splits inherit the focused pane's directory (OSC 7) — split in ~/proj, land in ~/proj, like Terminal.app and iTerm2.
Idle-render throttle
The driver tick drops 60 Hz → 10 Hz when the window is fully hidden, so herminal stops burning CPU rendering a window no one's looking at. The PTY keeps draining on its own thread.
Re-run on restore
Opt in (off by default) and session restore replays each pane's ssh / claude command, not just the layout — the whole session back, on your terms.
The recursive layout went through a parallel code + security review before shipping
— it caught a real crash (a deeply-nested workspace.json could overflow
the decoder), now fixed and regression-tested. See
docs/REVIEW.md.
What we promise we won't do.
- No telemetry. No HTTP client. No analytics SDK. No crash reporter that phones home. Network activity = whatever you run in a terminal pane.
- No cloud sync. Your notes are yours.
- No account. Don't email us; we don't have a mailing list.
- No plugin marketplace. v1 scope is intentional.
- No AI chat assistant inside the terminal. The dashboard is the AI surface; the terminal is the workspace.
- No App Store distribution. The sandbox kills how libghostty spawns shells.
- No Linux/Windows builds. macOS-only by design.
These are load-bearing. PRs to add them get politely declined.
Built with discipline
The audit trail is the value proposition.
- MVP
- 7 months, solo dev + Claude Opus pair
- Tests
- 141 unit + 9 integration guards · all green
- Reviews
- 4 parallel code + security passes
- Kernel bugs
- 3 documented Sequoia gotchas
- Swift LOC
- ~8,700 — still readable in a sitting
- External deps
- 2 — SQLite.swift, libghostty
Full retrospective for each month at docs/backlog/.
Install
Direct download
curl -LO https://github.com/hoangperry/herminal/releases/download/v0.5.4/herminal-v0.5.4.dmg
open herminal-v0.5.4.dmgSigned + notarized + stapled. First launch is silent.
From source
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/hoangperry/herminal
cd herminal
Scripts/bootstrap.sh
Scripts/make-app-bundle.sh
open .build/herminal.appStatus + next
Where v0.5.4 lands.
- now · v0.5.4 MVP + v0.3 polish + the complete Sessions milestone + the v0.5 workspace wave: recursive splits, ⌥⌘ directional focus, focused-pane outline, cwd-inheriting tabs, opt-in re-run-on-restore, occlusion render throttle. Notarized.
- soon Sparkle auto-update, font-picker UI, image rendering, SSH search + groups. Beta-feedback-driven.
- later · v1.0 More agent kinds. Bilingual site. Whatever the beta asks for.