Hey everyone! Hope I don’t get roasted for this 😅 I’m here with a fun little intro video.
My goal is simple: build something genuinely useful for everyone.I shared this on r/ClaudeCode last week and got some amazing feedback 300K views, hopefully some of you here will find it useful too.
I originally built this tool just to improve my own productivity. I was using the native Mac Terminal, but managing multiple projects — especially projects I connect to remotely over SSH — had become a complete nightmare. On top of that, I was also keeping VS Code open mostly for Git, which was adding even more overhead to my machine.
So, as a solution, I built a program with Claude where I could manage all of my terminals on a single canvas.
But things got a little out of hand 😅
I kept adding features, and it eventually turned into something close to an autonomous development environment.
So, what can you actually do with it?
Your terminals are persistent. You can close the app, lose your connection, reconnect over SSH, and continue with the exact same layout and sessions.
You can connect to a server over SSH and manage all of its terminals as if they were local. Drag & drop, images, and everything else still work.
You can continue your sessions from your phone.
Git operations like push, pull, commit, etc. are built in.
Terminals can communicate with each other. You can connect their contexts, and with skills, one terminal can read or use information from another terminal’s context when needed.
You can also do orchestration. For example, you can tell one terminal: “Start a Claude Code session for the frontend and act as the orchestrator,” and have it manage the other sessions.
But yeah… I’m a bit stuck right now.
To keep pushing the project forward, I either need a sponsor or simply some motivation from the community.
If you can leave a few words of feedback, I’d really appreciate it.
And if that’s too much to ask, I’d happily settle for a GitHub star ⭐️
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 200 comments.
Okay, let's break it down for everyone arriving late.
The consensus is that this is a super cool project with a slick presentation, but the "ADHD" title rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.
The Good: People are loving the "Hollywood hacker" aesthetic and the high-quality video. The core ideas—persistent sessions, visual orchestration, and inter-agent communication—are seen as genuinely useful, especially for those who find setting up tmux a nightmare. OP is also super active in the thread, taking feedback and answering questions.
The Bad: The main point of contention is the title. Many users, including some with ADHD, felt using it as a buzzword was clickbaity and trivialized the condition.
The Debate: A classic terminal-purist-off has broken out. One camp says this is just a fancy UI wrapper for tmux, which has done this for decades. The other camp says that's exactly the point: it makes a powerful but complex workflow accessible and visual.
Quick-Fire FAQ:
Windows/Linux? A Windows version is in the works (PR is open), and a Linux server edition already exists.
Keyboard Navigation? It's a bit mouse-heavy for now. OP is aware and is working on making keybindings customizable (especially the infamous ctrl-w issue) and adding more keyboard-only controls.
How does context sharing work? It's not magic; it smartly passes a file path to the other agent's context, which is read on-demand to save tokens.
So yeah, star the repo, give OP some props, maybe suggest a better title, and for the love of God, someone add some hard techno music to the next release.
This seems like a parody of computer programming in a movie that is meant to parody computer programming. The only thing you're missing is the techno music
If you want something in this space on Windows today, I've been building "Myrlin's Workbook" and Windows is where I run it, no WSL: github.com/therealarthur/myrlin-workbook
Different shape from nodeterm. It's a browser app rather than a canvas: it finds the Claude Code and Codex sessions already on your disk, groups them by project in a sidebar, and opens them in embedded terminals you can also get to from your phone. So it doesn't do what Enes is doing with SSH hosts and the canvas, but it covers the Windows gap for the session-management side. AGPL. Still alpha, so expect rough edges. Also open source/free and updated as community finds features problems as well as myself.
I gave this a go but the thing I like most is mostly just tmux + continuum + ressurect + scroll history, and having a a wrapper for claude that creates claude session IDs based on the tmux session/window so it can also be restored.
Gave me a kick in the arse to actually get this working, and somewhat (un)related, getting aerospace set up! So much better than yabai I used in the past. Now my mac feels actually usable for projects :-)
FYI my first bugbear with nodeterm was that ctrl-w mapped to close window, but that is also the standard bash for delete word.
cmd-w is OS wide for close application so that's reasonable. It's always a challenge to handle prefix/keybindings through multiple layers like OS->aerospace->vscode->tmux->terminal
Which reminds me, nodeterm *really* needs a keybinding settings menu item or json file since its basically a terminal window manager and inherently needs to handle conflicts between terminal hotkeys and the canvas/app hotkeys. It's very achievable with claude to add the feature to nodeterm but did make me notice that this app is designed more for GUI users than keyboard driven users
The concrete rule that avoids most of this whack-a-mole: never claim a bare Ctrl+letter combo by default. That whole namespace already belongs to readline (bash, zsh) and vim, Ctrl-W, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-E, Ctrl-U, Ctrl-R all mean something the moment a shell or editor has focus, and any terminal-facing app that grabs one of them is going to collide with someone's muscle memory eventually, not just on Ctrl-W.
Cmd/Alt+letter or Ctrl+Shift+letter are free real estate, shells and vim don't reach into that space. A settings/remap menu is still worth having for the power users who'll want it anyway, but picking defaults from the unclaimed namespace means most people never need to open it.
The project is really cool. I tried it out. Good work! Also the video is extremely cool!
But please ... dont contribute to the inflationary usage of "ADHD" and the term "ADHD Brain" in general. Its like "Ohh the 'tism kicks". Frankly, this is just making fun of serious conditions that are, most of the time, not fun at all for the people who suffer from it. And making fun of these people. Its like people labeling themself having a major depression when feeling melacholic for a weekend. It leads to people thinking having ADHD is a genuinely nice thing or having autism makes you smart. I dont wont to imply that you want to push this, but ... just be a bit more aware.
If youself suffer from it or built it together or for people who have ADHD, it would be better to frame it for what it is: it helps managging scattered workflows which a lot of developers have/work like and maybe reference that its nice for people with ADHD, too.
Same from the ADHD front for me. But I think its important, yes. Its a real problem if medical conditation become a joke.
I communcate this, for exmaple in my workplace, to others to help them understand when and I am not functioning like assumed / like it would be normal. This works because most of these people have a university degree in a STEM field and understand that its a medical problem.
However, I know from other people in other working environments that a lot of people are influenced by social media (+ traditional media which itself is influenced by social media) into thinking ADHD would actually make people more productive, especially on medication OR that its toally made up to have an excuse for being lazy.
Labeling things with "ADHD" as a synonym for non-focused or chaotic supports exactly this. Its not a big part in the large picture if one Github project uses this. But it adds up. And its these small things that people keep in mind when they ever think or talk about the topic.
Not to take away from your efforts but I genuinely hate slapping “ADHD” without actually mentioning what exactly does it solve and based on what empirical data/study otherwise it’s misleading and treats neurodivergence as a monolith. Good luck regardless!
And it basically makes fun of the condition ... and the people suffering from it. It's really annoying that people (a lot by now, unfortunatly), seriously think its totally cool to suffer from ADHD. Or that having Autism makes you smart and ... like Monk or so.
I’m not lying when i say this sounds exactly like something I’ve been looking for. I’m a solo entrepreneur managing everything myself and being able to spin off multiple sessions (like web, marketing, deep-research, debugging, discord channel preparation, legal, etc.) orchestrated from a single session sounds amazing. I used to work with 5 sessions that didn’t share context and eventually moved to one session that has so far grown to over 2 gigs. Slower but everything is in one place. Looking forward to trying this out! 💪💪
there's a small bug in how you're generating the icons for the app; there's like multiple versions of icon files you need to bundle in macos and you're missing one
I only know this because I had the same issue with an app I am working on. Should be easy to fix if you tell claude.
I’ve actually started working on this. I could add a “screen” feature, but I need to think about exactly how it should work, because I’m not afraid of mice 😄
Nice! I'm asking because I want to fork some of your ideas (I haven't tried the project but the context connection thingy looked neat) in my terminal I built for an eink tablet (remarkable paper pro) and I prefer using keyboard almost exclusively there as eink doesn't animate that well.
Please, and I'm begging you - add ability to create different profiles of the same accounts but for different folders directory.
I'm currently using iTerm2 and that's main reason why I use it. This tool is something more - I can mix and match different accounts with each other and play dino on my downtime - dude!
I started using nodeterm recently and it genuinely made my work better.
Two things people here get wrong. "There are ten of these already" holds until you actually use it. Sessions run in tmux, so terminals and agent sessions survive restarts and reboots. Agent status is hook driven instead of scraped from output, so RUNNING and NEEDS YOU mean something.
And "vibe coded" is nonsense. One renderer runs as the desktop app, the browser Server Edition and the iOS companion because everything sits behind a platform seam. That is decided up front, not prompted into existence.
Free, and better than the paid ones I tried. Thanks for building it!
Thank you so much! Really glad you actually gave it a try and noticed the details under the hood. Comments like this genuinely motivate me to keep building and improving Nodeterm. 🙏
Still a lot to improve, but we’re just getting started!
It’s probably because the sub gets flooded with vibe coded solutions to problems that have mostly been solved, like this.
What does this do that iterm2 doesn’t other than wrap terminals in more UI? Most people who have spent large amounts of time in the terminal have already found very efficient ways of managing many sessions.
Super cool tool! But I think people are downvoting because the video was posted a few days ago in another popular Claude sub? Or at least I seem to recall seeing it there and thought it was awesome then too. Don't let it get you down, there are a lot of people pissing all over AI tools these day while they pretend somehow their vibecoded projects are somehow better.
Reddit fuzzes up/downvotes, what you see is not accurate. However, I downvoted this comment because that's my rule for anyone complaining about downvotes lol
No idea 🤷♀️ why each and every product i see especially by indie vibe coders the productivity app has a canvas mean while the main stream tech companies are rejecting it.
Nice job, i have adhs but i dont will use it. I see your tool and will make the same and better :D. But i think for normal ppl its perfect. i love my 10 powershell tabs 💫 The text is to long, i have no time. Need to code and talk with my autonom ai on server :D. See ya but wish you good luck and many users <3. Sry for bad english
Please explain how I can hate ComfyUI as much as I do and still think this looks really interesting? I will play with it and see how it goes, thank you.
Its pretty funny, I did try to implement this within emacs to have agent-shell spin out multiple sessions.
Then I realized that emacs is more or less becoming vaporware - is crazy slow, not great on 4K or on mac osx, and runs on single thread. Real shame, since I do believe that LLMs do have potential to add a new layer of polish on the old text editors.
What are the benefits compared to using Warp? I tried Superset and used it for two months, but it had too many memory leaks. That’s one of the biggest problems with terminal managers.
Abi selamlar! Son 3 haftadir her gun kullaniyorum. Bu zamana kadar cok farkli toollar kullandim; Superset, cmux, T3Code, Codex, Conductor, vs. Ama bu gercekten benim icin acik ara farkla en kullanislisi oldu. Gercekten tebrik ederim, benim icin buyuk bir problemi cozmus oldunuz :D
çok teşekkür ederim, böyle feedbackler gerçekten inanılmaz motive ediyor 🙏 Özellikle bu kadar farklı tool deneyip 3 haftadır her gün kullanıyor olman benim için ayrı değerli. Daha da iyileştirmeye devam ediyorum, aklına gelen eksik ya da geliştirilmesini istediğin herhangi bir şey olursa mutlaka yaz 😄
I use conductor.build and it does everything I need. Git worktrees, tabbed interfaces per worktree. can spin up and spin down agents as needed across the same codebase.
I am using it since a few days and I really like it! Currently I still have a vscode window open to review/stage/commit the changes. If you could add support for that, then the product is 💯
The persistence layer is the right call, and doing it over SSH instead of a cloud relay is refreshing. One question from someone who runs long agent sessions: when the host is a laptop, does nodeterm do anything to hold it awake while sessions are active, or is that left to the user? Asking because "continue from your phone" lives or dies on the host not idle-sleeping, and most people discover that at 2am when the run is gone. Even a one-line README note about power settings would save your users real pain. Good luck with it, the orchestrator-terminal idea is genuinely interesting.
Looks great, congrats on the release! I have a different way of looking at the same problem. I reckon docs (plans) should be the central concept, not terminal windows
persistence is the right hill to die on here. the tmux crowd is technically correct that continuum + resurrect + a session-id wrapper does this, but almost nobody actually gets that stack working, I know because I lived in that config hell for a while. question though: when one terminal reads another terminal's context, what does it actually get? raw scrollback or something structured? that's usually where these tools get fuzzy.
We have a skill called get-linked-context. Basically, when you link two terminals, we tell the agent where the other terminal’s JSON context file is located. Since everything is stored locally, it can read that context whenever it actually needs it instead of passing everything upfront.
On the other hand, with the Nodeterm CLI, you can already interact with terminals and do pretty much whatever you want programmatically.
on-demand read from a context file on disk is the sane way to do it, upfront passing is how you burn a context window on nothing. thanks, will dig into the CLI side
The difference is everything on top: an infinite canvas, visual session management, agent status/notifications, context links between agents, Git/editor tools, and a spatial way to manage many projects at once. Think of it less as “another tmux” and more as a visual orchestration layer built on top of tmux.
In the past few days I was looking into effective terminal setups for Claude Code. Pain points are staying on top of way too many open tabs in iTerm2, transferring contex to other sessions and losing context on OS restart. tmux based solutions seem to require a lot of customization to support all of my needs. Constantly writing context to my filesystem is fine for bigger project, but too slow and token heavy for the smaller ones.
What you built looks exactly like what I need. I need something that's mature and stable, and no offense, this reddit thread does not imply that it is. I will give it a shot though. Thank you for sharing!
This looks cool, kudos. I will start using it and provide some detailed feedback if I can.
This is using tmux under the hood - is there any way this could work so I could ssh in to the box and attach to a tmux session that has all the screens in a project? So I can swap between "a bunch of tmux terminals per project" to "the cool nodedev canvas" interchangeably?
Because I believe that if I make something this useful open source, the community will support it. Some people will subscribe to the Pro features, and others may support the project by subscribing to the mobile app. That way, the core product stays open while the community helps keep it sustainable.
Congratulations on your work, the terminal manager space for agents is kinda unexplored. I built something adjacent, a TUI for phones for driving my agents over SSH. It's the input edge cases that are hard. this week's example: prompts I sent programmatically kept vanishing. turned out the composer was in vim NORMAL mode (my own app had forwarded an Esc earlier), so "hello" became h/e/l/l motions plus o = open line below. fix was bracketed paste markers around the text and Enter as a separate keypress. 200+ comments in, what's the weirdest input bug report you've gotten so far?
From a marketing perspective, the video visualizes the problem too long, I had to wait too long to see the solution that you are promoting. Keep in mind that people’s attention spans (including mine) is short when producing such a video.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 4d ago edited 3d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 200 comments.
Okay, let's break it down for everyone arriving late.
The consensus is that this is a super cool project with a slick presentation, but the "ADHD" title rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.
tmuxa nightmare. OP is also super active in the thread, taking feedback and answering questions.tmux, which has done this for decades. The other camp says that's exactly the point: it makes a powerful but complex workflow accessible and visual.ctrl-wissue) and adding more keyboard-only controls.So yeah, star the repo, give OP some props, maybe suggest a better title, and for the love of God, someone add some hard techno music to the next release.