penso/herdr-gpui

herdrui.dev · Releases · App updates · Command line · GUI scope & configuration · Performance report · Contributing · Star history

A native Rust/GPUI client for macOS, Linux, and Windows, for a Herdr daemon you installed yourself. It paints the daemon's terminal cells, split panes included, without running another terminal emulator or wrapping the TUI.

Unaffiliated project. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or supported by Herdr or herdr.dev.

_{Workspaces, worktrees, and agents in one sidebar. Each agent carries the daemon's status dot (idle, working, or waiting on you), and tabs and splits are painted natively from the daemon's cells.}

Worktree popover. Right-click a workspace or worktree for a new worktree, fan out, rename, Teleport, checkpoints, close, or delete the checkout.	Teleport. Move a worktree to another host with its commits, uncommitted changes, tabs, splits, running programs, and agent sessions.
Review an agent's changes. Open Review Changes from a tab strip's + menu, click any line to leave a note like a pull request comment, then Send to agent.
Side-by-side diffs and a collapsed sidebar. Switch the review to side by side, and fold the sidebar to a rail that keeps every workspace and agent one click away.
Browser tabs with annotations. An agent opens its page with herdr-gpui browser open; you pick elements or regions, write notes, and send them back to that agent. Listening ports such as :4173 appear under their workspace.
Sidebar layouts. Pick a density or a design of its own from View > Layout or Settings; the choice applies live.
Plan usage. The status bar shows the signed-in AI services closest to their limits; click one for the details.	CPU and memory per host. The status bar follows the selected host, and with several hosts each sidebar host row shows its own, read over SSH for remote machines. Native settings. A live preview and a searchable grid of every built-in and Ghostty theme, plus fonts, indicators, sounds, and notifications.
Light or dark, or both. Any theme, or a light and dark pair that follows the system appearance; status colours keep their contrast on either.

Also included: saved SSH hosts with file copies, inline images, clickable links, code navigation that jumps to a symbol, file, or printed path:line in your terminal editor, file drops, editor groups, and system notifications, sounds, and a Dock badge when an agent needs you.

Install the Herdr daemon first; this app is only its client. It starts an already-installed local herdr server when the target session is absent, but never installs or upgrades a daemon. Explicitly confirming session deletion stops that named session first; closing or removing the GUI leaves daemon sessions and shared Herdr configuration intact.

Then install the latest stable release:

Details, manual downloads, and other methods follow. Coding agents can read herdrui.dev/llms.txt for the same steps.

Requires Homebrew and macOS 14.2 Sonoma or newer, on Apple Silicon or Intel. The cask installs the signed, notarized universal app.

brew install penso/tap/herdr-gpui
open -a Herdr

brew install resolves casks directly, so --cask is not required. To update it later, or to install by its short name, tap once first:

brew tap penso/tap
brew install herdr-gpui

The cask is published from the tap by the release workflow. A cask install updates itself through Homebrew: the in-app updater detects that Homebrew owns the bundle and runs brew upgrade --cask herdr-gpui for you, so Homebrew's records stay correct. If its metadata is stale, the updater runs brew update and retries once. The update panel shows progress throughout. macOS .dmg, experimental Linux packages, and experimental Windows .zips are also published on Releases.

Betas are published as GitHub prereleases before being promoted to stable. To try them in a standalone install, turn on Settings > General > Install beta releases ([updates] channel = "beta"); turning it off never downgrades. Homebrew installs always follow stable releases.

Each release publishes x86_64 and ARM64 builds as a .deb, an .rpm, an Arch Linux package, and a plain tarball, all containing the same executable. They need glibc 2.39 or newer (Ubuntu 24.04, Debian 13, Fedora 40, current Arch, or later). The install script picks the package for your architecture and package manager, checks it against the release's published SHA-256, and installs it with sudo:

curl -fsSL https://herdrui.dev/install.sh | sh

Read it first at site/install.sh. To install by hand instead, download the file for your architecture from Releases, then:

sudo apt install ./Herdr-VERSION-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.deb      # Debian, Ubuntu
sudo dnf install ./Herdr-VERSION-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.rpm      # Fedora
sudo pacman -U Herdr-VERSION-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.pkg.tar.zst  # Arch Linux

The package manager pulls in the runtime libraries, including the Vulkan loader; a Vulkan driver for your GPU must also be present. App Updates detects which package manager owns the installed executable, downloads the matching .deb, .rpm, or Arch package, verifies its signed release metadata and checksum, then installs it through APT, DNF, or pacman with a PolicyKit authentication prompt. The authorized helper verifies and installs a protected root-owned copy. Choose Restart after installation; daemon and terminal sessions stay running. This requires pkexec and your desktop's PolicyKit authentication agent. Older builds that report “Package-managed installations cannot self-update” need one manual package upgrade to gain this support. Before a release, CI installs each package on Ubuntu 24.04, Debian 13 and Fedora 42, and the x86_64 Arch package on Arch Linux, then checks that the executable finds every library. The ARM64 Arch package targets Arch Linux ARM and is not install-tested.

On NixOS, or anywhere with Nix, build from source with the repository's flake:

nix run github:penso/herdr-gpui
# or add it to a configuration: inputs.herdr-gpui.url = "github:penso/herdr-gpui";
# then environment.systemPackages = [ inputs.herdr-gpui.packages.${system}.default ];

The flake builds with the toolchain pinned in rust-toolchain.toml on x86_64 and ARM64 Linux. Like the packages, it never updates itself.

In PowerShell, on x86_64 or ARM64:

irm https://herdrui.dev/install.ps1 | iex

The script (site/install.ps1) downloads the zip for your architecture, checks its published SHA-256, installs herdr-gpui.exe under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Herdr UI, adds that directory to your user PATH, and creates a Herdr UI Start menu shortcut. Windows builds never update themselves; run the command again to update. See Windows for what works on the platform.

Install Rust/rustup and, on macOS, the Xcode command-line tools. The repository pins Rust 1.96.1 and GPUI 0.3.6 (the gpui-pre snapshot crate); the Rust version is declared in rust-toolchain.toml and mirrored in mise.toml, so mise install also provisions it.

git clone https://github.com/penso/herdr-gpui.git
cd herdr-gpui
just run

just run uses the optimized release build with the QA menu enabled; just run-debug is notably slower with a dense terminal on screen. On macOS both build a local bundle identified as so.pen.herdr-gpui.dev, so it never shares a Dock tile or icon cache with an installed release. Without just: cargo run --locked --release -p herdr-gpui --features qa-menu.

To compile and install the optimized executable on macOS, Linux, or Windows:

just install

This installs herdr-gpui (herdr-gpui.exe on Windows) into Cargo's bin directory, normally ~/.cargo/bin or %USERPROFILE%\.cargo\bin, and replaces an earlier installation. Keep that directory on PATH; set CARGO_INSTALL_ROOT to use a different installation root (the executable goes in its bin directory). The build uses the pinned lockfile and default features, without the QA menu. On macOS this installs the standalone executable; use Homebrew above for the full app bundle. Linux needs the build dependencies below; Windows needs the Visual Studio C++ build tools and Windows SDK for the MSVC Rust toolchain. Without just: cargo install --locked --force --path crates/herdr-gpui --bin herdr-gpui.

Running cargo test or just ci on Unix also requires python3 and jq on PATH: the usage-provider tests exercise each JSON parser explicitly. The Ubuntu dependency helper below installs both; on macOS, use brew install python jq.

Application shortcuts use Ctrl+Shift on Linux, including Ctrl+Shift+T for a new tab and Ctrl+Shift+C/V for copy/paste. Customize them from Herdr > Keyboard Shortcuts; see keyboard shortcuts.

On Ubuntu 24.04 (x86_64 or ARM64), run bash scripts/install-linux-deps.sh before building. This installs GPUI's X11/Wayland/font development dependencies and libasound2-dev for Rodio/CPAL native audio. CI and release builds use the same script. Linux binaries require the system ALSA shared library (libasound2t64 on Ubuntu 24.04), a configured default audio device, and Vulkan for rendering. Audio normally routes through the desktop's ALSA plugin configuration; no CLI audio player is required. Custom notification sounds are MP3 only. See notification sounds.

Windows is experimental, not a supported platform: CI checks formatting, lints every target and feature, and runs workspace tests with default and all features on windows-2025, including headless UI and CLI tests. The release workflow also builds and CLI-tests the optimized executable, but no native window, renderer, or live daemon has been exercised. Local connections use the named pipe the Windows daemon binds, and configuration and state follow its %APPDATA% / %LOCALAPPDATA% layout. A Herdr daemon inside a WSL distribution can be added as a device from Add Device…; see WSL distributions. Saved SSH hosts, in-app updates, saved GitHub credentials, and the avatar disk cache are unavailable and report that plainly; see the GUI README.

Each release publishes Herdr-VERSION-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip and Herdr-VERSION-aarch64-pc-windows-msvc.zip (native ARM64), each containing herdr-gpui.exe and its license notices. They carry the same checksums, Sigstore signatures, and build provenance as the other assets, but they are not Authenticode-signed, so SmartScreen warns on first launch, and they never update themselves: rerun the install script or download each new release manually. The executable is console-subsystem, so launching it from Explorer also opens a console window.

flowchart LR
    subgraph app["Herdr UI (this repo)"]
        ui["herdr-gpui<br/>window, painting, input"]
        client["herdr-client<br/>discovery, socket worker, sessions"]
        proto["herdr-protocol<br/>framing, surface patches"]
        ui --> client --> proto
    end

    proto <-->|"bincode frames over<br/>herdr-client.sock"| daemon

    subgraph host["Your machine or a saved SSH host"]
        daemon["herdr daemon"]
        daemon --> terms["terminal processes,<br/>workspaces, agents"]
    end

The daemon owns the terminals and all session state. The GUI attaches to the binary client socket, renders the surfaces it is sent, and sends semantic input back. Closing or detaching the GUI leaves the daemon and its terminals running.

Browser tabs are the exception: Herdr has no browser panes, so web pages shown beside a workspace's terminals belong to the GUI alone. Agents in your panes open them with herdr-gpui browser open URL, which reaches the running app over a local socket of its own. The same command line reaches the rest of what only the GUI keeps: its windows and tabs, worktree notes, checkpoints, forwarded ports, and its settings.

The QA menu is excluded from default Cargo builds, including published releases. just run enables it automatically; with Cargo, use cargo run --locked --release -p herdr-gpui --features qa-menu. To manually test native audio in that build, choose QA > Play Sound. It plays the built-in Done sound on the background Rodio worker, even without a daemon or active pane and even with notifications muted. HERDR_DISABLE_SOUND and NEXTEST still suppress playback. See notification sounds for queue limits and playback details.

just test-perf opens a daemon-free native fixture with a dense 160x50 terminal, 40 workspaces, and 40 agents. It dispatches real window-local mouse/scroll events and measures cold frames, warm hover, and both sidebar lists' scrolling. It also asserts that unchanged terminal cells need zero new text-shaping calls, validates batched background counts, and compares cached glyphs with freshly shaped ones.

On the development M4 Max, caching and background batching reduced release hover p95 from about 51 ms to 12 ms, and scrolling from 56 ms to 14 ms. The benchmark measures CPU event-to-scene construction, not GPU completion or pointer-to-screen latency. Use just test-perf 50 to set a different calibrated budget; native tests remain opt-in rather than imposing machine-dependent timings on hosted CI.

See PERFORMANCE.md for the before/after results, reference mode, workload, deterministic checks, and remaining limitations.

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE and NOTICE, plus the upstream protocol attribution for the vendored parts of herdr-protocol.