tmux vs Zellij vs Hermes IDE: Five CLI Agents, and Which One Is Waiting on You
Book: Database Playbook The series: Pocket Guides for Developers — 8 short books on agents, RAG, prompts, observability, events, databases and system design — the whole series My project: Hermes IDE | GitHub — an IDE for developers who ship with Claude Code and other AI coding tools Me: xgabriel.com | GitHub Five agents, five panes. Three are still printing. One finished ten minutes ago. One has…
Three tools, five panes: tmux, Zellij and Hermes IDE. Each can host five AI coding agents in one screen. But what matters most are four questions: which agent is blocked, which are done, will they survive connection drops, and do they each work in their own checkout.
Multiplexers like tmux excel at the first three. They create a persistent session that survives disconnects, allowing agents to run from any machine. A bell can signal a blocked agent, but only tells you to look, not why.
Desktop apps like Hermes IDE handle the fourth question better. Hermes runs each agent in its own checkout and window, making conflicts less likely. However, tmux shines at terminal tasks, like printing the latest lines from an agent's log.
So, choose tmux for terminal-centric work, Hermes for isolated agent environments, and consider Zellij if you need a middle ground. Each tool has strengths depending on your workflow.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
