I really like the bit where he transferred ownership of Ghostty to a non-profit, and is now building this new company on that as an open source dependency:
> We will build on libghostty exactly as it was designed to be used: as a public building block for terminal applications. Superlogical will consume the same MIT-licensed components available to everyone else, and we will continue to upstream shared terminal work so every libghostty consumer can benefit.
danbructoday at 7:35 PM
This reminds me somewhat of OLE, COM, DCOM, ActiveX, ... [1]. You can paste an Excel chart into a Word document and if you update the data in Excel, the chart in Word will update. You can edit the chart in Word using the Excel UI because you are essentially running an Excel instance inside of Word. You can interact with Excel through an API, no need for a human. But it is painful, you can probably imagine the kind of API you need in order to be able to do all the things you can do with the Excel UI.
The idea is amazing, making this work consistently requires effort, and a lot of it. And as only a few applications invested this effort, it only works with a few applications and never really took off outside of Microsoft. I think this used to work with WordPad and maybe even Notepad but it no longer does, you just get an image instead of the chart object in WordPad and nothing at all in Notepad. It is a dying technology.
This sounds like a mashup of of several things I've been playing with lately...
- pi-web (https://pi-web.dev/): a web frontend for the Pi coding harness which can multiplex pi sessions across multiple machines
- herdr (https://herdr.dev/): a fairly polished agentic multiplexer TUI, can easily spawn or destroy windows based on subagent activity
- firstmate (https://github.com/kunchenguid/firstmate): a meta environment for coding harnesses - more naturally handles spawning and communicating with subagents, managing worktrees, and other SDLC functions, and has a fairly large number of constraints thru bash scripts to ensure better results with less intelligent models
alasanotoday at 8:04 PM
They're basically building in one layer what a lot of people are using multiple different apps for currently. Exactly as another commenter said, it's sort of a mix between herdr and proper remote access.
I use pi as my primary harness and then Claude code and Codex (but with the desktop app for some very specific things)
The last two have remote capability with their own app. With pi, you have extensions that can do remote access, but you still end up with three different places to look to get remote access properly from your phone.
People also use tmux and Zellij and any other number of combinations of different apps combined with some kind of remote access, but nothing that's unified and does everything all at once in one place. I feel like that's a good problem to solve if you can do it better.
It doesn't solve the fundamental problem however of inverting the flow from one human to many agents to many agents to one agent to one human.
devytoday at 5:26 PM
Wow, that "We're hiring/Career Page" link is geeksmaxxing.
First time seeing `ssh superlogical.jobs` would be a way to show job descriptions in terminal!
rixedtoday at 6:43 PM
Meta, won't comment on the site, won't click. I'm fed up with this category of click baity titles that are designed to be enigmatic rather than informative.
The guideline do not mention this, apart maybe from:
If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link.
I'd prefer HN if we made it a habit to editorialize such titles consisting solely of a Domainname or a single word.
sigbottletoday at 5:24 PM
I feel like the main benefit of such a thing would be centralization. Part of the issue with the terminal ecosystem is precisely that everything's so fragmented and everybody needs to support arcane terminal protocols and wrap a billion wrappers around each other. The easiest way to solve this is to be a definer yourself rather than an integrator, which I think is what this is trying to be. If we could actually have standardized terminal extensions in one place (you'd be surprised how many extension codes there are in terminal land) that has a different semantics not from the 80s, but still captures the terminal experience, that would be great.
The 'cleanest' experience I've got for what I want is mosh + tmux and even that has issues (no block cursor for example).
If superlogical's ultimate goal is to revamp the Linux developer ecosystem, all for it. Am potentially worried long term about these kinds of strategies from a political point of view but as long as things stay open source and stay as local dev tools, its fine.
ksectoday at 5:10 PM
Flashback to when Mitchell first introduce Vagrant [1] to HN, which of course was the how everything from HashiCorp started.
I thought it was't that long ago, may be 8, or at best 10-12 years.
I've spend the last ~20 years inside tmux/vim — and the last month almost exclusively in the Codex desktop app, and increasingly am just doing remote control from the ChatGPT app on my phone.
Ghostty rocks and it brings me no pleasure to say this, but it seems unclear how much longer this world will exist?
Tootoday at 6:05 PM
> We're also addressing the most common papercuts of existing tools, such as making scrollback, selection, and scrolling all work natively.
Goes ahead and butchers the browser scrollbar.
4lx87today at 5:58 PM
Agent orchestrators are the IDE dream repackaged. IDEs never really took off, excepting lock-in/monolopolization (Visual Studio, Xcode). They never lived up to the grand vision of the likes of Alan Kay. IDEs of today are still basically just text editors with a file explorer. Agent orchestrators seem similar. The vision is grand but the implementation is just tabbed terminals.
jvicantoday at 4:49 PM
I expect the product from this company to resemble a combination of Orca + zmx
This doesn't seem like a niche that isn't filled. Am I missing out on something by still just using iTerm2 and tmux?
vanagandrtoday at 4:44 PM
If its got Mitchell, I’m in.
To make it more relevant: right now I mostly rely on tmux. Before that I’ve been a long time user of screen (irssi over ssh people know this play). Looking forward to this.
atleastoptimaltoday at 4:55 PM
> Location Though the team has spent many years scaling remote-first companies and is currently remote, we are hiring specifically in Los Angeles, London, and New York, with an expectation for a flexible in-office schedule as we build our presence in each region.
I always get a "lifestyle business" vibe when tech companies are based in LA or NY. When you're a seasoned veteran you'd prefer to live in a larger, more fun city, even though tech is concentrated in the Bay Area
Sleakertoday at 5:35 PM
Maybe I just missed the boat on hashicorp and similar solutioning, but I find a lot of the solutions for working with multiple systems using an intermediary shared language, such as terraform, end up obfuscating the problems they intend to solve and result in people who deal with and support those systems on a daily basis having very little understanding of how to interact and troubleshoot the core infra that is being built up with those tools.
Yes, building those solutions requires a lot of expertise, but I've never found the tools to be worth engaging with over just using what the standard platform tools they abstract away were replacing. Then you add in the economic rug-pull scenarios that have happened when utilizing software like this and I wonder why everyone hops on the bandwagon so easily.
What is the company they're building trying to solve that system maintainers can't already do? Isn't this just rebuilding OS windowing?
wxwtoday at 5:18 PM
Really exciting IMO. Many people are working on new work interfaces (e.g. Codex/Claude/Cursor, multiplayer agent spaces, unified Slack/Notion/Zoom, etc.), and I think the Superlogical vision makes sense as a competitor in the space, at least to try.
There’s clearly room to improve our existing tools.
dtnewmantoday at 5:13 PM
I love how ghostty does windows/tabs/splits, but ultimately, I don't find myself using them. I find that I only have so much muscle memory in my hands, and I need to stick with one solution that works everywhere. A multiplexer let's me do this on my own machine, or if I'm SSH'd in elsewhere. Personally I use Zellij, because tmux feels like learning another vim. But I do use tmux when using tmate, because it's the simplest way I've found to share terminals.
Anyway, I'm very happy to see someone with Michell's talent entering this space. We can use more options with sane defaults and great performance.
user-today at 4:51 PM
Im assuming that they've noticed tools like CMUX and Herdr (cmux is using libghostty too and i use herdr in ghostty) and this is gonna be similar?
bryanlarsentoday at 7:05 PM
Sounds like something that could be done with by pulling in a few dozen Emacs extensions and writing a few thousand lines of elisp. (And one of those extensions would be the libghostty base ghostel.)
It's sort of what I'm doing already -- using emacs-server to provide portable persistent sessions on top of a bunch of terminals, agents and editor buffers.
It's a 1% effort on my part and super janky and super me-specific -- if somebody put a small fraction of the effort into it that others are putting into superlogical and the other alternatives listed here, it could be awesome....
summarybottoday at 8:06 PM
Multibuffer program like Emacs but not Emacs. All for it.
cjbarbertoday at 5:21 PM
My understanding: it’s like tmux but the session lives on a server instead of one machine and you can open it on your computer/phone/etc
Funny. I started working on a similar product myself just a few days ago. I have multiple machines for multiple different purposes. Each one runs different agents (some local, some cloud), for different tasks. Different ones store different data (a NAS on one, my VMs on another, etc.). I wanted a durable layer over all of them to be able to start work on any one of them and resume on any other, and for all the disparate agents to share memory/configurations where possible, and for each node in the network to make all the others aware of its purpose (so when the NAS is online, the agents know how to connect to it and what it contains). Sadly no VC funding for me, building it on my lonesome :)
dannygreertoday at 7:04 PM
Anybody else using Superset as your multiplexer rn? I'm finding it quite useful but wondering if there are other existing products that I should consider -- Mac Silicon: https://superset.sh/ Curious to see what Superlogical cooks up.
brad0today at 6:48 PM
OT, but the superlogical browser tab icon gives me flashbacks (pun intended) to the flash player icon:
why you want to build new terminal multiplexer?
Is there issues with current? tmux or zellij?
Still very interested. Especially if you will go further than terminal - multiplexer for window environment, not just in terminal
pamatoday at 7:05 PM
Serious question: if one were willing to give up on curses, isn’t Emacs/elisp providing the best multiplexing system available to humankind? And conceptually, why would agents ever need to depend on curses?
passivetoday at 7:20 PM
My biggest token sink so far has been something very much like this, but I'm still not sure whether it's a good idea. But it has been a lot of fun.
leetharristoday at 4:37 PM
This is an incredible idea. I would usually be skeptical that such an engineering-focused tool would "make it," but Mitchell Hashimoto is one of the very few people I think can pull it off.
This is going to change so many things if it starts getting adopted.
azuanrbtoday at 5:06 PM
That explains why he built sessions into libghostty instead of Ghostty itself. Looking forward to it.
I spend most of my time in the terminal and have been using tmux to manage my sessions and workspaces, mainly via sesh.
But recently, I decided to move to Kitty and use its built-in sessions instead. I built something around it as well. It’s still early, but I’m really liking this workflow so far.
Definitely a missing piece in the ecosystem. Happy to hear it will have first class support for web or GUI.
tmux but with sane UX/controls being usable by non-vim binding people is important.
supjefftoday at 8:27 PM
backed by tobi lutke? so, supervillain tech.
vicek22today at 4:31 PM
I love Ghostty. But I miss out on lots of its features because I use zellij exclusively to work with agents. This sounds exciting and I hope they'll choose some cliff oss license like gitbutler does
wenbintoday at 5:50 PM
`ssh superlogical.jobs` gives me same vibe as telnet bbs when I was in college :)
andrewstuarttoday at 8:27 PM
Sounds a bit like the do all the things of Google Wave.
jollyllamatoday at 4:40 PM
> We believe the missing layer is a durable session around the work itself
Curious as to how this will be different than K8s?
le-marktoday at 5:29 PM
Commercializing and integrating (openclawing ?) cmux to take all the jerbs?
This sounds awesome enough to see if they're hiring, and they are, but unfortunately only in certain areas with an expectation to be in-office with some regularity. Bummer. Exciting to see this team together, though. This is a tool that I want and think about daily.
hoppptoday at 6:41 PM
I dig that the jobs page is via ssh!
izolatetoday at 6:01 PM
Extremely excited for this as a tmux and Ghostty user. Given the team, I know a great deal of care will be taken in building this product.
orphereustoday at 7:40 PM
They're not hiring in EU remote? Barely managed to somehow open the links on my phone since I don't have my laptop around.
edit: aand someone fixed it :) I guess that must've been their older branding (it was a very beautiful website)
kbdtoday at 5:28 PM
Very cool to see a man execute on his vision. Ghostty -> libghostty -> terminal multiplexing -> ???
cmiles8today at 4:33 PM
Congrats. Not entirely clear on the vision but most things he touches are great so am sure whatever they come out with will be good stuff.
archietecttoday at 5:17 PM
It’s interesting because in an ideal world he is practically building a NixOS config.
I’m pretty new to NixOS (a few months) but i could envision using Nix to declarativey configure tmux windows and panes in a dev shell. That said, Nix feels like it might still be too clunky at this point in time to quickly re-declare window and panel arrangements. But I never tried and it could be possible.
dolmentoday at 4:32 PM
Funded by Mario Zechner (pi.dev) among others.
kubatyszkotoday at 4:36 PM
ssh superlogical.jobs
This actually works!
tills13today at 5:02 PM
Kind of funny that he lists himself as "Creator of Ghostty" first and not Hashicorp.
albertzeyertoday at 4:54 PM
"Why is terminal usage more widespread than ever?" - I guess because of AI agents?
deletedtoday at 5:05 PM
deletedtoday at 5:11 PM
dbgrmantoday at 5:40 PM
So excited to see what this dream team cooks!
brcmthrowawaytoday at 7:27 PM
How can I get points in the company?
Syttentoday at 4:40 PM
I am guessing Ghosty will become closer to Warp.
andriy_kovaltoday at 5:24 PM
domain could be very good for some relevant AI startup and not multiplexer..
the_real_chertoday at 6:34 PM
Literally everything Mitchell does is top notch. Looking forward to seeing how this turns out!
whalesaladtoday at 5:31 PM
the careers page is just `ssh superlogical.jobs` which is kinda cool
Scarbutttoday at 5:17 PM
We're a team that has spent our entire careers building some of the most widely used developer tooling, infrastructure software, and AI systems.
Not being snarky. What AI systems have they built?
iririririrtoday at 5:17 PM
> We will build a high-quality terminal multiplexer that remains excellent at that job, even as it grows to support the second and third parts of the plan.
why this feels the next step is data collection and Ads?
xyzsparetimexyztoday at 5:15 PM
Taking VC money to being a better (probably worse) tmux is the sort of clownworld stuff only people in the Thiel circle can come up with
dominotwtoday at 4:54 PM
i just have log.md that keeps a running log of things as i work though a project.
thats all my claude code needs to navigate 'session' across systems.
brcmthrowawaytoday at 7:28 PM
Can someone explain as pi as a harness vs Claude Code or OpenCode?
People keep saying "yeah, it's customizable!", but I can't be bothered doing that.
I'm sorry to take it out on this specific announcement, as it just seems to be one of many "offenders", but why are the 15 investors listed on an announcement blog post of a semi-stealth startup?
With most of them being VC or high-count angel investors, they can combined push whatever product is being built here into 200+ companies independent of whether it is good or not. What happened to the good old way of figuring out product market fit first? Is that the only way a product can succeed nowadays, or why else would a ~billionair that could easily fund it himself pull in that many investors that early?
---
I'm excited to see what Superlogical will build, but the startup scene seems to grow more clique-y by the day.
_verandaguytoday at 4:59 PM
I really wish mitchellh wouldn't take funding from some of these people. Tobias Lutke in particular has chronically been on the wrong side of fundamental issues, and has most recently advocated for a pay-to-play version of democracy where wealth determines your ability to participate (and in particular your "stake" in the democracy).
It sounds like they're building a super-root which can destroy your whole infrastructure at once ???
From their website:
"Building and operating software today spans local machines, remote hosts, sandboxes, services, and production systems. It has many modes of operation: interactively with a human developer, automatically through CI and background processes, and increasingly through agents working in parallel.
[...]
We believe the missing layer is a durable session around the work itself: one that can span applications and environments, provide relevant context by default, expose structured data and actions, preserve history, and be driven by software while remaining visible and controllable by people.
[...]
This is our plan to build a multiplexer for all work:
1 Build an incredible multiplexer.
2 Make everything in it composable.
3 Make it safe and operable in production"
