Free · Open source · Native macOS
A native macOS home for your terminals and coding agents. Sessions live in a background daemon, so you can quit, update or crash and come back to exactly where you were.
brew install --cask anilsenay/tap/octomux
Features
Each agent is marked working, needs input or done in the sidebar, the tab and the menu bar. Notifications take you straight to the right pane, and ⌘⇧U jumps to the next one waiting.
The Agents section lists every agent across workspaces by state, so nothing sits waiting for you unnoticed.
⌘⇧C shows a Claude Code or Codex session as a chat: its own transcript, live, with tool calls as cards. What you type there goes into the same session, as if typed in the terminal.
The agent still runs as itself, with your config and login. Octomux owns the terminal, not the agent.
The command palette finds sessions, projects, commands, themes and settings. Sessions waiting for you come first.
Every menu shortcut can be rebound in Settings → Keyboard.
Plain dark and light, three theme presets (Ink, Grid, Glass), or one of more than twenty animated pixel-art scenes that show through translucent terminals. The octopus ones are the house favorites.
You can also make your own scene from a JSON file.
Every terminal runs in its own holder process under a launchd daemon. Close the window, quit, update or crash, and reopen where you were.
Workspaces, projects, tabs, splits, a dock, and one-click git worktrees so several agents can work on the same repo without stepping on each other.
The right panel follows the focused session: changed files, commit and push, history with diffs, and a file tree with a code viewer.
Claude Code, Codex and any other CLI agent run as themselves, with your own config and login. Installed agents are detected for you.
5-hour and weekly limits for Claude and Codex in the status bar.
Run the daemon on a Linux box over SSH and keep its sessions next to your local ones.
Swift and AppKit, GPU-rendered terminals by libghostty, and a small Rust daemon. No Electron.
No account, no analytics, no telemetry. Your sessions, projects and settings stay in a SQLite database on your Mac.
How it works
The holders keep running. Reopen Octomux and every pane reattaches with its scrollback. Updates install while your sessions keep going.
Claude Code and Codex sessions come back with --resume and continue the same conversation. Plain terminals come back as a fresh shell in the same directory.
For Claude Code, Octomux passes its hooks and status line with --settings, so your ~/.claude/settings.json is left alone. Codex 0.164 and later reports its own state, with nothing to set up.
Install
Get Octomux.dmg from the latest release.
Open the disk image and drag Octomux into Applications. Opened straight from the disk image or Downloads, it offers to move itself there first.
Octomux installs its background service on first launch and asks for notification permission. Then add a project with ⌘⇧O.
brew install --cask anilsenay/tap/octomuxFAQ
Yes. It is open source under the MIT License, and there is no account to create.
Any CLI agent runs in Octomux, since it is a terminal. Claude Code and Codex get more: working and needs-input status, resume after a reboot, usage limits and the chat view. Codex needs version 0.164 or later for the needs-input state. Gemini, Amp, OpenCode, Cursor, Kiro, Antigravity, Copilot and your own commands keep running when the app quits. Want deeper support for one? Open an agent request.
Claude Code and Codex sessions come back with --resume and continue the same conversation. Plain terminal sessions come back as a fresh shell in the same directory.
Sessions keep running while Octomux is fully quit, but notifications are posted by the app, so nothing is shown until you open it again.
No analytics and no telemetry. Octomux only goes online to check for updates (a plain download of the update feed, no system profile) and when you import a scene from a URL. Your agents talk to their own providers exactly as they would in any other terminal.
No. Octomux runs your CLI with your own config and login. For Claude Code it passes its hooks and status line with --settings, and your own status line keeps working.
The app is for macOS 14 or later. The octomux daemon can run on a Linux server, and the Mac app connects to it over SSH as a remote host.
If you installed with Homebrew, brew uninstall --zap --cask octomux stops the sessions and removes the app, its background service and all Octomux data. Otherwise follow the steps in the guide.
brew install --cask anilsenay/tap/octomux