I love Ghostty for agentic work (mostly Claude Code). It doesn’t try to bake in its own agentic coding environment. It’s completely unopinionated about how you use it. It is exactly what I want from a terminal.

It’s open source, primarly made by one person, Mitchell Hashimoto, who doesn’t ask you for any money. No outside investment, no employees. Just a really solid (I think the best?!) terminal emulator.

Sometimes I do wish it had slightly better navigation, and system notifications was easier to figure out, but this is minor stuff and not a blocker for me being productive or enjoying the work.

The Warp’ed De-Tour

I used to use Warp before Ghostty. I’ll still open it occasionally to see what they’re working on. Warp has some interesting ideas, they’re trying to replace your IDE and be your entire agentic development environment. The problem is they seem to have too many features now for general use. I think this approach will turn off both the IDE crowd and the Neovim crowd simultaneously. So, I keep going back to Ghostty.

We now have a new contender.

Enter Cmux

Cmux is a newer option that actually solves those two minor problems I had with Ghostty. It has better navigation with side tabs, and notifications work out of the box. It’s open source and free to use, and it’s built on Ghostty under the hood, so the core terminal experience is solid.

There’s a small AI company behind it. It looks like their Y Combinator batch was in 2024, and they’re trying to build some kind of product on top of Cmux, possibly memory-related. Though with Claude Code getting better at memory and plenty of free memory frameworks already out there, I’m not sure where that is headed. This CMUX project could be the start of a pivot?

The repo is kind of a mess, they have their website mixed in with the application code. And they offer something called a “Founder’s Edition” for $30/month… which I don’t know how that makes any sense when Warp is $20/month, Zed is $10/month, and Cursor is $20/month.

However it’s optional and the free version of Cmux is really good right now; but I’m be doubtful it exists in five or ten years. My guess is their exit strategy is to get acquired by a model provider, given that they have taken investment.

I am having fun with cmux, so check it out if you haven’t yet!