Show HN: RunKit – a browser based tmux manager

Notifications You must be signed in to change notification settings

Fork 10

Star 50

BranchesTags

Open more actions menu

Folders and files

NameName

Last commit message

Last commit date

Latest commit

History

847 Commits

847 Commits

.github

.github

app

app

assets

assets

configs

configs

docs

docs

fab

fab

scripts

scripts

.env

.env

.envrc

.envrc

.gitignore

.gitignore

LICENSE

LICENSE

README.md

README.md

justfile

justfile

Repository files navigation

Part of the shll toolkit — see all projects there.

Your tmux, in the browser and on your phone. run-kit is a remote console for the machine you actually work on — every tmux session and pane as a live terminal, in a sidebar, from your desk or your couch. It's the modern, terminal-native answer to the old server web-console: nothing to configure, no database, state read straight from tmux.

What makes it sing in 2026 is what you tend to run in those panes: AI coding agents, many at once. rk riff spawns each one in its own git worktree, and the dashboard lets you watch the whole fleet. But run-kit never wraps the agent — a pane is just a pane. It's equally a build, a REPL, an ssh session, htop. The agent is one of the things you run, not the thing run-kit is. That's the point: when the agent tooling churns underneath you (and it does, monthly), the terminal layer stays put.

Install

curl -fsSL https://shll.ai/install | sh

Installs the entire shll toolkit via Homebrew, handling tap trust automatically. run-kit relies on its sibling tools (wt for the riff worktree flow), so the full-toolkit install is the supported path.

Quick start

From install to a working dashboard with one agent running:

run-kit agent-setup # optional, once per machine: agent busy/waiting/idle in the dashboard run-kit daemon start # start the dashboard daemon on :3000 open http://localhost:3000 # open the dashboard in your browser

in a tmux session (tmux new -s work if you aren't in one):

run-kit riff # spawn an agent workspace (--skill /name picks the slash-command)

run-kit riff also needs wt on your PATH — included with the full-toolkit install, or shll install wt — and your agent CLI available. When something fails, run-kit doctor prints per-dependency status.

The new workspace appears in the sidebar; click into it to drive the agent — or any command — from the browser.

The formula also installs rk as a fully interchangeable short alias of run-kit, so every command here works the same whether you type run-kit or rk.

To upgrade later, run run-kit update — pulls the latest version via Homebrew and restarts the daemon so the new binary takes effect immediately.

Coming from the old rk formula? run-kit was originally published as sahil87/tap/rk. If brew warns that sahil87/tap/rk was renamed to sahil87/tap/run-kit, you have a keg installed under the old name — remove it with a benign brew uninstall sahil87/tap/rk (your config and the rk command alias are unaffected), then brew install sahil87/tap/run-kit if run-kit is no longer on your PATH.

See the install & access guide for prerequisites, run-kit doctor, development setup, and driving run-kit from your phone over Tailscale HTTPS.

What run-kit is (and isn't)

run-kit

It is A remote, phone-first console for your tmux — agent-agnostic, no database, state derived from tmux + filesystem. A spawner (run-kit riff) and a dashboard (run-kit serve) that compose.

It isn't An agent wrapper. It doesn't speak any agent's protocol, parse any agent's output, or care what's in the pane. That's deliberate — it's what makes it outlive whichever agent you run.

Why run-kit?

A remote terminal console, not an agent wrapper — run-kit exposes your tmux, full stop. Drive an agent in one pane, a dev server in the next, an ssh session in a third. Because it's agent-agnostic, it outlives whatever coding agent you're running this month.

One command per parallel agent — run-kit riff creates a worktree, opens a tmux window in it, and launches your agent. run-kit riff -N 3 spawns three workspaces in parallel; failures roll back cleanly.

Watch a whole fleet, from anywhere — every tmux session and pane shows up in a sidebar. Click for a live browser terminal; pin several into a board to watch three agents side-by-side; open the same dashboard on your phone over Tailscale.

Mobile-first, keyboard-first — Cmd+K command palette is the primary discovery surface. Touch targets are tuned for mobile so you can steer a session from your phone while away from your desk.

No database, no daemon magic — state is derived from tmux and the filesystem, the way a good console mirrors the system it manages. Sessions survive run-kit restarts because the daemon never touches them.

The dashboard layer over fab-kit and wt — run-kit riff --skill /fab-fff launches a full fab-kit pipeline in an isolated worktree. Reach for run-kit when you have more parallel changes than one terminal can hold.

Screenshots

The mental model

run-kit is two independent halves that compose (the command is run-kit; rk is the fully interchangeable short alias people tend to type):

run-kit riff run-kit serve ▼ ▼ spawns agent runs the workspaces ─────► browser dashboard (tmux + worktree) (watches tmux)

You can run either alone. Run run-kit riff in any tmux session without ever starting run-kit serve — you get the spawning behavior, no dashboard. Run run-kit serve and never call run-kit riff — you get a tmux browser dashboard for sessions you spawn manually. The two are designed to compose, not depend on each other.

run-kit riff — the spawner

One invocation gives you a git worktree, a tmux window inside it, and one or more panes ready to go. The default pane runs your coding agent, but a pane can run anything — run-kit riff is a workspace launcher, not an agent launcher.

Pane array model. --skill and --cmd are repeatable. Each occurrence adds one pane; argv order (left to right) becomes pane order. Bare --skill opens a blank agent session; bare --cmd drops into $SHELL.

Layouts. auto (default), tiled, even-horizontal, even-vertical, main-horizontal, main-vertical. Set with --layout.

Presets. Common pane/layout combos go in fab/project/config.yaml under riff.presets.. Invoke as run-kit riff or run-kit riff --preset .

Parallel. -N spawns N workspaces in parallel; failures roll back successful ones before exiting.

wt passthrough. Flags after -- go to wt create verbatim (e.g. --base, --reuse, --worktree-name).

Examples:

run-kit riff # 1 pane, default skill (/fab-discuss) run-kit riff --skill /fab-fff # 1 pane, specific slash-command run-kit riff --skill /fab-fff --cmd "just dev" # 2 panes (agent + dev server) run-kit riff --skill /a --cmd x --cmd y --layout main-vertical run-kit riff ship # invoke the 'ship' preset run-kit riff ship -N 3 # 3 parallel ship workspaces run-kit riff -- --worktree-name pacing-canyon # name the worktree

Prerequisites: must be inside a tmux session, wt on PATH, and the launcher (default claude --dangerously-skip-permissions) available. Override the launcher per-project via agent.spawn_command in fab/project/config.yaml — point it at any agent CLI, or any command at all.

See the riff guide for the full reference.

run-kit serve — the HTTP server

Start the HTTP server in the foreground. Configurable via RK_HOST (default 127.0.0.1) and RK_PORT (default 3000).

run-kit serve # foreground on 127.0.0.1:3000 RK_HOST=0.0.0.0 RK_PORT=8080 run-kit serve # bind all interfaces, port 8080

To run it in the background, use the run-kit daemon subcommands:

run-kit daemon start # background daemon in a tmux session run-kit daemon restart # stop and start run-kit daemon stop # graceful shutdown run-kit daemon status # show daemon state and port owner

The daemon runs in its own dedicated tmux server (rk-daemon), completely separate from your sessions. Restart the daemon and everything you're running keeps running — the console reconnects automatically.

Status dots — read every window at a glance

Each window in the sidebar, dashboard, and pane panel carries a single status dot that tells you where it sits in the fab → PR lifecycle and how healthy it is — using two orthogonal channels:

Hue = phase (where in the journey): intake → execution (apply/review) + completion (hydrate) → shipping (ship/review-pr) → the live PR. A plain window with no fab change is gray — color is reserved for the journey.

Shape = status (health), one vocabulary across every phase: ring = pending · solid circle = active/ready · dashed ring + red center = failed · square = done/merged · gray ring = skipped/closed.

Exactly one signal drives the dot, in precedence order PR > fab > tmux.

See the status dot reference for the full matrix, the per-state rendering, and the design rationale.

Agent state — run-kit agent-setup

Windows running an AI agent can report a live lifecycle state in the sidebar and pane panel: active (turn in progress), waiting (blocked on you — a permission prompt or question), or idle (turn done, with elapsed duration). waiting is the state worth a glance at your phone: the agent isn't working, it's waiting for you.

This is opt-in and needs a one-time setup per machine:

run-kit agent-setup # shows the settings diff, asks before writing run-kit agent-setup --uninstall # removes exactly the run-kit-owned entries

It installs agent-harness hooks into your user-global agent config (v1: Claude Code, ~/.claude/settings.json) that stamp a @rk_agent_state tmux pane option on lifecycle events. Each hook is a thin, stable wrapper that delegates to run-kit agent-hook — a stable interface whose logic (the pid resolution, the value write) lives in the binary. No run-kit server is needed at fire time, and because the logic is in the binary, hook fixes track brew upgrade run-kit with no settings changes and no session restarts. They work for any session, in any repo, under any workflow. Idempotent: re-running updates run-kit's entries in place (recognizing and replacing older-generation entries too) and never touches your other hooks. Until it's run (and agents are restarted so new sessions pick up the hooks), agent state shows —.

Upgrading from an earlier run-kit? Older installs had the hook logic inlined in settings.json. Run run-kit agent-setup once more to swap in the new delegating wrapper, then restart your agent sessions (harnesses snapshot hook config at session start). This is the last time a hook logic change needs a re-setup — future fixes ship in the binary. (Changes to which events map to which state still need a re-setup, since that mapping lives in the settings entries.)

The cross-repo convention is documented in docs/specs/agent-state.md.

Boards — watch many panes at once

A board is a named, cross-server pane dashboard. Pin any tmux window from any server into a board, and the board renders all pinned panes side-by-side in a horizontally-scrollable layout — perfect for watching three parallel agent sessions, or comparing a just dev server's output against the agent that's editing it.

Three ways to pin a window to a board:

Sidebar pin icon — every window row in the sidebar has a pin icon. Click it to open a popover listing existing boards (click to pin/unpin), plus a "Pin to new board…" input that creates a new board on first pin.

Command palette (Cmd+K) — Board: Pin Current Window, Board: Unpin Current Window, Board: Switch to , Board: Leave Board View.

Board pane header — each pinned pane shows an unpin button in its header for one-click removal.

Inside a board:

Cmd+] / Cmd+[ cycles pane focus to the next / previous pane (wraps).

Click a pane to focus it; keystrokes route to that pane's terminal.

Drag the pane edge to resize (desktop only; widths persist per-board in localStorage).

On mobile, panes render as a single-pane swipe carousel.

Pin state lives in tmux (via the @rk_board window optio

[truncated for AI cost control]