Godot and Rust Terminal Multiplexer gPTY Debuts on Hacker News
A developer showed gPTY, a Godot- and Rust-based terminal multiplexer, on Hacker News on Sept 11, 2026.
The author said the starting point was tmux: letting a user spawn multiple pseudo-terminals (PTYs) and arrange them in a grid or tiled layout. Because Godot is part of the stack, gPTY also shows an FPS counter and lets users set a preferred frame rate, an option the developer frames as a way to draw less power on a laptop running on battery compared with a desktop running at high or native frame rates.
In its current form, the developer said, gPTY is evolving into a terminal workspace for orchestrating autonomous AI agents, a direction shaped by dogfooding. He added that users can simply run herdr inside gPTY; he found herdr after starting gPTY and said he now uses it frequently, calling it the better orchestrator and good software.
The application is not limited to terminal panes. With Godot available, the developer has a 2D canvas that could potentially extend to 3D, and the app can already be run full-screen in a "zen" mode with no taskbar or other distractions. Users committed to text interfaces can keep media or other applications entirely inside terminal panes. Groundwork for displaying Markdown properly has been completed.
Planned work includes a Wiki-style framework for local knowledge management, additional pane types such as a native audio and video media pane that would sit alongside a terminal pane, and simple 2D games such as Snake as prototypes. Further details are listed on the project roadmap.
A browser is one thing the developer said is not easy and probably will not happen. Having built a couple of small Electron projects, he said the temptation arose to drop Godot and Rust because of the learning curve and because of the ecosystem, where pulling in components and using web technologies would have produced higher development velocity. He decided that with current LLM and AI support, velocity should be comparable depending on how much he leaned on those tools, and he said he leaned on them heavily. A large share of the code was generated with LLMs and AI, according to the post, but the developer said he reviews and steers the work actively rather than relying solely on vibes, and that some portions are human-authored.
He acknowledged that many polish and quality-of-life items still need to land to improve the end-user experience. The repository is at github.com/godot-pty/gpty and documentation and blog posts are at godot-pty.github.io/gpty. The Hacker News listing showed 46 points and 26 comments.