Show HN: Boo – Screen-style terminal multiplexer built on libghostty
github.comscreen actually works the same way architecturally: it parses all output through its own built-in terminal emulator and redraws from that state on reattach. But that emulator is decades old and lags far behind what modern programs emit. Whatever it doesn't understand gets dropped or mangled on redraw. boo swaps that layer for libghostty-vt, Ghostty's VT core, so the saved state matches what your terminal would actually display, and terminal queries get answered while detached so TUIs don't hang unattended.
tmux is great, it was just never the model I wanted. I really liked screen's simplicity, sessions and a prefix key and nothing else to learn, and boo keeps exactly that.
They also compose: a boo session is just a PTY running a program, so you can run tmux inside one if you want.
Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but some of your posts (like this one) are getting classified that way.
Screen is 1 server to 1 client.
In screen each client session is a fork of the screen server. In tmux there's one server and many client forks iirc.
Without -x though it works as originally described.
Edit: gnu screen 1.0 was originally released in 1987. The -x flag was released in screen 3.0 in the 90s. TIL
Definitely interested in something like this - love ghostty and I’ve been finding Zellij a bit crashy recently (plus I don’t really need tabs).
Very similar, based on libghostty
I currently use tmux. Not because I need to multiplex shells in a remote server, but because I like to have my sessions persisted in my local machine. Even between reboots (technically not the same session, but the same tabs and splits I had). I currently have that with tmux and a tmux plugin that restores my sessions. But I think that tmux is overkill for this. And if I'm in a tmux session, then I can't use my terminal emulator's native tabs and splits. Does anyone have a recommendation of how to handle only terminal sessions on Linux?