Thurbox

Thurbox is an open-source TUI (terminal user interface) built in Rust that lets developers run multiple CLI coding agents — Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, opencode, aider, GitHub Copilot CLI, and others — simultaneously in persistent tmux panes. It is released under the MIT License and available on GitHub. A single install command sets up both the thurbox TUI binary and the thurbox-cli headless binary, and the agents keep running even after the TUI is closed.

What It Is

Thurbox sits in the category of agentic code orchestration tools. Its core job is to manage multiple coding-agent CLI sessions in one terminal window, each backed by a real tmux session that survives crashes, restarts, and reboots. The tool is agent-neutral: it launches vendor CLIs unmodified and knows nothing about their models, prompts, or tools, so new agent features arrive the day the upstream CLI ships them. Every pane in the interface — including the session list — is a Lua file in a directory the user owns, making the layout fully editable without recompiling or restarting.

Architecture: Two-Layer Design

Thurbox separates its internals into two distinct bands:

• The engine (Rust, fixed): Handles processes, git, hosts, schedules, and the SQLite database. This layer is not user-editable by design, providing a stable surface that plugins can rely on.
• The interface (Lua, yours): Every visible pane, the arrangement file (ui/layout.lua), and keybindings are Lua files under ~/.config/thurbox/ui/. Panes can be moved, disabled, deleted, or replaced without a recompile. Pressing F10 reloads the interface from disk.

Both the TUI and the headless CLI share one SQLite database, so actions taken via thurbox-cli appear in the running TUI within a tick.

Key Capabilities

• Persistent sessions: Each agent runs in its own tmux pane and survives TUI restarts. Ctrl+Q exits the TUI without killing agents.
• Git worktrees: Sessions can be spawned in isolated git worktrees for branch-level isolation. Ctrl+S rebases all worktrees from origin/main with automatic conflict resolution.
• Remote and WSL hosts: Agents can run on remote machines over SSH or inside WSL distros (discovered with no config), while the interface stays local.
• Automations: Named, scheduled agent runs — one-shot or recurring cron — fire whether or not the TUI is open, via a detached tmux keeper.
• Tasks and issue sync: A todo list whose items connect to a coding agent; records carry a source and external ID for integration with external trackers.
• Inter-session messages: An agent-neutral mailbox lets one agent hand another a payload without scraping its terminal.
• Extensions: Opt-in, agent-agnostic add-ons declared as data manifests, installed and self-healed with a single thurbox-cli command.
• Headless CLI: thurbox-cli scripts everything — create, drive, capture, and tear down sessions — from the terminal or from inside an agent session.
• 36 built-in themes: 28 dark and 8 light palettes, switched live with Ctrl+Y.

Performance Model

Thurbox uses a demand-driven rendering loop. An idle screen drops to four frames per second instead of a hundred, and layout, terminal render, and panel rebuilds are skipped rather than repeated when nothing has changed. Panes that declare themselves pure can have their whole render tree reused. The F12 HUD and THURBOX_PERF_LOG=1 expose per-pane cost — total, p95, max, frame share, and cache-hit rate. Performance regressions are tracked with deterministic frame counters rather than wall-clock timers, so they fail tests consistently across machines.

Update: v2.28.0

The latest release is v2.28.0, published on 2026-09-18, according to the GitHub repository. The project was created in February 2026 and has been updated continuously, with the last push recorded on 2026-09-19. The repository shows 72 stars and 10 forks at the time of indexing. The project is actively maintained under the MIT License and built on ratatui, tui-term, vt100-rust, and tmux.