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Show HN: Waffle – Native macOS terminal that auto-tiles sessions into a grid
Hi HN. I built Waffle because I kept ending up with 15 terminal windows scattered across three spaces with no idea what was running where.
Splitting/merging in iTerm kind of works but it never felt intuitive to me.
With that in mind, I built something to suit my workflow:
Waffle is a native macOS terminal (Built on Miguel de Icaza's SwiftTerm) that tiles your sessions into an auto-scaling grid automatically. 1 session is fullscreen, 2 is side by side, 4 is 2x2, 9 is 3x3. Open a terminal, it joins the grid. Close one, the grid rebalances. No splitting, no config.
I've been using it a lot recently and one thing I've found really useful is that sessions detect which repo they're in and group accordingly. Each project gets a distinct colour. Cmd+[ and Cmd+] flip between groups. If you have three repos open across eight terminals, you can filter to just one project's sessions instantly. Also, no accidentally closing a window with CMD-W as it gives you a confirmation and requires a second CMD-W to close.
Honestly, if you live in tmux, this probably isn't for you but it's really helped to speed up my workflow.
Other things: It comes with a handful of themes (and has support for iTerm themes), bundled JetBrains mono, has keyboard shortcuts for everything. Free, no account, opt-in analytics only. macOS 14+.
There's a demo on the landing page if you want to see it in action.
- eddie-wang 5mo ago[dead]
- billylo 5mo agolove this. thanks for sharing!
- olleeolleeollee 5mo agoThank you! Give me a shout if there’s anything I can add or change that would make it more useful for you.
- throwaway290 5mo ago> Honestly, if you live in tmux, this probably isn't for you but it's really helped to speed up my workflow. Fresh honesty, nice.
- olleeolleeollee 5mo agoHaha, I mean ever since launching this I’m learning of a zillion alternatives I should have probably tried earlier but for me the auto tiling is really the main thing and, as far as I can see, no other alternatives really do that for some reason? Maybe there’s a good reason but it suits my workflow anyway
- throwaway290 5mo agoYeah, with tmux it sucks that switching window size ruins pane layout. But it happens so rarely I don't really care
- jamesgresql 5mo agoThis is great, no more lost terminal screens!
- olleeolleeollee 5mo agoThanks! Let me know if there’s anything I can do to make it more useful. I thought in the next update I’d work on custom key bindings but if there’s anything more glaring, I’d love to hear it.
- rrojas-nexus 5mo ago[dead]
- replwoacause 5mo agoLooks really nice! Super clean site too. How did you make the animation at the top?
- olleeolleeollee 5mo agoThanks! Glad you like! The logo animation is an SVG with CSS keyframe animations.
- LimeLimestone 5mo agoomg, the DMG weighs 3MB and the installed app is only 9MB. Amazing
- olleeolleeollee 5mo agoThanks for noticing
- olleeolleeollee 5mo agoEmoji got stomped, so ;-)
- smcleod 5mo agoI like the tiling concept but I don't see the source code linked, is this closed source? There's no way I'd run a terminal that didn't have publicly inspectable source, there's just too much that could go wrong.
- olleeolleeollee 5mo agoFair! I certainly could publish the source. It’s more or less just a wrapper for Miguel de Icaza‘s SwiftTerm: https://github.com/migueldeicaza/SwiftTerm https://github.com/migueldeicaza/SwiftTerm
- Yizen 5mo agoTried it, lean and elegant, amazing tool ! I like the "omarchy/wayland" auto focus of the tab when moving the mouse over, saves a click, this could be added as an option.
- olleeolleeollee 5mo agoThanks for giving it a shot! We do track hover state already but it's just visual right now — not wired up to actually focus the terminal. Focus-follows-mouse is a great idea though, should be easy enough to add in. Will explore.
- Yizen 5mo agoThanks ! Another nice to have would be window reordering, but so far, really enjoying it as-is :)
- olleeolleeollee 5mo agoWindow re-ordering and mouse focusing added in latest release, should be available fairly imminently. Thanks for the suggestions!
- Yizen 5mo agoSaw that ! Super useful, thank you !
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- brainymo 5mo ago[dead]
- SeriousM 5mo agoI'm on Windows and I would love to see such a easy solution for the windows terminal.
- olleeolleeollee 5mo agoThis is just something to scratch my own itch, I’m afraid, so no plans to build for any other platforms sorry!
- yeonsh 5mo agoGreat tool — the auto-tiling grid and repo-based grouping are exactly what I've wanted. As smcleod mentioned, publishing the source would go a long way. A terminal has access to files, environment variables, and credentials by nature, so open source is often a prerequisite for adoption in developer workflows. Even a read-only mirror would help. Thanks for building and sharing this!
- olleeolleeollee 5mo agoThanks! Appreciate it :-) Sure, that makes sense. I’ll get it sorted and let you know.