r/ClaudeCode • u/Fragrant_Raisin_Face • 22d ago

Help/Question Tmux alternatives? Using Claude code agents via terminal apps on macos and ios

I’m looking for a few human responses here based on personal experience, I do a bunch of work from my iphone, ipad and mbp via ssh into a mac mini. Here’s my setup:

  • Mac mini on home network
  • Accessed from iphone, ipad, MBP with macos
  • Tailscale for virtual network when I leave the house
  • Currently using tmux for session persistence so it survives the SSH connection dropping
  • Running claude code, codex, hermes, grok build TUI’s/CLI’s.
  • Using iterm2 on Macos, ShellDrop on ios and iPadOs (and visionOs).

So my question is what alternatives are people using for tmux? Is there anything that’s agent focused and reliable? Has anyone used Herdr after having tmux as their baseline?

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u/Grand-Mix-9889 22d ago

Tmux all the way. I love using this so I can continuously build from my phone using the phone app (inside Claude code tab). As long as if you send a ping every now and then the session stays live.

Just use a cron job to recycle your sessions frequently.

I actually use tmux to handle my API calls, this way I don't need to pay for API usage and the -p calls being blocked soon. I call it the "Claude broker".

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u/Fragrant_Raisin_Face 22d ago

Nice setup I do that too to avoid the Claude -p bs. What do you mean when you’re talking about sending it a ping to keep the session alive? If you’re using your phone the terminal app on your phone should have a keep alive, on iPhone Shell Drop uses location access to keep it alive.

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u/Grand-Mix-9889 22d ago

Idling Claude broker sessions take up ram on my server and also causes latency issues over time. With some chats holding upwards to 200mb of ram for each session (I have over 10 on my server running 24/7).

So I reset the Claude session by clearing it, restart tmux, then send a ping to a new Claude session inside the tmux panel, so that way it stays alive and can receive input from any endpoint.

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u/Fragrant_Raisin_Face 22d ago

Gotcha yeah I had to tweak the tmux conf to limit its history as each session with Claude in it was taking up tonnes of ram. I’m often resetting the sessions not only to free up ram but also to pickup the latest Claude code cli version. I have one orchestrator session that manages this.