I built a tmux sidebar for multiple Claude Code sessions
A developer created hivemux, a free, open-source tmux sidebar to monitor, manage, and jump between multiple active Claude Code sessions effortlessly.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
- hivemux is a free tmux sidebar designed to manage multiple simultaneous Claude Code sessions.
- Displays task names, states, and idle times with rename and post-reboot restore features.
- Runs locally on macOS using Python and shell scripts with zero cloud servers or telemetry.
- Easy installation via curl or Homebrew, featuring a fun office mode for visual monitoring.
Running a single Claude Code session is straightforward, but juggling five at once quickly becomes awkward: one is refactoring code, another is writing documentation, a third is fixing a bug, and somewhere hidden in those tabs, a session paused two minutes ago to ask, "Do you want to make this edit?" Nothing moves forward until you track it down.
To solve this exact issue, a developer built hivemux, a tmux sidebar that displays every Claude Code session—whether it is running, waiting for input, or finished—and allows you to jump straight to the one that needs your attention. The tool is free, MIT-licensed, and designed for macOS, with Linux compatibility likely working though untested.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
The sidebar sits neatly on the left side of every tmux window. Each project is assigned a colored box, and every Claude instance is represented by a card showing its task name and how long it has been in its current state. The task name pulls directly from Claude's conversation title, and double-clicking a card lets you rename it by sending a /rename command directly to that instance.
"Running one Claude Code session is easy. Running five at once is where it gets awkward..."
Esteban-Eg-Kim
This transforms the workflow into a simple loop: keep working, glance at the sidebar or status line, press Option+0 to answer, and carry on. Because everything operates entirely inside tmux, closing your terminal window will not interrupt the process. Following a reboot, tmux-resurrect restores the layout, and hivemux executes claude --resume for each pane, bringing every Claude session right back to its exact conversation.
Integrating terminal multiplexers like tmux with workflow-specific extensions such as hivemux significantly lowers the context-switching cost for developers. By eliminating the need to manually cycle through multiple terminal tabs to check AI agent states, developers can maintain deeper focus on their core engineering tasks.
There are no background daemons or cloud services involved. hivemux is entirely built on existing shell and Python scripts. Aside from downloading the core tool and two tmux plugins from GitHub, and checking for the latest Claude Code version during updates, it makes zero external network requests. The installer cleanly adds marked blocks to your tmux and shell configuration files, which are completely removed upon uninstallation.
What began as a joke evolved into a persistent tool, featuring an optional "hivemux office" mode that opens a miniature virtual office where every Claude session appears as a bee. At the end of the day, a "Clock out" command stops the processes while the bees walk home to a tiny village, and "Clock in" restores everyone to their respective active conversations on a secondary monitor.
Prerequisites include tmux 3.3+, jq, git, python3, and an authenticated Claude Code session. Ghostty terminal is recommended, though any terminal works if tmux is initiated manually. Installation can be executed via:
- curl -fsSL https://hivemux.dev/install.sh | bash
- brew install esteban-eg-kim/tap/hivemux
Source: Dev.to
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