Developer & ITOriginal Reddit post
Prototyping a new pane UI for my terminal app - WDYT?
I'm prototyping a new interaction for a terminal app I plan to build. The idea is to keep the number of visible terminal panes limited, but give the pane management a bit more macOS flare. Panes can be rearranged via drag and drop, minimized, resized, and auto-resized. I would love to hear whether this kind of UI clicks for you or feels like overkill. Honest reactions welcome.
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I want know about how to implement this
Honestly that's a pretty standard use of AppKit (not SwiftUI), the whole video is recorded from the real app not some UI prototyping tool.
the animations and the way panes move around really does give that apple design feel. i would still love to see this in an actual terminal with content inside though as single letters look just fine in this context but i'm really curious how the panes will look with terminal content in them
Trust me I also can't wait to put libghostty to the test as real pane content source. Will keep you guys posted!
sounds good! looking forward to seeing it in action :)
Thanks for all the kind words! Let me share the thinking behind this and hopefully get your take too. My starting assumption was that working in a terminal falls into roughly three modes: Keyboard-heavy - pros who already have their preferred terminal and live in the keys Keyboard + frequent mouse/touchpad - people who reach for the pointer often (like me!) Fire-and-forget - you type a command, something runs in the background, and the pane mostly just sits there (me as well) So the demo tries to cover all three: Drag-and-drop to reorder panes so you can see running terminals side by side without scrolling Keyboard navigation to switch the active terminal (cover-flow-style) — so yes u/cefege, alt-tab-ish, but specifically for your terminal sessions rather than apps Minimize via double-click or shortcut terminal stays alive but docks to the side Resize freely, fit all panes to the screen at once, or zoom one to be dominant And u/Afraid_Bar_1748 - good call on the contrast, the inactive panes are too bright right now. Will dial them down. u/calab2024 - yabai noted, looking into it.
Woah, This is a very Interesting concept and a very unique one, I think it's very cool, I would use this app if the final result is as good as im imagining it to be
Neat. Recommend adding support for binary space partitioning like Mac's yabai or Linux hyprland
This is neat, what would be the mane use for this? Is it like an alt tab selector?
wow, pretty nice!
The sliding pane animation looks incredibly smooth! Personally, I'd prefer a slightly darker contrast on the inactive panes so the active terminal stands out a bit more, but the layout logic is solid. Great work so far!
Really cool. I couldn’t clearly see it watching from mobile but it is good to have title taking the full space in the title bar so it is easy to identify which tab to choose. Also possibly supports icons in tab bar like notification icon
The drag-and-drop pane management looks really polished. One thing I'd love to see is a keyboard shortcut to move focus between panes — mouse-only pane switching gets tedious fast in a terminal workflow. Auto-resize on minimize is a smart touch too. Looking forward to seeing this ship!
the coverflow UI is sweet, old iPod vibe
There are some interesting ideas.
It looks pretty neat and I also loved the animations. Would definitely give it a try.