Comparison

Lots of tools now “run coding agents in parallel, each in its own git worktree.” They mostly differ on what’s underneath: whether the session backend is real tmux or a re-implemented multiplexer, whether the UI is a lightweight TUI or an Electron/native app, whether they launch the unmodified vendor CLI or their own model, and whether one session can span several repos. Thurbox optimizes the boring-but-load-bearing end of that list.

What makes Thurbox different #

Some of these are shared — the combination is the point.

• Real tmux, not a re-implemented multiplexer. Sessions live in the same battle-tested mux that already survives crashes, restarts, and reboots — reattach from any terminal with tmux -L thurbox attach . A custom multiplexer is one more thing that can lose your session. (Of the tools above, only Claude Squad shares this.)
• A TUI, not an Electron app. Tiny footprint; runs in a plain terminal, over SSH, on a headless server — no desktop, no GPU, no per-window browser.
• Launches the unmodified vendor CLI. Thurbox knows nothing about the agent’s model, prompts, or tools — it just runs command + args — so you get the newest agent features the day the CLI ships them, with no wrapper in the way (vs Cursor, which runs its own models).
• Any agent CLI as data ( ~/.config/thurbox/agents.toml ) — add your own with no recompile; Thurbox is deliberately agent-neutral.
• Multi-repo sessions. One session can span several repos at once — each repo in its own git worktree on a shared branch, gathered into a per-session symlink workspace — not just one worktree per task. (Of the GUI tools above, the closest is Conductor’s /add-dir , which links separate pre-made workspaces rather than spawning one session across repos; Cursor’s multi-root/cloud path is folders-in-one-window, not worktree-per-repo.) Thurbox also runs agents in plain non-git directories (and attaches them as-is with --add-dir ); worktree-only tools like Claude Squad require a git repo.
• Mouse support in the terminal. Clickable session rows and buttons, plus drag-to-select — a gentler on-ramp than most TUIs, while staying fully keyboard-first (and toggleable via [features] mouse ).
• An interface you can edit. Every pane — the session list included — is a Lua file under ui/plugins/. Move one, turn it off, delete it, or write your own, and the arrangement closes up around what is left. A plugin gets no filesystem and no network: it draws, and the kernel does the rest. No other tool in this table lets you replace its own interface while it runs.

On top of that, Thurbox is the only entry here that is terminal-native and runs on Windows and over SSH, and it ships a full headless CLI ( thurbox-cli ) plus cron-like automations to drive and schedule fleets of agents with no GUI at all. It is also the only one whose interface is data rather than product — every pane is a Lua file you can move, disable or replace, which is a kind of extensibility a packaged GUI cannot offer at all. The click-to-review visual diff the GUI tools lead with is one plugin install away — a pane (thurbox-code-review) rather than something baked into the binary. They also trade footprint and scriptability for a gentler on-ramp — and the most polished of them, GitHub’s Copilot App, also ties you to a single vendor’s agent and a paid subscription, where Thurbox stays agent-neutral and runs whatever CLI you already pay for.