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points by jdorfman 1 day ago | 0 comments

> “And a whole wave of new terminals and "agentic" coding tools, such as herdr and cmux, have been built on it rather than writing yet another emulator.”

Mitchell could have easily snuck his competing product Rex in there but resisted. Respect.

[–] raglof 23 hours ago

I like Rex and have started using it and its replacing Ghostty for me. This has made me a bit confused: is the intent for Rex to replace Ghostty? not sure when I would use one vs the other yet

[–] norman784 21 hours ago

AFAIK he said that Ghostty was like a technical demo of libghostty

[–] WD-42 16 hours ago

Dang. I was hoping some of this was going to come to ghostty. Especially the ssh session stuff. Wezterm has it. I prefer ghostty but it’s kinda lame if it becomes the lite version of a paid product.

[–] exitb 13 hours ago

So far they stated they don't intend to charge for Rex.

[–] 9dev 23 hours ago

I suspect Ghostty is to Rex what Chromium is to Google Chrome (without all the negative connotations that is, I’m a happy Rex user!): both something of a tech demo for libghostty, and an open source, basic-but-fully-featured terminal emulator. Rex, then, will possibly be a paid product at some point, and adds features like the server, agent integration, and persistent session management on top. If you had asked me two years ago if I was ready to pay for my terminal and quit my jetbrains subscription, I’d have laughed. Now I’m earnestly ready for that if Superlogical were to announce a paid plan.

[–] goosejuice 16 hours ago

> Rex is and will always be free.

[–] _strobe 5 hours ago

Sweet as!

[–] jazzypants 16 hours ago

Why on Earth would folks pay for that? I'm not trying to be a jerk, but I genuinely don't understand the value proposition.

[–] r_lee 16 hours ago

if it provides a nicer DX and offers value for you, why wouldn't people pay for it?

there's a big market for "makes your life easier" tools both in B2C and B2B

maybe not that big of a market but who knows

[–] limagnolia 15 hours ago

It comes down to the question of if it provides enough value over other competing products (which may be free or lower cost) to justify the price. If you sell 10$ widgets that solve $100 problems, you may wonder why nobody is buying your $10 widget when it "provides so much value" and it is because a $1 widget solves the same problem just as well.

Note, I am deliberately using a generic example, I use Ghostty but I haven't tried Rex yet and I have no idea how much value it provides over competing widgets)

[–] r_lee 15 hours ago

yeah, that's true. but I would say with dev tools and such, people might easily fork over $10 if they think it's nice

I'd say the whole "lower cost" thing is less of a problem when it comes to ergonomics, we know that many devs buy all kinds of fancy split keyboards and things like that to make their workflow smoother, so I wouldn't be surprised if people easily forked over money to this

question is if it will actually take off or actually provide/slot into workflows that people actually like etc. if it's heavily opinionated or not really innovative, I don't see how people would "move over"

just my take though.

[–] limagnolia 15 hours ago

Absolutely, ergonomics is a huge part of the value- it solves a real problem.

[–] transitorykris 8 hours ago

There are many things enterprises will pay for for compliance purposes

[–] cpuguy83 15 hours ago

I'm pretty sure he said Rex will remain free.

[–] 9dev 14 hours ago

Sure, but then again, Superlogical is a company and as such surely will create a commercial product at some point. I would be surprised if that wouldn’t pertain to Rex in some way.

[–] tough 14 hours ago

I'm pretty sure Google Chrome is free ;)

[–] dash-44 20 hours ago

Incredible that we’re now at the point of needing to say “without all the negative connotations” when comparing against any sort Google product. LOL. I see this often.

[–] k9294 20 hours ago

How you got your invite? I wanted to test Rex, but on the website there is only an invite only beta.

[–] guessmyname 11 hours ago

You don’t need an invite to get a copy of Rex Beta app; the URL to download the official .dmg has been leaked for several days in various Chinese forums. Search “blob.superlogical.com AND latest.dmg” online [1]. And for the people who like Go (golang) projects, someone already asked an LLM to replicate the app in Go [2].

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22blob.superlogical.com%20A...

[2] https://github.com/egoist/gorex

[–] k9294 11 hours ago

Thank you!

[–] qaz_plm 17 hours ago

Should be able to add your email to get an invite. My invite arrived after three days.

[–] Graziano_M 18 hours ago

I got an invite after only a few weeks

[–] postepowanieadm 23 hours ago

Ghostty- maybe, but not libghostty.

[–] veidr 15 hours ago

I like Rex, too. Ghostty was never enough to use as any kind of frequent daily-use thing; I tried it, but found it basic. (I use iTerm, mainly, or Konsole on Linux.)

Rex is a more serious challenger to iTerm, for me, but atm has similar flaws (Mac only, for most functionality) without coming close on a feature basis. (Nobody uses all of iTerm's features, but most iTerm fans use a subset of them that still exceeds what less-featureful terminal apps (i.e., all of them) can do).

But libghostty is fuckig amazing. Do you have some internal/personal bespoke app that needs a terminal pane somewhere? Ask your clanker to use libghostty.

Do you have a professional, commercial product that needs a terminal somewhere? Direct your team of highly-paid experienced human software engineers to evaluate libghostty.

It's the fucking business.

[–] mijoharas 20 hours ago

I had a look to see how Rex was coming along the other day and it seems there's still no Linux beta (though MacOs users have one).

I'm still interested to check it out though none of these things have ever interested me too much so far.

[–] dcre 16 hours ago

There is a beta out for the server on Linux but not yet the frontend. So you can connect to a remote Linux box from macOS (or iOS).

[–] ksh09 1 day ago

I'd be happy there even if he did, maybe there's a delayed schedule for Rex to be publicly available.

[–] howunfortunate 1 day ago

Would be some serious 4d chess if you were his sockpuppet account.

[–] jdorfman 1 day ago

lol now that I read it back it might seem like that. I’m just a Mitchell Stan.

[–] codessta 1 day ago

After watching "You can see everything" I now have to stop and think rather than just laughing at your commment.

[–] nsonha 1 day ago

That's because he doesn't have a product yet

[–] jdorfman 1 day ago

I’m using the beta. So far so good. I’m swapping between that and Herdr. Anyone who writes macOS apps take notes on Rex’s onboarding. It was so easy to enable/grant permissions.

[–] 9dev 23 hours ago

The whole app is so incredibly satisfying and feels polished, down to every last button and animation. Buttery smooth, feels completely native. Better than some first-party macOS apps IMHO.

[–] yurishimo 20 hours ago

Just to reiterate to anyone reading this and being skeptical; it’s 10000000% better than what most apps give you in terms of affordances for allowing permissions in a Mac app.

Does this mean Apple might nuke those capabilities next year? It would not surprise me, but for right now, it’s really freaking good what they managed to put together.

It’s worth downloading the beta just to study their onboarding flow.

[–] aroman 1 day ago

No, he does, and it's extremely good. It's completely replaced herdr for me and I run it on Linux (server), macOS, and my iPhone. I've yet to run into a bug. Access is being controlled via Discord and TestFlight - you can find the link to apply on their site.

[–] mgrandl 18 hours ago

Can you describe the iOS experience? Is it just a terminal that mirrors your sessions from the server? I have yet to encounter a good terminal experience on iOS that doesn’t make me want to rip my hair out so if they have some secret sauce to make it enjoyable I would be interested…

[–] violinist 18 hours ago

It has its own server-client format that replaces both the ssh / mosh layer and the tmux layer, allowing the iOS app to connect to existing sessions on the computer (also the Mac app can either connect to the local Rex server that is included in the app, or to remote servers over Tailscale).

It doesn’t replicate the “remote authentication” part of ssh, and leaves that to Tailscale instead.

[–] dcre 16 hours ago

Here’s a demo of it on iOS. It’s on a Duo, but you can get the idea from the single-screen part of the demo.

https://xxcancel.com/almonk/status/2114390982049329442#m

[–] cellu 13 hours ago

how have you replaced herdr's worktree management with rex?

[–] bullfightonmars 13 hours ago

Rex has "sessions" which are like groups of tabs and it is scriptable, I made a little plugin that when invoked pops open a floating terminal asks for a worktree name and sets up a new worktree.

[–] aroman 12 hours ago

i'm not sure what you're referring to - if herdr had worktree management features, I never used them. that's not something i'd want my terminal multiplexer to do anyway, our worktree automation is part of the repo.