The terminal is still where most developers live. The UNIX philosophy of being able to shuffle data from one application to another is essential when one’s job is building things; reusable components are a critical necessity. As such, when developers build tools, even when not thinking about interoperability, the first class audience is the terminal. Now with LLMs making it almost trivial to build decent UIs, terminal user interfaces (TUIs) are popping up to supplement command-line interfaces (CLIs) that came from the first command prompts.

If you are an Emacs user, you might have a terminal open on another screen next to your full-screen Emacs instance to handle the various commands you will need to enter, and this is a perfectly valid workflow that many of us use. However, terminal emulation in emacs has gotten pretty good in the past few years; and in particular vterm is amazingly performant. Unless you are doing something that is pushing the boundaries of performance, vterm is able to handle your needs.

Unfortunately, the window management for vterm is pretty abysmal. Creating new windows gives you vterm <1>, vterm <2>, vterm <3>, and so on, which isn’t very helpful and has an obnoxious cognitive overhead when working with multiple windows. The package multi-vterm helps by associating one vterm instance per project directory, but in order to go beyond that, falling back to vterm numbered buffers is still necessary.

I want to run multiple terminal buffers per project, and sometimes even multiple instances of the same program in the same project, and be able to name them semantically. This isn’t a huge ask, and multiple packages do various parts of this, but not altogether. So that is why vtermux exists.

vtermux allows you to specify any number of programs that you can run individually in the context of a directory. The package exports one macro, vtermux-define, which allows you to specify the programs you want in a straightforward way:

(use-package vtermux
  :ensure
  (:host github :repo "pcmantz/vtermux")
  :after vterm
  :bind ("C-c v" . vtermux-run)
  :config

  ;; shells
  (vtermux-define bash)
  (vtermux-define zsh)

  ;; dev tools
  (vtermux-define pitchfork :args "tui")
  (vtermux-define claude)
  (vtermux-define opencode :args "-m")

  ;; ops tools
  (vtermux-define btop)
  (vtermux-define htop))

For claude, this gives you the following commands:

For those following at home, this gives you a TUI or CLI interface to any existing program in Emacs in one line.

So what can you do with this? Well, during development, I had OpenCode working on fixing bugs while I had Claude do code review. You could even use two instances, as the claude-new command that gets generated takes a label argument, so you would end up with *claude - ~/git/vtermux/* and *claude - ~/git/vtermux/* (review), which makes it easier to manage an ever-increasing amount of tools in one place.

Rather than having to run every command manually, there is a built-in launcher vtermux-run which can be bound from the use-package statement as seen above. so with the above configuration, you get the following prompt:

vtermux b c h o p t z:

Which launches the corresponding program. If you already have a corresponding buffer for the project (or directory, read the docs!), you will be asked for a label and you’ll have both your programs running happily together.

Please give vtermux a try! I’ve been using it happily in my efforts to turn Emacs into an LLM-powered IDE (article forthcoming…). I suspect this package will be able to bridge a lot gaps in developer workflows that otherwise would take a lot of custom code and effort, which maybe erroneous when a suitable TUI is right there.

Many thanks to the authors of the packages reformatter, multi-term, multi-vterm, and vterm itself for all the inspiration and time they have saved me by allowing me to cobble together an effective workspace to get things done. I hope this helps others in the same fashion.

M.C. Pantz

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