How should I pick between terminals, multiplexers and agent apps?
Pick what you're doing, and the page shows which tools can do it and which combination to run. It compares tools on macOS, and its facts were checked on 2026-11-07 against the sources under See also.
Layers
A terminal setup is up to three programs stacked together. Some tools cover one layer and some cover all three. Click a tool to see what it does.
A multiplexer runs many shell sessions inside one terminal, as panes and tabs. It runs them in a background program, so they keep going when you close the window or lose the connection to a server. You detach, come back later, and reattach to find everything where you left it. tmux and Zellij are the common ones, and they fill the middle layer below.
Closing a tab or pane is different. That ends the session in every tool here, tmux included. What a session keeper protects is the session while the tab stays open.
- Window
- Draws the text, tabs and splits on your screen.
- Session keeper
- Keeps programs running after you close the window, on this computer or on another machine. This is the multiplexer's job.
- Agent control
- Knows which agent is waiting on you, and lets a script or agent start, read and type into panes.
| Tool | Kind | Window | Session keeper | Agent control |
|---|
covers it partly no
Use cases
Each use case turns on the needs it depends on. Tools that can't meet them fade in the layer chart above and the matrix below. You can also switch needs on and off yourself.
Matrix
Every tool against every need. Hover, tap or tab to a "part" or "?" cell to see what's missing. A "?" means the sources didn't settle it.
Agent GUIs
The Agent GUIs group runs agents as chat threads, usually one git worktree per thread, with a terminal off to the side. Pick from it when you'd rather manage agents from a chat window than from terminal panes.
Orca and T3 Code run any CLI agent. The Claude and ChatGPT apps each run only their own vendor's agent and need an account, but their cloud sessions keep going after you close the laptop.
Bugs
- Warp: whether sessions keep running after you quit, and whether panes can be driven from a script, weren't settled, so those cells show "?".
- T3 Code: its docs don't cover terminal splits, or whether agent sessions survive closing the app.
- Claude desktop (Code) and ChatGPT desktop (Codex): their docs don't say whether local sessions keep running after you quit the app.
- Claude desktop (Code): its docs don't show a marker for a session that's waiting on you.
- Windows and Linux-only tools, such as Windows Terminal, aren't compared. The page covers macOS.
- Conductor is left out: it announced on 2026-11-04 that it's joining Meta.
- Paseo, Paradev (formerly Superset) and Emdash are newer agent GUIs that this page doesn't cover yet.