Hive

A grid of terminals for parallel agentic work.

macOS Electron app, standalone server, and remote-desktop bridge — one surface, many sessions.

What it is

The grid

Each cell is its own PTY, configured by a layout you control. Sessions stay alive across moves; scrollback persists to disk. The grid is the workspace, not a wrapper around one.

State, not just output

Every cell is in one of five states — idle, waiting, streaming, question, dead — visible in the cell header. Auto-approve, in-state timers, and jump-to-urgent are built on top of that, not heuristics bolted onto raw stdout.

HiveDesk

Terminals and remote desktops in the same grid surface. VNC, RDP, and iDRAC sessions render in cells the same way agent terminals do — one keyboard, one selection model, one set of shortcuts.

Architecture

Electron app  ─┬─►  Hive server  ─►  PTY sessions  ─►  Claude / shell processes
               │      (scrollback, IPC,
               │       multi-machine)
               │
               └─►  QuantaProxy  ─►  guacd  ─►  VNC / RDP / iDRAC
                    (HiveDesk)

The Electron renderer is the surface. The Hive server owns process lifecycle, scrollback retention, and inter-machine communication; QuantaProxy + guacd handle the remote-desktop pipeline so the renderer never speaks raw VNC.

For developers

Hive is a TypeScript codebase: an Electron renderer, a Node server, and a small set of native bridges. Read the source, run it locally, open issues.

git clone https://github.com/paxinos/hive
cd hive
npm install
npm run dev

Electron: 41.x
xterm.js: 6.x
Node: 20+
Language: TypeScript
Platform: macOS-first

For ops & teams

Hive runs as a server, not just a desktop app. The standalone daemon keeps sessions alive across reboots, persists scrollback to disk, and exposes a tray UI for status. Sessions can be reattached from a second machine.

· Server-mode tray with at-a-glance state across all sessions.
· Scrollback retained on disk; survives crashes and restarts.
· Multi-machine — connect from another host without losing state.
· Remote desktops via SSH, RDP, VNC, and iDRAC in the same grid.

Request early access

Status

What works, what's rough, and what's planned. Kept honest.

Mature

Used daily, stable surface area.

Cell grid + custom layouts
Per-cell state machine (idle / waiting / streaming / question / dead)
Scrollback retention to disk
Auto-approve with regex matching
Dashboard web UI

Experimental

Working but rough; details may change.

HiveDesk on non-macOS hosts
iDRAC6 KVM bridge (IVTP protocol)
Inline image rendering (xterm OSC 1337)
Multi-machine session reattach

Planned

Designed; not yet shipping.

Public open-source release
Linux desktop build
Plugin API
Packaged installer for non-developers