nest

nest · loading the house

A terminal multiplexer you walk around in.

Nest puts your terminals on the walls of a house you build yourself. Every screen is a real shell, live from across the room. Walk up, jack in, and the keyboard is yours.

Download for Mac Take the tour

Runs in this page. A real Nest house, down to the candles on the desk.

the screens

Real terminals, not props.

Every screen runs your own shell with full terminal emulation, so vim, top, TUIs and Nerd Font prompts all work. Your shells live in a server of their own, and they keep running when you close Nest.

A screen only draws when its terminal changes, so a wall of them costs next to nothing while they sit idle.

the room

The room is the dashboard.

When something wants you, its screen's border flashes three times, then glows until you look at it. If an agent is waiting, a line on the floor leads you there: through the doors, and into the elevator if it's on another floor.

  • Needs you a permission, a question, a login
  • Failed a command, a run, a turn
  • Finished a program says it's done
  • Notification from anything that can print

Coding agents report their own status. Any script can with one escape sequence.

jacked in

Sit down. Type.

Click a screen and every key goes to the terminal, plain Esc included. Double-tap ⌘ to get back on your feet. Tabs are keycaps set into the housing: click one, or the + for another. The wheel reads back through what scrolled by.

Try it: click the screen to sit, and answer the agent. The shells here are a demo in your browser; in Nest they're yours.

build mode

You draw the house.

Drag rooms out on a floor plan. Click a wall to cut a door or a window. Then get back on your feet and furnish it from a hotbar: hold something, and a hologram shows where it lands, snapped to the surface you're aiming at.

Screens mount on any wall, desk, floor or ceiling, in slim, retro CRT, frameless or industrial housings, in about 630 color themes.

programmable

A room that reacts.

Lamps and neon listen for what happens in your terminals: a bell, a command failing, output going quiet. Every shell has a nest command for the rest, and it works from scripts and over ssh.

$ make && nest alert done "build ok" \
       || nest alert failed "build broke"
$ nest fx room pulse '#ff8800' 10
$ nest signal build.ok

Nothing a terminal prints can make Nest run anything.

outside

There's a city out there.

The house stands high up, with towers to the hills and traffic in the streets. The sky follows your clock and the date, so the sun sets when yours does and the moon is at its real phase. The weather turns by itself, or on your say-so.

$ make || nest weather storm 5
time
weather

floors

A floor for every project.

Give a floor a name and a folder, and every screen you put up on it opens there. Walk up to the elevator and the doors open. Press a button and the car hums a moment and lets you out on the next one.

the real thing

An agent needs you. You walk over and sit down.

Recorded in Nest: the border lights up, a line on the floor leads the way, and one key sends the deploy.

A paneled library with a patterned rug, a full bookshelf, potted plants, a desk with candles and a retro monitor, and a huge terminal on the wall.
A huge wall terminal between hanging lanterns and a tripod floor lamp, an agent waiting for an answer on it.
A desk with candles, books and a retro CRT running a build, beside a window with rain outside.

the kit

Every panel built like a piece of hardware.

Keycaps with a lip, sunken wells, amber readouts. All from the game.

The Battle Station: every screen as a live card with its status, one marked needs you, others working, with filters for agents, needs input, builds and alerts.
Battle StationTabEvery screen, live, wherever it is. Filter, search, and jump straight in.
The floor plan: the rooms of the house from above on a blueprint grid, with their names and sizes, and a list of floors.
Floor planBTabDrag rooms, cut openings, stack floors.
Build mode in the library, with a hotbar of nine slots along the bottom of the screen.
Build modeBA hotbar and your hands. Pick things up, put them down, copy what you're looking at.
The catalog: tabs of screens, lights, neon, plants, furniture, decor, walls and paint, with a rendered picture of each.
CatalogEEvery item with its own picture, and a search.
The theme browser beside a wall terminal: a searchable list of themes with a live preview.
ThemesTBrowse, and the screen you're facing previews each one.
Settings on the Keys page: a sidebar of settings pages and a grid of rebindable keys.
Keys⌘,Disconnecting, tabs, splits, walking, building. Change nearly all of them.

under the floorboards

A game on the outside. A terminal all the way through.

on rex too

Already living in Rex? Nest can move in.

Nest also runs on Rex's server. Pick Rex in Settings → Hosts and you're walking through what Rex is already running: its sessions are floors, its windows are screens, and Nest keeps your house beside them.

Settings → Hosts
  This Mac
● Rex   Rex.app's server
        its sessions are floors,
        its windows screens

Shells that outlive the game

Your shells belong to birdie, a server that runs on its own. Quit Nest, update Nest, or crash Nest, and every build keeps going. Come back and they're on the walls where you left them.

Other machines are other houses

Run the server on a Linux box or another Mac and pair with it. Then Settings → Hosts walks you into that machine's house and shells. birdie ls, attach and send still work over plain ssh.

Programs can say what they're doing

One escape sequence, OSC 7501, and the LEDs in a screen's bezel sweep or fill with progress, and its tab's keycap shows a ring, a check, a cross, or a mark when it's blocked on you.

$ nest status working "Deploying" --progress 40

A house programs can read

Shells know where they are. nest whoami gives the screen, room, floor and folder. nest screens --json gives every pane in the house, so an agent can tell what's running down the hall.

Fast where it counts

While you're jacked in, the frame rate lifts to your display's, 120 Hz on a ProMotion Mac, and screens out of the picture stop drawing. Get up and it drops back to the cap.

Keys are yours

Disconnecting, tabs and splits, the switcher, walking, building: nearly every key can change. Settings shows what clashes, and how to get each one back.

Come on in.

Build a house and put your shells on the walls.

Download for Mac