# ZMX ZMX is session attach/detach for the terminal. Start a shell, walk away, come back and reattach with the session and its output intact. It does session persistence, and nothing else. Created by neurosnap, sponsored by pico.sh, written in Zig, [[MIT License]]. ## What it does - Attach and detach from shell sessions without killing them - **Native terminal scrollback restoration**, so reattaching gives you back real scrollback rather than a repainted screen - Multiple clients on the same session at once - Send commands to a session remotely - Read scrollback history as plain text - macOS and [[Linux]] Architecture is small: one daemon per session, each with its own Unix socket, and terminal state restored through `libghostty-vt` (the terminal engine from [[Ghostty]]), which captures and replays output and state when a client reconnects. Install via binaries, Homebrew, mise, nixpkgs, community packages for Alpine, Arch, openSUSE and Gentoo, or build from source with Zig. ## What it deliberately doesn't do No window management. No tabs. No splits. Those are your window manager's job. That's the whole design argument, and it's aimed at [[TMux]]. TMux bundles session persistence with a full multiplexer: panes, layouts, a keybinding language, its own copy mode. ZMX takes the persistence and hands everything else back to software that already does it well. On a tiling setup, the window manager is better at splits than tmux is, and the terminal is better at scrollback than tmux is. A reason to be careful: this is a young project doing one job, against a tool that has been on every server for twenty years. If you need a multiplexer on a remote box you don't control, tmux is still the answer because it's already there. ## References - Documentation: https://zmx.sh - Source code: https://github.com/neurosnap/zmx - Blog posts: https://bower.sh/?tag=zmx - IRC chat (#pico.sh on Libera): https://web.libera.chat/gamja?autojoin=#pico.sh ## Related - [[Ghostty]] - [[Zellij]] - [[quotawake]] - [[Linux]] - [[Open Source]] - [[MIT License]]