Waffle
Native macOS terminal that auto-tiles sessions into a grid
Details
- External ID
- 47730522
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Waffle
- Website domain
- waffle.baby
- Launched
- April 11, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 40
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8232647814910026
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Hi HN. I built Waffle because I kept ending up with 15 terminal windows scattered across three spaces with no idea what was running where.Splitting/merging in iTerm kind of works but it never felt intuitive to me.With that in mind, I built something to suit my workflow:Waffle is a native macOS terminal (Built on Miguel de Icaza's SwiftTerm) that tiles your sessions into an auto-scaling grid automatically. 1 session is fullscreen, 2 is side by side, 4 is 2x2, 9 is 3x3. Open a terminal, it joins the grid. Close one, the grid rebalances. No splitting, no config.I've been using it a lot recently and one thing I've found really useful is that sessions detect which repo they're in and group accordingly. Each project gets a distinct colour. Cmd+[ and Cmd+] flip between groups. If you have three repos open across eight terminals, you can filter to just one project's sessions instantly. Also, no accidentally closing a window with CMD-W as it gives you a confirmation and requires a second CMD-W to close.Honestly, if you live in tmux, this probably isn't for you but it's really helped to speed up my workflow.Other things: It comes with a handful of themes (and has support for iTerm themes), bundled JetBrains mono, has keyboard shortcuts for everything. Free, no account, opt-in analytics only. macOS 14+.There's a demo on the landing page if you want to see it in action.
Enrichment
- Theme
- macOS utilities and system tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- macos terminal that auto-tiles sessions into a grid
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial While the basic UI chrome and grid layout can be vibe-coded, a performant native macOS terminal emulator requires low-level POSIX pty handling, VT100/xterm escape parsing, and GPU-accelerated text rendering.
What it would actually take: The app would be built in Swift/AppKit, integrating libghostty or an embedded libvterm parser along with Apple Metal for performant glyph rendering. The hardest challenge is robust PTY management, IPC session lifecycles, and sub-frame latency terminal output parsing under heavy AI agent streaming loads, requiring systems programming experience beyond standard vibe coding.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: tmux, Windows Terminal
Concerns raised: Closed source - no publicly inspectable source code, macOS only - not available for other platforms, Window size changes can ruin pane layout
Feature requests: Custom key bindings, Focus-follows-mouse (auto-focus on hover), Window reordering
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 170 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #46 of 171 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 146 days after the earliest competitor.
- A terminal glued to the macOS dock · hn · 2026-08-06 · 55 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Sash · hn · 2026-04-10 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Toastty · ph · 2026-09-18 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- boringBar · hn · 2026-04-12 · 520 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Deckard, Claude-first terminal manager · hn · 2026-04-02 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Omacosy · hn · 2026-08-20 · 57 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Chain Your Mac · ph · 2026-09-20 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Split · ph · 2026-09-25 · 57 upvotes · similarity 0.42
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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