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Waffle

Native macOS terminal that auto-tiles sessions into a grid

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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.

HN · launched Apr 11, 2026 · 40 upvotes (top 18%) · 0 views

Niche: terminal emulators and utilities · 106 launches, 1 in the last 7 days ▼ -88% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Horizontal
  • Dev tools
  • Developer
  • Not AI
  • Commercial product

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

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 : 413 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #108 of 414 (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 0.52
  • Wimi · ph · 2026-11-07 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.50
  • QuiltMac · ph · 2026-11-07 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.49
  • Naqsh · ph · 2026-11-03 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.48
  • Sash · hn · 2026-04-10 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.47
  • boringBar · hn · 2026-04-12 · 520 upvotes · similarity 0.47
  • Toastty · ph · 2026-09-18 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
  • TileMyMac · ph · 2026-10-19 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.46

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