I Love tmux. But I Switched to Something with Themes, Plugins, and a Config That Doesn't Fight Back.

Tom Dringer — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 17:35:10 +0000

This story originally appeared on Medium

If you've spent any real time in the terminal, you've probably settled into a multiplexer. tmux is the obvious choice — it's
battle-tested, endlessly configurable, and runs everywhere. GNU Screen is still kicking for people who learned it a decade ago.
Zellij has earned a following with its friendlier defaults. These are all good tools. I'm not here to argue otherwise.

But there's a ceiling you hit with all of them. Not in functionality — they can all split panes, manage sessions, and keep your
work alive through a disconnected SSH session. The ceiling is comfort. The feeling that your terminal workspace is yours, rather
than a configuration file you're constantly losing the thread of.

That's the gap Mado is trying to fill.

A sidebar that actually does something

Most multiplexers give you panes. Mado gives you panes and a sidebar — but not the kind that just shows a file tree and calls it done. The sidebar runs independent plugins: small executables that draw their own UI and respond to keyboard and mouse input.

Out of the box you get a clock, a Pomodoro timer, a clipboard history manager, a Tasku stats monitor, Tasku workspaces, Tasku priorities, World time, task timer and an AI assistant panel. Each one lives in the sidebar while your terminal work carries on uninterrupted.

The plugin protocol is straightforward enough that you can write your own in whatever language you're comfortable with. Plugins receive events as JSON on stdin and render by writing pixel frames to stdout. That's the whole contract. There's no SDK to install, no framework to learn.

Your work, exactly where you left it

Switch projects in the Mado sidebar and your current layout is parked — all panes, their working directories, and scroll

positions saved automatically. Switch back later and everything is restored exactly as you left it. No manual session saving, no tmux-resurrect, no lost context. If you've ever come back to a terminal session and spent five minutes reconstructing which directory was open in which pane, you'll know immediately why this matters.

Configuration without the archaeology

Anyone who's spent an afternoon tracking down where tmux actually reads its config on a new machine knows the feeling. Mado

takes the opposite approach: one command, mado config, opens your configuration in $EDITOR. It's a single TOML file. Theme,
font, shell, plugins — all in one place, all in a format you can read without consulting a man page.

Custom themes work the same way. Drop a .toml file into ~/.config/mado/themes/, update your config file and it appears automatically. No restart, no rebuild.

Twenty-two themes, because comfort is visual too

This is the part that might sound frivolous until you've spent eight hours staring at a terminal that feels slightly wrong. Mado ships with twenty-two themes built on Tailwind's colour palettes — Slate, Indigo, Emerald, Rose, and nineteen others. Each theme coordinates the terminal colours, sidebar chrome, focus indicators, and toolbar into something that feels deliberate rather than assembled. One line in your config to change everything.

The point

tmux isn't going anywhere, and it shouldn't. It's the right tool for a lot of situations — servers, remote sessions, scripted

environments. Mado isn't trying to replace it. It's trying to answer a different question: what does a multiplexer look like when it's built for the machine you actually work on every day?

Mado is open source, macOS-only, and launches in public beta on October 1st. Linux and Windows support is on the roadmap.

Your Terminal Tasks, Everywhere: Introducing Tasku Cloud

Tom Dringer — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 17:08:26 +0000

Note: This story originally appeared on Medium.

If you've been using Tasku — the open-source CLI task manager — you already know the appeal. No dashboards, no browser tabs, no bloated SaaS. Just a clean terminal interface, SQLite under the hood, and your tasks exactly where you're already working.

But there's always been one catch: your tasks live on one machine.

Switch to your laptop, your tasks aren't there. Work with a team, and everyone's working in isolation. That's what Tasku Cloud fixes.

What is Tasku Cloud?

Tasku Cloud is the companion web app for Tasku. It backs up your tasks to the cloud, keeps them in sync across every device you work on, and — for teams — gives everyone a shared view of what's being worked on.

It's not a replacement for the CLI. It's a layer on top. Your local SQLite database is still the source of truth. Tasku Cloud is opt-in, and if you ever stop using it, your data is exactly where you left it.

Why you need it

Your tasks should follow you

You're on your desktop, you add a task. You pick up your laptop on the sofa, it's there. You open a browser at work, it's there. That's cloud sync — and it should just work.

Backups matter

SQLite is rock solid, but it lives in ~/.tasku/tasks.db. One bad rm -rf, one failed disk, and it's gone. Tasku Cloud backs everything up automatically so you never have to think about it.

Teams need a shared view

The Tasku CLI is brilliant for solo work, but the moment you're working with other people, you need more. Who's working on what? What's blocked? What's overdue? Tasku Cloud's Teams plan brings shared projects, task assignment, and an activity feed — without turning into Jira.

The same Tasku you know

One of the things that makes Tasku Cloud feel right is that it doesn't reinvent anything. The fields are the same ones you use in the CLI and in Mado: status, priority, due dates, projects, categories, tags. No mapping, no import/export dance. It just looks like Tasku — because it is.

Pricing

Tasku Cloud is free for individuals. Sign up, connect your tasks, and get cloud backup and sync with no credit card and no trial period.

The Teams plan adds everything you need for collaborative work:

Shared projects and tasks
Team member assignments
Activity feed

That's it. No per-seat pricing tiers, no feature gates on the things you actually need.

Get started

Head to tasku.cloud, create a free account, and have your tasks in the cloud in minutes. If you haven't tried the Tasku CLI yet, install it first:

gem install tasku

And if you're a macOS user, keep an eye on Mado — launching October 1st with Tasku built right into the sidebar.

DEV Community: Tom Dringer