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.
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