TUIOS: Terminal Multiplexer With Tiling WM and Kitty Graphics

My notes

Summary

TUIOS is a Go terminal multiplexer/window manager (Charm stack: Bubble Tea v2, Lipgloss v2) that replaces tmux’s fixed-rate redraw model with event-driven rendering, adds native kitty-graphics image/video passthrough, and layers in a BSP/niri-style tiling window manager on top of session persistence (daemon mode + session resurrection). It positions itself as tmux plus a real WM plus a Kitty-aware terminal emulator, in a single static Go binary.

Key Insight

• Event-driven rendering, not ticking: PTY reader goroutines push output through a buffered channel to trigger a Bubble Tea render, instead of redrawing on a fixed-rate timer. Result: near-zero idle CPU. This is a structural difference from most terminal multiplexers, which poll/refresh continuously even when nothing changed.
• Kitty graphics done properly, not just supported: most terminals that “support” the kitty graphics protocol still flicker or tear on video. TUIOS reuses image IDs across frames (no delete+re-place) and wraps graphics output in mode 2026 synchronized-output, batched with the render cycle, the stated result is flicker-free mpv --vo=kitty playback inside a multiplexed pane. Sixel is present but explicitly experimental (no pixel-level clipping yet).
• Real tiling WM semantics, not just splits: BSP (binary space partitioning) tiling with spiral layout and preselection (control where the next pane spawns), plus a niri-inspired scrolling-columns layout and a master-stack layout, a feature set closer to Hyprland/niri window managers than to tmux’s manual pane splitting.
• Concrete performance engineering, not just claims: the changelog lists specific micro-optimizations, removed defer/recover from the style-comparison hot path (~20k calls/frame), LRU style cache with sequence-based change detection (40-60% allocation reduction), viewport culling for off-screen/minimized panes, and a fast render path for unfocused panes that uses the emulator’s built-in Render() instead of cell-by-cell iteration.
• Session model matches tmux’s daemon/attach pattern but adds resurrection: tuios new/attach/ls/kill-session mirror tmux, but sessions are stated to survive a daemon restart or full reboot, restoring pane structure and working directories, tmux itself has no built-in equivalent (that gap is normally filled by the separate tmux-resurrect/tmux-continuum plugins).
• Scriptable via a tape DSL: a dedicated scripting language records/replays terminal workflows and can run headless in CI (tuios tape run), and saved layouts can be exported directly to tape scripts, useful for reproducible demo environments or onboarding scripts, not just interactive use.
• Driven by a JSON control protocol: the daemon exposes a documented JSON verb protocol, meaning external tools (or an agent) could drive pane creation/layout programmatically rather than only through keybindings, relevant for anyone building automation on top of a terminal environment.