Limen: a terminal workspace launcher
A keyboard-driven launcher for local and SSH tmux workspaces, with explicit handoff from selection to execution.
in progress
A terminal session begins with a small decision that repeats all day: which machine, and which workspace? Limen turns that transition into a keyboard-driven interface without taking ownership of the work inside the session.
CTO to Human: reduce the cost of getting oriented
The launcher has two stages: choose a host, then choose an existing tmux session or create one. The same shape works locally and over SSH. Its value is a consistent threshold into the workspace, rather than another application people must maintain while they work.
The public repository describes active implementation. The project’s scope is deliberately narrow: selecting a host and session, showing useful status and handing control to the existing terminal tools.
Engineer to Engineer: compose established mechanisms
Limen is written in Go with Bubble Tea for the terminal state machine and Lip Gloss for presentation. It uses tmux IPC and native OpenSSH, with a JSON declaration of the available hosts. Existing sessions remain tmux sessions; remote access remains SSH.
That composition is the useful design choice. The launcher can improve discovery without inventing a second session protocol or a replacement remote shell. Host reachability and session counts help selection, while the escape path avoids trapping a user in the picker.
The repository contains the implementation and design specification. This journal will cover the transitions, failure behavior and packaging decisions as they are documented.