Show HN: Waffle – Native macOS terminal that auto-tiles sessions into a grid

olleeolleeollee 30 points 8 comments April 11, 2026
waffle.baby · View on Hacker News

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.

Discussion Highlights (4 comments)

billylo

love this. thanks for sharing!

throwaway290

> Honestly, if you live in tmux, this probably isn't for you but it's really helped to speed up my workflow. Fresh honesty, nice.

jamesgresql

This is great, no more lost terminal screens!

replwoacause

Looks really nice! Super clean site too. How did you make the animation at the top?

Semantic search powered by Rivestack pgvector
4,259 stories · 39,825 chunks indexed