The new Terminal Multiplexer

I built a terminal multiplexer for macOS developers who live in the terminal 👋

I'm Tom, and I'm launching Mado — a macOS terminal multiplexer built in Rust that I've been working on full-time for the past year.
The problem

I spend most of my working day in the terminal. tmux and iTerm2 are great tools but they've always felt like they were designed for a different era — configuration-heavy, visually spartan, and disconnected
from the rest of your workflow. I wanted something that felt like a first-class macOS app, not a port from 1987.

What Mado is

Mado gives you tmux-style pane management with a sidebar plugin architecture, a beautiful theme system built on Tailwind CSS palettes, and a pixel plugin protocol that lets developers build native-feeling
visual panels — not just more text — directly inside their terminal environment.

It ships with built-in integrations for task management (via Tasku, my terminal task manager), an AI chat panel, world clock, system stats, and more.

The stack

Built in Rust using the Slint UI framework, with a custom VT100 terminal state machine. macOS-first, with Linux and Windows ports planned.

Open source

Mado is open source. Terminal developers are a skeptical audience — you should be able to read the code and trust the tool before you commit to living in it.

What I'd love from this community

Honest feedback. If you're a terminal-first developer on macOS, I'd love to know what's missing, what's wrong, and what would make you switch.

Happy to answer any questions below 👇