Mandor

A fast, lightweight desktop app for running and managing multiple interactive claude sessions — each in its own real terminal.

Mandor spawns the actual interactive claude CLI in a pseudo-terminal (PTY) per session and renders it with a full terminal emulator. Because every session is a genuine interactive terminal, you get the complete CLI experience with nothing reimplemented: native permission prompts, slash commands, /resume, output styling, and --remote-control all just work. Mandor adds the part the terminal doesn't give you — a proper home for many sessions at once.

Status: early, but a daily driver. I've used Mandor every day for about a month on Ubuntu 26.04 — that's the only platform I actually run it on. macOS and Windows builds exist and install, but I've never used them day to day; treat them as untested.

Why Mandor

I built this for my own working day. My work is spread across separate repos — backend, frontend, research — and a single ticket usually spans more than one of them: one touching both BE and FE means two sessions, in two repos, at two different stages. Running that in plain terminal tabs gets unwieldy fast — you lose track of which session is in which repo, which one is waiting on you, and which one you were about to resume.

Mandor keeps each session a real terminal but wraps the pile in a sidebar you can actually navigate, so juggling a dozen sessions across projects stays calm instead of chaotic.

The design goal is deliberately narrow: be the best possible shell around the real CLI, and reimplement none of it. Mandor never parses or re-renders the conversation — it hosts the genuine claude process and stays out of the way.

Features

• Session sidebar — organize sessions into groups, drag to reorder, and see at a glance which are working and which need your attention.
• New & resume — start a session in any directory (with a recent-directory picker), or resume an existing one; supports -w worktrees, --model, and --remote-control.
• Incognito sessions — run against a throwaway config directory so nothing is written to your ~/.claude history.
• Themes & fonts — Catppuccin flavors, a Ghostty-style dark theme, or paste your own palette; pick any installed monospace family, set a point size, and toggle ligatures.
• Attention & notifications — a titlebar bell and desktop notifications tell you when a session finishes or needs input; an audible bell is included.
• Split view — tile up to four sessions in one window to watch related work (a backend and a frontend session on the same ticket) side by side.
• Suspend idle sessions — stop a session's claude to reclaim its memory while keeping it resumable, manually or automatically after N idle hours; pin the ones that must keep running.
• Filter the sidebar — narrow a long list to just what's running or what needs you.
• Find-in-session and pop-out windows for focused work.
• PR awareness — a session shows a badge when it has an associated pull request.
• Restart-to-update prompt when a new build is installed.

Install

Grab a build from the latest release (or build it yourself, below).

Linux (x86_64):

sudo dpkg -i Mandor_*_amd64.deb           # Debian / Ubuntu
sudo dnf install ./Mandor-*.x86_64.rpm    # Fedora / RHEL
chmod +x Mandor_*_amd64.AppImage && ./Mandor_*_amd64.AppImage   # any distro

Arch / CachyOS: the AppImage works as-is.

macOS (universal — Apple Silicon & Intel): open Mandor_*_universal.dmg and drag Mandor to Applications. The build is only ad-hoc signed — not signed with a Developer ID and not notarized — so Gatekeeper refuses to launch it while the download carries a quarantine flag (spctl reports no usable signature). Clear the flag once per install:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Mandor.app

Repeat after installing each new build; macOS re-applies quarantine to every download. The old right-click → Open trick is unreliable here: macOS 15 (Sequoia) removed that bypass for ad-hoc-signed apps.

Windows (x86_64, experimental): run Mandor_*_x64-setup.exe. The installer is unsigned, so SmartScreen will warn you (More info → Run anyway). This build is untested — it compiles and installs, but I don't run Windows; if sessions fail to start there, please open an issue.

Mandor launches the claude CLI from your PATH, so make sure claude is installed and runnable from a terminal first.

Build from source

Requires Bun, a Rust toolchain, and the Tauri v2 system dependencies for your platform.

bun install
bun run tauri build --bundles deb
# → src-tauri/target/release/bundle/deb/

Develop

bun install
bun run dev        # dev app: separate identifier/config namespace + amber titlebar

• Frontend edits: run bun build ui/app.js --target=browser to syntax-check, then press Ctrl+R in the running app. Backend (Rust) edits auto-rebuild.
• Format everything: bun run fmt (Prettier over ui/, cargo fmt for Rust).

The frontend is intentionally vanilla JS/CSS with no bundler and no framework — ui/ is served as-is, and third-party libraries are vendored into ui/vendor/. See CLAUDE.md for the full project constraints and architecture notes.

Tech

Tauri v2 (Rust) · portable-pty for PTYs · vanilla JS/CSS frontend · xterm.js for terminal rendering (vendored).

Credits

• Bell / notification sound: "Film special effects — short digital notification alert" from Pixabay, used under the Pixabay Content License (free to use, no attribution required). Bundled as ui/notification.mp3 (re-encoded to mono for size).
• Terminal rendering: xterm.js (vendored in ui/vendor/).
• Default terminal font: JetBrains Mono (OFL).

This is one person's workflow — fork it

Mandor is shaped end to end by how I work: the grouping, the defaults, the keyboard shortcuts, what gets a notification, what doesn't. That's the point — it's a tool I use, not a product trying to suit everyone.

So if something here doesn't fit your style, don't wait on me: fork it and make it yours. That's the intended outcome, and the GPL-3.0 license guarantees you can. Issues and PRs are welcome too, but a fork that fits your day beats a feature request that half-fits mine.

License

GPL-3.0. Mandor is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic.