Freshell – Contributing to Open Source

Dan Shapiro just open-sourced Freshell — a browser-based terminal multiplexer for Claude Code, Codex, and other coding CLIs that lets you detach and reattach sessions, browse your coding history, and access everything from your phone. The tagline is “What if tmux and Claude fell in love?” which is about right. It can be pronounced multiple ways: Free-shell, Fresh-hell, fresh-shell. I’ve been thinking of it as Fresh-hell, which amuses me.

As part of my exploration into AI coding, I decided to start contributing to open-source projects. I’ve been around open source for decades as a user and investor, but I’ve never been a consistent contributor. That’s changing now — it’s a natural extension of the learning I described in Blurry Transitions, and the best way to understand how software gets built today is to actually build it with other people.

Freshell is my first project. Dan and I have been working together for over a decade at Glowforge, and I love working with him.

I’ve been using iTerm2 for about six months. I expect I’ll have switched to Freshell by the end of the weekend. It already does most of what I want, and a lot more is coming. The combination of persistent sessions, browsing the CLI history, and the ability to access my terminals from any device is enough on its own. But the thing that makes me want to contribute rather than just use it is that it’s early — there’s a bunch of stuff to build, it’s something I will use continuously, and by participating in the open-source project, I can see how the changes I make work in that context.

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