The family

Three small Rust tools by Chris McLennan. Each runs standalone. Together they form a host (tmnl) and two reference native-mode clients (mnml, mixr).

tmnl

A GPU-rendered macOS terminal. Hosts your $SHELL like any terminal — and also hosts apps that draw directly into its cell grid via the tmnl-protocol wire format.

You’re here.  Install · GitHub

mnml

A NvChad-style terminal IDE. Pluggable input layer (vim or standard editing — picked at launch, no per-keymap branching downstream), LSP, git, fuzzy everything, baked-in HTTP client. Runs in any terminal; under tmnl it gets native-tab integration.

mnml.sh · GitHub

mixr

A terminal DJ app. Beatport streaming, MIDI controller support, Claude DJ for auto-mixing. The crossfader, knobs, and waveforms render as actual graphics inside tmnl (instead of unicode block art) thanks to the cell-streaming protocol.

mixr.sh · GitHub

Why a family

These tools were each built standalone, but they kept growing toward each other. Three shared threads now run through all three:

Shared aesthetic. Same > name prompt-style wordmark on the app icons (orange caret, monospace name on a charcoal gradient bezel). Same charcoal + warm-orange palette in the UIs. The icons are obviously siblings on the dock.

Shared settings UI convention. All three apps’ Settings modals follow the same idiom — a sectioned scrollable list, ▸ focus marker, [bracket] for the current choice, * for “modified from default”, ←→ to adjust a row, r to reset the focused row, R to reset all, Enter to save, Esc to cancel back to the opened-state snapshot. No shared crate — each app implements its own ~150-200 lines — but the muscle memory transfers.

Shared protocol. The tmnl-protocol crate is the wire format for native-mode tabs. tmnl is the server (owns the window + GPU), and any app that wants to run as a native tab is a client. mnml and mixr both ship a --blit <socket> flag that connects them as tmnl native tabs — the cell grid streams over a Unix socket, no ANSI in between. See Native tabs for the protocol walkthrough.

What “native tab” buys each app

• mnml gets native-tab integration with workspace switching, and can pop a running pty session out into a sibling tmnl tab via SCM_RIGHTS fd-passing (the shell keeps running). It also becomes the host for its own blit-host binaries — a third class of integration where a separate program owns an mnml pane and renders into it over tmnl-protocol.
• mixr stops being a pile of unicode block-art. Its crossfader, knobs, and transport render as real graphics. The ♪ chip on mnml’s statusline reads mixr’s ~/.mixr/quick.txt so the now-playing track surfaces in your editor without flipping windows.

What’s standalone

Each app works fine without the others. mnml runs in any terminal. mixr runs in any terminal. tmnl works as a regular terminal emulator hosting your shell. The integration is purely additive — and entirely opt-in via the --blit flag — so you can adopt one tool without committing to the rest.