Codeman 1.40.0: the tile grid, six live sessions side by side, and a big visual overhaul

[Ark0N]

Codeman 1.40.0 is out, and it's the biggest visual overhaul so far, big enough that I skipped straight from 1.35 to 1.40. The headline is the tile grid: up to six live sessions side by side, each one a real terminal you can type in. Around it you get a new header, CLI logos everywhere an agent shows up, lineage trees, a calmer welcome screen, optional new tab layouts, and five contributors' worth of fixes and features.

The tile grid. Click Tiles in the header (or Ctrl+Shift+G) and the window turns into a grid of your sessions, up to six. Every tile is a full live terminal with its own connection, so you can watch a Claude, a Codex and a DeepSeek work at the same time and jump into whichever one needs you. Each tile's header tells you which agent runs there (its logo), which model it's on, and its state, and a tile that needs you turns red and pulses. Right-click the button to pick 2, 4 or 6 tiles. To add sessions, Ctrl/Cmd+click a tab, drag a tab onto a tile, or just hit Run while the grid is open. Drag a tile by its header to rearrange (empty cells can be anywhere), drag the dividers to resize, zoom one tile with Alt+Shift+Enter, and move around with Alt+Shift+Arrows. The grid comes back after a reload, opens and closes with a short animation, and is translated into Chinese. This one took a lot of work, mostly to make six busy agents feel as smooth as one: tiles paint first and load their terminals one per frame, history replays at the terminal's own pace, and the main terminal sleeps while the tiles own the screen. It's on by default on desktop (windows at least 1180px wide). The full guide is the new Tile Grid wiki page.

Split view got the same terminal. The split's second pane is now built on the same component as the tiles, so it never loses or doubles a keystroke on a flaky connection, reconnects by itself after a drop, keeps its size in sync with the session, and takes clickable file paths and image paste. Both panes name their agent and model up top.

A new header. The WS, CPU, MEM and plan usage readouts now default to a Compact style: two pills where every reading is a ring with a label and a value. If you like it louder there's a Tiles style, and the old look is still one setting away.

Logos everywhere. The Run menus, every agent tab (Claude's too), the tile and split headers and the welcome screen show each CLI's own logo instead of a colour dot or a two-letter pill, so you can tell Codex from DeepSeek at a glance.

Lineage trees. When one session spawns others, the lines between their tabs are now one tidy tree per family, routed between the tab rows so they never cross a tab. All families are drawn, the selected one is thicker, and a dashed branch means that worker is still busy.

New tab layouts, if you want them. The tab strip stays the way you know it, but App Settings, Appearance, Tabs, Tab Layout now offers By state (a row each for Needs you, Waiting, Working and the rest), By case (a box per case) and Ledger (an aligned grid).

A calmer welcome screen. One big launcher for your first agent, every other CLI as a slim pill under it, and the tunnel as a quiet link. The toolbar's "+" and case gear moved into the case picker.

Every session knows its model, and every agent's turns actually end. Sessions now report the model they run, following /model switches. And OpenCode, Gemini, Pi and OMP sessions no longer spin "working" forever after a turn: Codeman reads their composer bars and spinners now, and freshly started panes report idle without a reload.

Spreadsheets in the File Viewer. .xlsx files open as a read-only grid with sheet tabs, number formats, merged cells and colours, parsed entirely in your browser. Thanks @aakhter, this went through a lot of careful review rounds to make sure a hostile file can't hurt anything.

More from contributors. @opticon454 fixed Android autocorrect keyboards (SwiftKey, Gboard) duplicating the line you're typing, made the Run dropdown fit and scroll on any screen, let git status cope with big folders and slow shares, and added a nightly browser-test workflow. @Randalix made opencode tabs selectable and scrollable again and moved the test suite off fixed ports. @shenlvkang-collab added Default Codex model and reasoning effort settings, plus a bridge that lets native wrapper apps pop a session out into its own window. @JDProfresh, welcome, brought back Respawn and Ralph in Claude's Session Options, removed the broken Upload URL page, and fixed a docs papercut and a flaky test.

Heads up: Ctrl+W no longer closes a session. It's delete-word in every shell and agent CLI, and it used to kill a session mid-sentence. Bind Close Session yourself in App Settings, Shortcuts if you miss it.

Release notes: https://github.com/Ark0N/Codeman/releases/tag/codeman@1.40.0

To update: Settings, System, Updates in the app, or re-run the install line.

Thanks: @opticon454, @JDProfresh, @Randalix, @shenlvkang-collab, @aakhter.

[JDProfresh]

Absolutely loving the new tiles and other new features. Thank you!