Hako started on my paternity leave. Most of my work then happened on my phone, with agents running on the Macs at home. I used Moshi, and it did the job, but it was slower than I wanted: moving between computers took a while, and even moving between projects wasn’t as quick as I needed.
So I tried writing my own terminal. It quickly became the one I reached for first, because it was fast and did exactly what I needed. Panes draw with the latest libghostty, the engine behind Ghostty.
My agents already ran in herdr, and herdr is amazing. Its sidebar was the one thing holding it back: on a phone it’s unusable, and even on a desktop it can only draw ASCII characters. That’s why I built a new sidebar, as native UI. Owning it opened up a lot: every agent on every Mac in one list, colored by what each one is doing. On the phone, another project is just a swipe away, whichever Mac or computer it lives on.
It worked so well on the phone that I wanted the same thing on my Mac: the same Macs, projects and panes in the same places, and a Handoff from one to the other. So Hako for Mac followed.
From then on, all my free time went into it. And because Hako lives on a phone, free time meant anywhere, not just in front of a computer. Doing the groceries, I improved Hako. At the gym, I improved Hako. Most of it was built that way: from inside Hako, wherever I happened to be.
If you run agents on more than one Mac, I hope it gives you some of that freedom too.
Eugeniu VozocaMaker of Hako