staxide.com• May 27, 2026• 1 min read
Show HN: STAX IDE – A zoomable macOS canvas of terminals and toolsHi HN. STAX IDE is a macOS app where every terminal session, code editor, and file browser is a movable, resizable window on a single zoomable canvas. `Cmd+wheel` to zoom out and see the whole workspace; zoom in to one window and use it like a normal app.I built it because I was running 8-10 Claude Code / Codex shells in parallel and tabbed terminal apps kept losing my place. I wanted to see every shell at once and drag them around like Post-its. And have my browsers and notes in there too.Implementation choices that might be interesting:• AppKit, not SwiftUI. I needed manual frame control during drag/zoom to avoid AppKit's display-cycle re-entrancy guard, and got it more reliably out of straight NSView land.• SwiftTerm (Miguel de Icaza's emulator) for VT100 + real PTYs (fork + openpty). One `LocalProcessTerminalView` per tab. OSC 7 → cwd → tab title.• `NSScrollView.magnification` for canvas zoom. Cmd+wheel events are coalesced to one mag-update per display frame and the resync broadca