Introduction

Lictor rotates through the work running in Herdr: terminal panes, tabs, workspaces, and recognized coding agents. Choose targets from the command line or from a keyboard-driven Ratatui interface.

When several coding agents work in parallel, the hard part is noticing which one has finished, is stuck, or is waiting for you. Lictor turns Herdr into a dashboard you can glance at.

There are two ways to watch your work:

• Focus rotation switches Herdr’s focused target every few seconds, like the original herdr_rotate script.
• Split observation opens a new Herdr tab containing two viewers. Each viewer cycles through its own selected targets while the original terminals continue in their existing locations.

A workspace or tab viewer reconstructs the entire source tab’s pane arrangement. An agent viewer shows the terminal hosting that agent. The viewers observe existing terminal output; they do not launch another copy of an agent.

Both modes are safe by design: Lictor never sends input to your agents, never moves or resizes panes, and only closes tabs it created.

Lictor starts on Linux. Its TUI uses Vim-style navigation and the Tokyo Night palette. The CLI and this book are in English.

Start with installation and quick start. Read split observation for side-by-side monitoring, target selectors to build a precise rotation queue, or how Lictor works for what happens behind the scenes.

The project is a Rust port and extension of Tiago Correia’s herdr_rotate gist. Lictor is licensed under the MIT License, copyright 2026 Tiago Correia. Herdr is a separate project with its own license.