You Installed Hermes. Now Make It Look Better Than ChatGPT or Claude

But now you're staring at a terminal window and wondering if this is really it.

It doesn't have to be. The Hermes community has been building user-interface wrappers at a pace that would embarrass most funded startups. Some of them are genuinely great. A few are beautiful. One of them might make your friends think you built something expensive.

Here are the four best ones right now—what they do, what makes each one different, and how to actually get them running.

This one feels less like a GUI and more like a companion that just happens to live on your Mac. It's not trying to be a chat app. It's trying to be the place where you actually manage your agent.

The whole thing works over SSH (secure shell, basically a way to connect to your computer remotely)—the same way Hermes already does. No gateway layer, no invisible sync process slowly drifting from what's actually on your server. When you open a session, skills tab, or cron job view, you're looking at live data from the real host. Nothing in between.

What you get is a full overview of your active Hermes profile, session history, token usage, your skills library, your cron jobs, and a built-in terminal with multiple tabs. You can edit USER.md, MEMORY.md, and SOUL.md directly from the app—with a remote conflict check before it saves. You can run multiple agents on the same host side by side without losing track of which is which.

The design is clearly written by someone who uses macOS every day. It feels native, behaves native. Version 0.5.0 added first-class cron job management and host-wide usage totals across profiles.

The honest caveat: There is no chat interface. This is a management and monitoring app. You'll still type your messages in the terminal it gives you. For some people that's completely fine—it's a real shell, and the surrounding tabs give you context you'd never have otherwise. For others, it'll feel like half an app.

One more thing: The app is not notarized by Apple yet, so macOS will warn you on first launch. Right-click → Open gets you past it. If Apple gets stubborn, go to your configuration settings and allow it to run under the security settings. It will appear as blocked.

Same name, completely different project, completely different philosophy. This one is about getting you from zero to chatting as fast as possible.

Where Dodo Reach's version assumes you already have Hermes running somewhere, Fathah's version does the whole thing for you. It runs the official Hermes install script, handles provider setup, and puts a working chat interface in front of you in a single flow. Double-click the app, follow the prompts, start talking.

The feature list is extensive. Streaming chat with tool progress indicators, token tracking per conversation, 22 slash commands, session search, profile switching, a persona editor for SOUL.md, a cron job builder, and support for 16 messaging gateways—Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, Email, and more.

Model support covers OpenRouter, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, xAI Grok, Nous Portal, Qwen, MiniMax, Hugging Face, Groq, and any local endpoint running LM Studio, Ollama, or llama.cpp. You can switch models from the UI, no config file editing required.

The design is more generic than Dodo Reach's—less "native Mac," more "cross-platform product." But that cross-platform part is the actual point. Builds exist for macOS, Windows, and Linux. All three install the same way, all three give you the same feature set.

If you want Hermes to look and feel like a proper chat app—something you could hand to a friend who has never opened a terminal—this is the one.

Mac install is standard.

If Claude's interface had a well-maintained open-source twin that ran entirely on your own server, it would look a lot like this.

Hermes WebUI is a browser-based interface built with Python and vanilla JavaScript. No build step, no framework, no bundler. You run one command, it starts a local server, you open it in your browser. The whole thing is intentionally simple to deploy—and the result is an interface that feels complete without feeling heavy.

The layout is three panels: sessions and navigation on the left, chat in the center, workspace file browser on the right. Model selection, profile switching, and workspace controls live in the composer footer as pill buttons—always visible, never buried in a menu. A circular token ring shows your context usage at a glance, with cost estimates on hover.

You can pick your model from the UI, change the thinking speed (fast, extended reasoning, or automatic—essentially ChatGPT's fast vs. thinking modes but on your own infrastructure), and browse your agent's memory, skills, and session history without touching the command line. Mermaid diagrams render inline. Claude's extended thinking shows up as collapsible gold-themed cards.

Seven themes ship out of the box: dark, light, dim, solarized, monokai, and OLED (pure black for burn-in prevention). Switch with /theme dark in the composer or through the settings panel. Custom themes are pure CSS—no Python changes needed.

The project has 66 contributors and ships at a version-per-day pace. Recent additions include an embedded terminal, MCP server management UI, JSON and diff viewers, and live reasoning cards.

How to install:

The instructions are in the Github repository, but in general terms just clone the repo and run the bootstrap script. It detects whether Hermes is installed and, if not, runs the official installer for you automatically.

cd hermes-webui

python3 bootstrap.py

For remote or mobile access, set up an SSH tunnel from your local machine to the server. One command on each end and you're in from anywhere.

This is the most ambitious one. It's also the one that makes Hermes look better than most commercial products. It’s also the one we prefer, by a wide margin. The UI is clean, elegant, customizable, and powerful.

Eight themes ship built-in: Official, Classic, Slate, and Mono, each with light and dark variants. The visual design is polished in a way that makes ChatGPT's web interface look dated. Every configuration option Hermes exposes is accessible from within the app—no terminal required once it's set up.

The standout feature is the mobile Progressive Web App support via Tailscale, essentially a way of having something that looks and feels like an app on your smartphone. Install the workspace as a web app on your phone, connect through Tailscale, and you have full feature parity with the desktop version from anywhere. You can watch your agents spawn subagents in real time from your couch. That's not a demo feature—it works.

The setup is more involved than the others. You need the Hermes gateway running and exposed on port 8642, a configured .env file with API URLs and auth tokens, and optionally a Dashboard API connection for the full sessions, skills, and jobs experience. A Docker Compose file ships with the repo and handles most of this automatically—pull the pre-built images and run docker compose up—but there's still real configuration work involved.

As with other GUIs, the instructions are in the repository, but these are the basic steps:

For the one-liner install path:

That installs Hermes and the workspace together. For manual setup if you already have Hermes running:

cd hermes-workspace

pnpm install

cp .env.example .env

pnpm dev

Tip: Once you have installed and configured the Workspace, you can also ask Hermes to generate executables so you don't have to deal with commands every single time

Any of these interfaces will make working with Hermes a truly pleasant experience. Working with an agent doesn’t have to be cumbersome or scary. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and all the other chatbots out there are great at coding and produce nice visuals, but their own interfaces are not too polished. Some of these are actually nicer than what those AI behemoths offer.

You don't have to figure any of these configurations alone. The Github repositories have all the information you need to set up your agent and almost all the time a simple copy/paste will work.

Alternatively, just give Hermes the URL of whichever repo you want to install and ask it to walk you through the setup. Hand it the documentation, describe what you're stuck on, and let it work. It'll cost you some tokens but things usually end up working out.