You put Hermes. Now Make It Looks Better Than ChatGPT or Claude

Then you put it Hermes. You chased it, you asked it some things, it remembered, maybe even created a skill on its own. Pretty good.

But now you’re looking at the terminal window and wondering if this is true.

It shouldn’t be. The Hermes team has been producing user-friendly bracelets at a pace that would put high-income earners to shame. Some of them are very big. Few are beautiful. One of them will make your friends think you built something expensive.

Here are four of the best right now – what they do, what makes each one different, and how to make them run.

#1 Hermes Desktop by Dodo Reach

Repo: github.com/dodo-reach/hermes-desktop

This one feels like a GUI and like a friend that just sits on your Mac. It’s not trying to be a social media app. I’m trying to be a place where you control your agent.

It all works over SSH (a secure shell, basically a way to connect to your computer remotely) – just like Hermes already does. There’s no layer at the gate, no invisible link running slowly from the content on your server. When you open a session, skills tab, or cron job view, you’re looking at live data from the host. There is no middle ground.

What you get is an overview of your Hermes history, session history, token usage, your skill library, your cron jobs, and a repository with multiple tabs. You can edit USER.md, MEMORY.md, and SOUL.md directly from the program—with a remote check before saving. You can run multiple agents in one sided group without losing who they are.

The design is clearly written by someone who uses macOS every day. It feels natural, it performs well. Version 0.5.0 has added management of the first cron job and the number of users in the entire profile.

Disclaimer: There is no chat mode. This is a management and monitoring program. You will still type your messages in the terminal that provides you. For some people it’s totally fine – it’s a real shell, and the tabs around it give you a story you wouldn’t have otherwise. For some, it feels like half a program.

One more thing: The software is not yet recognized by Apple, so macOS will warn you during the first installation. Right-click → Open to bypass you. If Apple insists, go to your preferences and allow it to run under security settings. It will appear as forbidden.

How to install: Download the entire environment (Apple Silicon + Intel) from Released page. Unzip, move to Applications, right-click → Open on initial installation to remove the Guardian warning. You must have SSH access to the machine running Hermes. That’s right.

#2 Hermes Desktop by Fathah

Repo: github.com/fathah/hermes-desktop

Same name, completely different project, completely different philosophy. This is about getting you from zero to chat as quickly as possible.

Where the Dodo Reach version thinks you have Hermes running somewhere, the Fathah version does it all for you. It runs the official Hermes script, handles the provider setup, and puts the working interface in front of you in one go. Double click the app, follow the prompts, start talking.

The list of products is extensive. Chat streaming with device identifiers, chat token tracking, 22-part search, session search, profile editing, SOUL.md personal editor, cron job builder, and support for 16 messaging gateways—Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, Email, and more.

Sample support includes 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 change colors from the UI, no file changes required.

Its design is more generic than Dodo Reach’s – less “regular Mac,” less “platform products.” But the cross section is the real point. Builds are available for macOS, Windows, and Linux. All three install the same, all three give you the same look.

If you want Hermes to look like a proper chat app—something you’d give to a friend who’s never opened a terminal, this is it.

How to install: Go to GitHub repoClick Releases, download the build for your OS. On Windows, SmartScreen will show that it is not signed – click “More” and then “Run.” On Fedora Linux, add –nogpgcheck to the setup command if your system forces a GPG signature check.

Mac installation is standard.

#3 Hermes WebUI by Nesquena

Repo: github.com/nesquena/hermes-webui

If Claude’s interface had a well-maintained twin running on your server, it would look like this.

Hermes WebUI is a browser 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 deliberately easy to use—and the result is a look that feels full without feeling heavy.

The layout is three panels: sections and directions on the left, chat in the middle, and a working file browser on the right. Model selection, profile changes, and workspace controls are at the bottom of the keyboard like tablet buttons—they’re always visible, not buried in the menu. The circular icon shows the usage of your voice at a lower rate, and gives you an estimate of its value.

You can choose your model from the UI, change the speed of thinking (quick, more thinking, or automatic-especially the fast ChatGPT and thinking modes but on your basis), and look at the memory of your agent, skills, and session history without touching the command line. Mermaid images form a line. Claude’s long thoughts appear as cards with golden heads.

Seven heads come out of the box: black, bright, dim, burn, monokai, and OLED (white black for burn-in). Change the /dark theme in the editor or through the settings section. Custom themes are pure CSS—no Python editing required.

The project has 66 agents and ships on a daily basis. Recent additions include an integrated environment, MCP server management UI, JSON and various viewers, and live mind cards.

How to install:

The instructions are in the Github site, but usually just copy the repo and run the bootstrap script. It detects if Hermes is installed and, if not, runs the installer automatically.

git clone https://github.com/nesquena/hermes-webui.git hermes-webui
cd hermes-webui
python3 bootstrap.py

Then open it http://localhost:8080 in your browser.

For remote or mobile access, set up an SSH connection from your local machine to the server. One order in each direction and you are from anywhere.

#4 Hermes Workspace by Outsourc-e

Repo: github.com/outsource-e/hermes-workspace

This is the most ambitious. It is also what makes Hermes stand out from most brands. It’s the one we love, it’s the limit. The UI is clean, beautiful, customizable, and powerful.

The Hermes Workspace was built during the Nous Hackathon 2026 and has become a community activity. wonder-hermes-assistant The directory describes it as “the most complete GUI for Hermes.” That’s a fair description. Chat, terminal, memory browser, professional manager, assistant manager, live playback of subagent events – everything is here.

Eight built-in themes: Standard, Classic, Slate, and Mono, each with bright and dark colors. The interface is polished in a way that makes the ChatGPT interface look old fashioned. Every update that Hermes reveals is available within the app—no terminal needed once installed.

The standout is Progressive Web App support through Tailscale, essentially a way to have something that looks like an app on your smartphone. Install the workspace as a web app on your phone, connect through Tailscale, and you have full desktop-style access from anywhere. You can see your agents creating subagents in real time from your couch. It’s not a show – it works.

Planning is more involved than others. You’ll need a Hermes gateway running and exposed on port 8642, a modified .env file with API URLs and identifiers, and selected Dashboard API connections for all fields, skills, and work experience. A Docker Compose file ships with the repo and does most of that – pulling pre-built images and running docker – but there’s still some real editing work to be done.

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

For the one-liner method:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/outsourc-e/hermes-workspace/main/install.sh | bash

This puts Hermes and the co-working space together. For manual installation if you already have Hermes:

git clone https://github.com/outsourc-e/hermes-workspace.git
cd hermes-workspace
pnpm install
cp .env.example .env
echo 'HERMES_API_URL=http://127.0.0.1:8642' >> .env
pnpm dev

Open it http://localhost:3000 and complete the journey. Expect to spend an hour on the update if you want all the extra features to be unlocked.

Tip: After installing and configuring the Workspace, you can also ask Hermes to create tests so you don’t have to deal with the rules every time.

One last thing to note

Each of these features will make working with Hermes a pleasure. Working with a therapist doesn’t have to be difficult or scary. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and all the other chatbots out there are great at writing and they create great visuals, but their features are not very polished. Some of these are even better than what these AI behemoths offer.

You don’t have to calculate some of these changes yourself. The Github repository has everything you need to set up your agent and almost always a simple copy/paste will work.

Alternatively, just give Hermes the link to any repo you want to install and ask it to walk you through the installation process. Submit the documents, explain your priorities, and let them work. It costs you tokens but things usually work out.

It’s really important. Hermes they passed 100,000 GitHub stars in 10 weeks—and technology means that the agent you use to install one of these GUIs today will be better than the one you started with. That’s kind of the point.