rexmod

Turn Rex into a harness for your coding agent.

The loop • Install • Usage • How it works • FAQ

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/ac2e4950-17d7-4bd9-b16a-9bd8cb463f49

Rex already runs your agents. rexmod builds the harness around them: it records every turn, so you see exactly what the agent changed; it opens a real editor beside the agent to read and review that code; and it hands your review back to the agent as its next input. Prompt, change, review, feedback: the whole loop stays in one Rex window, for Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode or Pi.

[!NOTE] rexmod is an unofficial mod, not made by or affiliated with Superlogical. It patches your local copy of Rex so Rex loads the panel; the uninstaller puts the official build back.

The loop

1. Prompt. Talk to your agent as usual. rexmod snapshots the working tree the moment you send.
2. Change. The Changes panel on the right, styled like Rex's own sidebar, fills in while the agent works. Its Changes tab shows Last Turn, exactly what this reply changed, next to Uncommitted (split into staged and unstaged) and Branch, as a list or a tree. The other tabs are Info (the agent's state and session, your plan usage, what runs in its pane and the ports it listens on) and a Files tree. The panel follows Rex's Interface style, Classic or Glass.
3. Review. Click a file and it opens in Neovim beside the agent, at the changed line, with LSP, completion and live diagnostics. Space r on a line or a selection leaves a review comment.
4. Feedback. Your comments ride along with your next message to the agent, or go right away from the panel. The agent answers them, and the next turn starts at step 2.

Around the loop:

• Any language, on demand. Open a Go, Rust, Python, Elixir… file and its tree-sitter parser and language server are installed (Mason) and started on the spot.
• ⌘P file picker over the agent's repository, with the editor's syntax highlighting in the preview.
• Several agents per tab. The harness follows the agent you focused last; its name at the bottom of the panel is a menu to switch. A note always goes to the agent it was written for.
• Media previews. Images and PDFs open as pictures in the editor, videos show their first frame (Space u o plays them in the macOS app), and markdown renders in place, images included (Space c p opens a live browser preview).
• The agent knows the harness. Every agent gets the rexmod skill, so it can open a file for you in the editor pane (rexmod open file:line) when it points you at something.
• Out of the way. Hidden, the panel takes no space; the toggle sits with the pane actions, ⌘⇧E from the keyboard. When Rex updates itself, rexmod re-applies the patch and asks you to reopen it.

Install

You need a Mac with Apple silicon on macOS 15 or later, Rex installed and opened once, and Homebrew (for Neovim, fzf and Node, if you don't have them).

With Homebrew:

brew trust --tap alpcanaydin/rexmod   # Homebrew asks you to trust third-party taps
brew install alpcanaydin/rexmod/rexmod
rexmod-setup

Or in one line:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alpcanaydin/rexmod/main/install.sh | sh

Then quit Rex (⌘Q) and open it again. Nothing is compiled on your machine. After brew upgrade rexmod, run rexmod-setup again.

• Copies rexmod into ~/Library/Application Support/rexmod and links ~/.local/bin/rexmod.
• Downloads the free Flow Icons pack for the file tree.
• Editor: with no ~/.config/nvim, installs the bundled LazyVim config there; with a lazy.nvim config, adds one plugin spec (lua/plugins/rexmod.lua); with any other config, installs the bundled one as ~/.config/rexmod-nvim and leaves yours alone.
• Adds ⌘P to ~/.config/rex/init.lua (in a managed block).
• Hooks into each agent it finds and installs the rexmod skill. JSON files are backed up first.
• Backs up the official Rex, patches it, and adds a LaunchAgent that re-patches after Rex updates.

Options: --update-rex installs the latest official Rex first, --no-patch skips the panel, --no-hooks skips the agents. From a checkout, ./install.sh builds what it needs if Go and Xcode are there.

[!IMPORTANT] Codex runs new hooks only after you trust them: start Codex and run /hooks once. OpenCode loads plugins when its background server starts, so quit OpenCode once after installing.

Usage

Pending comments head the panel's Changes tab, whose icon shows how many there are: click one to open it in the editor, or send them all right away with Send. Otherwise they ride along with the next message you type to the agent, as a short list of file:line, the code, and your note.

Several agents in one tab. The panel, Last Turn and your comments follow the agent pane you focused last; working in the editor or a shell doesn't change that. The agent name at the bottom of the panel becomes a menu to switch, and the Info tab lists them all.

How it works

flowchart LR
  subgraph Rex.app
    panel[Changes panel<br/>RexModPanel.dylib]
  end
  agent[Agent pane<br/>Claude Code · Codex · OpenCode · Pi]
  editor[Editor pane<br/>Neovim + rexmod.nvim]
  cli((rexmod))
  git[(.git/rexmod<br/>turns · comments)]

  panel -- "state, open, send" --> cli
  agent -- "hook prompt / stop" --> cli
  editor -- "comments" --> cli
  cli -- "panes, splits, input" --> rex[Rex server API]
  cli --> git
  cli -- "--listen socket" --> editor

• The panel is a Swift dylib. The installer adds a weak load command for it to Rex's executable and re-signs the app ad hoc. It insets Rex's own chrome and draws on Rex's backdrop, so it looks native.
• rexmod, a Go CLI, does the work: it finds the tab's agent pane through Rex's API, diffs git trees, opens files in the editor pane, and keeps comments.
• Last Turn comes from two snapshots of the working tree (written with a throwaway git index, so your index is untouched): one when you send a message, one when the agent finishes.
• Comments live in .git/rexmod/ of the worktree, each tied to the agent pane it was written for.

Updating and uninstalling

Updates: brew upgrade rexmod && rexmod-setup, or run the one-line install again.

Rex itself: Sparkle can't update a patched Rex (its installer only accepts an app signed by Superlogical), so rexmod turns Sparkle's checks off and its LaunchAgent updates Rex instead, every hour: it downloads the official build, checks its signature, Team ID and notarization, patches it and asks you to reopen Rex. To do it now: ~/Library/Application\ Support/rexmod/scripts/update.sh.

Uninstall, which restores the official Rex and removes the hooks, the ⌘P block and the files:

~/Library/Application\ Support/rexmod/scripts/uninstall.sh

FAQ

Check that Rex is patched: ~/Library/Application\ Support/rexmod/scripts/patch.sh --check. If Rex just updated, reopen it once the re-patch notification arrives. The panel logs to ~/Library/Logs/rexmod-panel.log; start Rex with REXMOD_PANEL_DISABLE=1 to run it without the panel.

The agent's hooks aren't running. Run ~/Library/Application\ Support/rexmod/scripts/install-hooks.sh again, then for Codex trust the hooks with /hooks, and for OpenCode quit it once.

No. A note is tied to the agent pane of the tab you wrote it in. An agent running elsewhere (another terminal or app) in the same repository only gets notes written outside Rex.

Codex runs its hooks in one background server for every pane, so rexmod finds the pane by looking for the Codex that works in that folder. With two of them in the same repository it can't tell which one sent the message, and rather than guess it leaves the notes pending and records the t