waiting-games

A Hermes plugin that plays tron-lightcycles in a side Terminal window while you wait for Hermes to think, and pauses it when Hermes finishes so you can read the response.

What it does

Two hooks fire on the Hermes CLI lifecycle:

Hook	When	Action
pre_llm_call	You hit enter, Hermes thinks	SIGCONT existing tron, or launch a new one
post_llm_call	Hermes finished responding	SIGSTOP tron — frozen until your next message

The same tron process persists across turns. Die or quit tron → next turn launches a fresh one. The launched tron lives in its own Terminal.app window (macOS only).

Layout

.
├── plugin/                   ← the plugin (Hermes loads this)
│   ├── __init__.py           ← all logic: hooks, launcher, signal helpers
│   └── plugin.yaml           ← name, version, hook list
├── bin/<arch>/tron           ← prebuilt tron binaries (vendored)
├── README.md
├── AGENTS.md                 ← orientation for AI agents working in this repo
└── skills.md                 ← short skill description for Hermes catalog

There is no Python package install, no MCP server, no build step. Hermes loads the plugin from a directory under ~/.hermes/plugins/.

Install

Symlink the plugin/ directory into the Hermes plugins folder under the plugin name:

ln -s "$(pwd)/plugin" ~/.hermes/plugins/waiting-games

Enable in ~/.hermes/config.yaml:

plugins:
  enabled:
    - waiting-games

Restart Hermes (hermes restart). The next turn will pop a Terminal window running tron.

How it coordinates with the game process

• The plugin's _launch_tron runs osascript → Terminal.app do script "exec bash -lc <inner>"
• <inner> writes the subshell PID to /tmp/hermes_games_menu.pid then execs tron
• The plugin signals that PID's process group (SIGCONT/SIGSTOP) via os.killpg
• That same PID file is also referenced by Claude Code hooks in ~/.claude/settings.json, so both runtimes coordinate on a single game instance.

Pitfalls / things to know

1. Plugin code is loaded once at Hermes startup. Edit the plugin → run hermes restart (in a separate terminal — don't kill your active session). Restarting from inside a Hermes turn kills the gateway you're talking to.
2. macOS only right now. Linux/Windows would need a different terminal launcher in _launch_tron (e.g. gnome-terminal -- or wt.exe).
3. tron binary must be executable. If you re-clone or re-extract: chmod +x bin/darwin-arm64/tron.
4. PID-file race. A fresh launch needs a beat for the inner shell to write its PID. _on_post_llm_call polls for up to ~1s before giving up.
5. Z+ zombies after SIGSTOP were the symptom of an earlier, broken wrapper-shell setup. The current exec-based launcher avoids them.

Provenance

Originally a Hermes MCP server that exposed an open_waiting_games_menu tool. The MCP layer was removed once the plugin became fully autonomous — hooks alone are enough; no agent action is needed to start a game.