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The terminal UI

Chat with your agent in the terminal: screen layout, keys, prompt styles, files and pictures, recording, and what happens without a terminal.

The terminal UI

Two commands draw a full terminal screen: bxAgents chat, where you talk to your agent, and bxAgents new, where you answer questions and get a project. This page is the tour. Every command and flag is in the CLI reference; every slash command is in Slash commands; a guided first session is in Chat walkthroughs.

Start a chat

bxAgents build          # chat needs a built agent (not with --connect)
bxAgents chat

--continue reopens your latest conversation, --session=<number or id> a particular one, --user=<name> chooses whose conversations and notes you see.

The screen

Finished turns are printed as ordinary terminal text, so your scrollback, search and copy keep working. Only two things are redrawn: the message box at the bottom and the answer being written.

• Answers stream in as they are produced and are printed as formatted Markdown when complete: headings, lists, tables with rounded borders, and code blocks coloured by language.
• Tool calls are shown with their arguments and how long they took.
• Thinking is shown while the model works and is never kept.
• Approvals. When a run stops for a human-in-the-loop decision, the screen asks in place: approve once, approve for the conversation, or reject.
• The hint row under the box lists the keys and starts with the size of the context, such as ctx ~12.4k / 128k 9%. It is an estimate (characters divided by four), refreshed before every prompt.

Keys

Change a key

Keys live in a file that belongs to you, not to any project: ~/.bxagents/bxAgents.yml (set BXAGENTS_USER_CONFIG to use another file).

chat:
  keys:
    newline: [ ctrl+n, alt+enter ]
    stop: ctrl+x

Actions you can change: submit, newline, historyPrevious, historyNext, clear, exit, deleteToStart, deleteWord, lineStart, lineEnd, complete, pasteImage and stop. Keys are written the way people say them: enter, alt+enter, shift+enter, ctrl+j, esc, tab, up, down, home, end, or a letter with ctrl or alt.

A typo never leaves you stuck. An unknown action, an unreadable key, or a key another action in the same place already uses is reported when the chat starts, and that action keeps its default keys.

Commands: type /

A / at the start of the box opens a menu of commands. Keep typing to narrow it, Tab or Enter to take one. All of them are listed in Slash commands; the ones you will use first are /help, /new, /sessions, /resume, /model and /exit.

Files, pictures and your own machine

! and # run locally even when the chat is connected to a server. Switch them off, or narrow them, in the same user file:

chat:
  shell: false                       # or a shell: "bash -c", "pwsh -Command"
  bifs: [ dateFormat, listLen ]      # or false to switch # off

Details and limits: CLI reference.

The look of the message box

Five styles, each with a top bar that carries a label and small facts (widgets):

Widgets: agent, profile, folder, user, clock, machine, git, date, session, elapsed, ctx. A widget with nothing to show (git outside a repository) is left out, and the last ones drop off when the line is too narrow.

Set the start for the project in Agent.yaml:

tui:
  prompt: bars
  widgets:
    top: [ agent, folder, user, clock ]
    bottom: [ ctx, profile ]

Or change it for one chat: /prompt box, /prompt top +git -clock, /prompt bottom none.

Notes screen

/notes opens a screen with the notes the agent keeps about you and about its own work: a add, e or Enter edit, d remove, t or Tab switch between yours and the agent's, s stats, Esc back. Needs a notes block in Agent.yaml.

Record it

bxAgents chat --record=demo.cast (or /record demo.cast inside the chat, /record stop to finish) saves the screen as an asciicast. Replay with asciinema play demo.cast. Keystrokes are not recorded, but what you typed in the box and everything the agent printed is, tool arguments included. It needs the terminal screen.

Colours and fallbacks

• True colour, 256 colours or 16 colours depending on COLORTERM and TERM.
• NO_COLOR set, or TERM=dumb: no colour at all.
• Not an interactive terminal (a pipe, CI): the chat falls back to the plain REPL. For scripts use invoke.
• bxAgents new asks its questions only in a terminal and without --model. Pass --model (a script is calling) and it uses flags and defaults; without a terminal it needs --model. See the new wizard.

Troubleshooting