Cockpit TUI

harness with no arguments opens the keyboard-driven dashboard onto a running daemon: every harness and its state at a glance, with a one-keystroke "hop" into any one as a live terminal. It's a calm ops cockpit — state legibility over decoration (see docs/design/ in the repo for the design exploration).

The dashboard

The dashboard lists every harness with its state glyph, name, state, and restart count, over a faint sub-line carrying that harness's kind (or prompt), backend, last exit code, and PID. Vim-style navigation works everywhere (j/k, g/G).

A scheduled one-shot reads as scheduled rather than as switched off — it is always enabled = false, so "disabled" would be the wrong word for an armed cron job. Its row is tagged (scheduled) and carries the countdown to the next firing (next in 2h); its sub-line carries the cadence (daily 09:30, or the cron expression verbatim when it is too irregular to paraphrase). A harness bouncing in restart backoff shows that countdown instead — the imminent event wins the column.

Beside the list, the preview pane is a live read-only view of the selected harness's screen and nothing else — move the selection and it follows, without attaching. The list takes only the width its rows need, so the preview gets every column that's left.

The preview is a real read-only attach under the hood, so the harness inside it is sized to the pane and follows it: a full-screen agent lays out at the size you're actually looking at, not at the 80×24 it was spawned with. Hop in with ↵ and it resizes again to your whole window; detach and the preview takes it back. If two clients are watching the same harness at different sizes, the smaller one wins — harness describe <name> lists every attached session and flags the one setting the minimum.

Key	Action
↵	attach to the selected harness
s / x / r	start / stop / restart
e	edit the harness definition
n	new harness
d	delete a harness
p	profile switcher
a	show all harnesses
l	logs
y	copy the selected harness name (OSC52)
/	search
^k or :	command palette
?	full help
q / ^c	quit
esc	back (always unwinds an overlay or attach)
↵/y	confirm a guarded action (e.g. delete)

Attached mode

↵ (or harness attach <name>) opens the embedded terminal — a full-window x/vt emulator fed by the daemon's attach stream, with a 1-line status bar at the bottom: logo chip · harness identity + state · read-only badge, and on the right the compact attached keymap (hop / scrollback / detach / help).

In attached mode, bare keys reach the embedded process (an agent CLI, a REPL) unchanged. Harness reserves only the Ctrl-b prefix and a few intercept keys:

Key	Action
^b d	detach — return to the dashboard (the harness keeps running)
^b [ or PgUp	enter scrollback
^b h / ^b l	hop to the previous / next harness
^b s / ^b r	start / restart the attached harness
^b ?	open the keymap help from attached mode

esc always works to back out of an overlay or a full-screen detach without a chord.

The hop

The hop is the signature interaction: while attached to one harness, ^b h or ^b l instantly switches the attach to the previous/next harness. It stays attached the whole time — you never drop to the dashboard — and the status bar flashes a quick animation as you land. The harness never notices; you're just resubscribing to another screen.

A hop reopens at the current window size (never the 80×24 box of a freshly spawned PTY), so you land exactly where you were.

Scrollback

Daemon-owned scrollback means history survives detach (ADR-0007). From attached mode, enter scrollback with ^b [ or PgUp:

• Scroll with j/k, PgUp/PgDn, or the mouse wheel (q/esc returns to live).
• Scrollback renders inert text with the harness's colors intact — it shows what the process produced, not a replay of its repaint traffic.
• harness scrollback isn't a separate surface: scroll back in-place, then q returns you to the live stream.

Read-only attach

harness attach <name> --ro opens the harness read-only: you see live output and scrollback but keystrokes are ignored. The status bar shows a read-only badge. This is also how a scoped SSH key attaches (see Remote access).

Palette & search

• ^k or : opens the command palette — fuzzy access to every dashboard verb without the keymap.
• / opens incremental search across the list; in scrollback, / searches the history.

Zero state

With no harnesses defined, the dashboard shows a friendly zero state pointing you at harness new and the config file, rather than an empty list.

Remote

The same cockpit is reachable over SSH — a remote session is just another thin client onto the daemon. See Remote access.