agentknit-tui

A Textual TUI front-end for agentknit coding agents.

Features:

• one always-visible conversation pane
• a multiline prompt at the bottom,
• tool calls / results / token accounting rendered inline
• a live status bar.

the TUI is a pure subscriber to the event stream from agentknit.

Install

pip install agentknit-tui

It depends on agentknit, textual, and rich.

Usage

agentknit-tui                       # default: glm-5.2 via z.ai
agentknit-tui glm-5.2
agentknit-tui "qwen3-8b" "https://openrouter.ai/api/v1"
agentknit-tui --session <id>        # resume a previous trajectory
agentknit-tui --non-interactive     # drop ask_user* tools from the schema
agentknit-tui --no-strict-cache-proof

Key bindings

Mouse

• Drag over the conversation log selects text in place (highlighted as you drag); Ctrl+Shift+C then copies the selection (plain Ctrl+C also works when your terminal delivers it). Esc clears the selection.
• Paste into the prompt with the terminal's own paste (Ctrl+Shift+V, Shift+Insert, or middle-click) — Ctrl+V inside the TUI only reads text copied within the TUI.
• Copying tries the platform clipboard tool first (xclip/xsel, wl-copy, pbcopy, clip.exe) and also emits OSC 52; one of the two reaches the system clipboard even in VTE terminals that ignore OSC 52 (Terminator, older gnome-terminal).
• Copying out of a bordered block (your prompt, replies, tool output) strips the Rich panel chrome first, so the clipboard gets the payload text — no leading │ gutter, no border rows.

Ctrl+L (and the TUI's built-in /clear alias) wipes the displayed log and zeroes the token counters in the status bar; the agent's message history — the context sent to the model — is untouched, and /usage still reports the session's full totals.

Status bar

The line under the prompt shows the model, session id, token usage, and — while a turn is running — the task the agent is working on, wrapped over two terminal-width lines so long prompts stay readable. To reset the LLM context (session history, keeping the system prompt), run /reset-context in the TUI; it forwards to agentknit's /clear handler.

Slash commands (/help, /usage, /clear, /compact, /model, /reset-context, /exit) are forwarded to agentknit's command registry; their printed output is captured and shown inline.

On exit the TUI prints the command to resume the session on the console, exactly like the end of the agentknit REPL:

Resume: agentknit-tui glm-5.2 --session <session-id>

Set AGENTKNIT_RESUME_COMMAND to override the program prefix (wrappers embedding the model already do this); the --session <id> suffix is always appended.

Design notes

• The agent loop (agentknit.run_turn) is synchronous and blocking and emits typed events through a session on_event callback. The TUI runs each turn in a Textual worker thread and forwards every event onto a thread-safe queue; a 50 ms UI-thread timer drains the queue and renders each event's pre-formatted ANSI string into a Rich renderable.
• agentknit's fmt strings are raw \033[…] ANSI escapes (not Rich markup), so they are decoded with rich.ansi.AnsiDecoder for faithful colour/style reproduction.
• Multi-line input uses TextArea, so users can paste and edit freely. A CancelToken is wired to the cancel bindings so a turn can be interrupted cooperatively, exactly like Ctrl+C in the REPL.
• Prompt history is per-folder and shared with the REPL: both read and write agentknit's readline history file (~/.local/share/agent_probe/repl_history/<md5(cwd)>.hist), so arrow-up recalls instructions typed in either front-end, scoped to the folder they were typed in. ↑ on the first prompt line walks back, ↓ forward, and any edit drops back to normal typing.
• On exit the TUI mirrors the REPL's teardown: the trajectory snapshot is saved (if the session has any messages), a session_end record is appended to the session log, and — after Textual restores the plain console — the same dim Resume: … line the REPL prints is echoed so the session can be continued with --session <id>.
• agentknit installs a module-level SIGINT handler (meant for the foreground REPL) that kills the active tool subprocess. The TUI neutralises it for each turn's duration and drives cancellation through the CancelToken instead.

License

MIT.