konsole-pal 🐰

A tiny, local-first attention router for terminal AI agents. It shows when an agent is working, keeps genuine questions in one unread inbox, and returns you to the right tab without scraping terminal output.

The rabbit stays in one fixed position. Only the equal-width activity symbol changes, so the tab label never shifts and the tab never grows or shrinks.

The CLI follows the same idea: one memorable rabbit, calm typography, useful empty states, and no decorative work when output is piped or requested as JSON.

What you get

• Working: 🐇✨ / 🐇⭐ — a gentle fixed-width pulse.
• Completed: 🐇💤 — a resting bunny plus a soft ascending chime.
• Needs you: 🐇❗ — tab handoff plus a short “meeep.”
• Failed: 🐇💥 — a visible error state and attention sound.
• A durable attention inbox with deterministic next and ack commands.
• One sleeping animator for every tab, not one process per tab.
• Codex, Cursor, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Copilot CLI, and Aider adapters.
• Native Konsole, Zellij, tmux, Kitty, WezTerm, Ghostty, SSH, and generic support.
• Validated rabbit, ASCII, monochrome, and local data-only theme packs.
• Safe hook installation that merges existing configuration and creates backups.
• No network access, telemetry, prompt storage, or transcript storage.

Real state previews

These screenshots were captured from a real Konsole 26.04 session on an isolated display containing only the controlled demo. They contain no username, hostname, filesystem path, notifications, or device information.

A CLI designed for humans and scripts

Interactive commands use a terminal-native palette and aligned status rows. NO_COLOR disables color, non-TTY output contains no escape sequences, and --json is available for status, inbox, emit, setup, doctor, settings, themes, and hook health.

Install in three commands

Python 3.10 or newer is required. pipx is recommended because it installs the CLI in an isolated environment.

pipx install konsole-pal
konsole-pal setup
konsole-pal demo

Setup connects the supported agents detected on your machine. Restart those agents after installation. That is it.

Prefer uv?

uv tool install konsole-pal
konsole-pal setup

Prefer Nix? The committed flake lock keeps the package input reproducible:

nix run github:daredoole/konsole-pal
# Or install it into your profile:
nix profile install github:daredoole/konsole-pal

For native Konsole control, install whichever Qt D-Bus command your distribution provides: qdbus6, qdbus-qt6, or qdbus. Without it, konsole-pal safely falls back to the standard terminal-title escape sequence.

For sound, it automatically uses the first available player: PipeWire (pw-play), PulseAudio (paplay), or ALSA (aplay).

Agent setup

The installer preserves unrelated hooks, writes mode-0600 files, and makes a hooks.json.bak before changing an existing file.

# Guided setup for detected agents
konsole-pal setup

# Calm defaults without prompts (useful for dotfiles)
konsole-pal setup --yes

# Or one agent
konsole-pal setup codex
konsole-pal setup cursor
konsole-pal setup claude gemini opencode copilot aider

# Confirm the active configuration
konsole-pal hooks status

Every adapter normalizes its native lifecycle into the same four events:

Hook installers preserve unrelated configuration and create private backups. Aider uses its official notification command; OpenCode gets a data-minimizing local plugin. konsole-pal emit STATE --agent NAME integrates any other tool.

Codex requires one explicit security review after installing or changing a hook: restart Codex, run /hooks, and trust the Konsole Pal command. On plain SSH, setup also disables Codex's competing built-in terminal title with tui.terminal_title = []. It preserves the rest of ~/.codex/config.toml and creates a private config.toml.konsole-pal.bak before changing it.

Attention inbox

Completion is display state; attention is durable unread state; focus is a short-lived event. Keeping them separate prevents an old completion from ever stealing focus after an animator restart.

konsole-pal inbox          # only unread questions, approvals, and failures
konsole-pal next           # jump to and acknowledge the newest focusable item
konsole-pal ack codex      # clear one matching item
konsole-pal ack --all
konsole-pal status         # one snapshot of every tracked agent session
konsole-pal watch          # live unified view; exits cleanly with Ctrl-C
konsole-pal watch --attention-only
konsole-pal watch --expanded

next acknowledges only after the terminal confirms that it focused the target. An unsupported remote target stays unread instead of silently disappearing. watch uses an alternate terminal screen, refreshes only when displayed state changes, and leaves no permanent dashboard or background process behind. Use arrow keys or j/k to move and Enter or Space to expand a session. Press f to focus its terminal, a to acknowledge an unread request, t to edit its display-only task label, / to filter by agent, task, state, or terminal, Escape to clear the filter, and q to close. Expanded cards show the task label, state, terminal, age, and opaque local session ID.

Automatic hooks use the project name as the task label. To provide a more useful description without granting access to prompts or transcripts, set a short label before starting the agent:

KONSOLE_PAL_TASK="Refactor checkout flow" codex

Manual integrations can instead pass --label to emit, set, or run.

Terminal support

Nested multiplexers take priority over their host terminal. Remote agents never invoke local desktop automation; they use terminal escape protocols carried by the originating PTY.

Settings

Settings are layered from lowest to highest priority:

1. Built-in defaults
2. User config: ~/.config/konsole-pal/config.toml
3. Nearest project config: .konsole-pal.toml
4. KONSOLE_PAL_* environment variables
5. Command flags

konsole-pal config show
konsole-pal config set focus attention
konsole-pal config set volume 0.45
konsole-pal config set sprite_size large
konsole-pal config set theme ascii
konsole-pal config set quiet_hours 22:00-08:00
konsole-pal config set sound false --agent claude
konsole-pal config set animation static --project
konsole-pal config reset volume

focus=attention is a calmer setup: questions, approvals, and errors select their tabs, while normal completions only rest and chime. animation=static shows one working icon and immediately exits the animator for effectively zero idle resource use. Sprite presets change the rabbit's fixed-width footprint; Konsole controls the actual emoji font size for the whole tab bar.

Project policy belongs in .konsole-pal.toml; agent overrides use tables such as [agents.claude]. The CLI writes them safely with --agent. Presets apply first, so explicit settings always win.

Preview or install a data-only JSON theme:

konsole-pal theme list
konsole-pal theme preview ascii --sprite-size large
konsole-pal theme install ./my-fixed-width-theme.json

Every frame and final state must occupy exactly the same number of terminal cells. Manifests containing control characters or shifting widths are rejected.

See examples/config.toml for a complete file.

Manual use

Wrap any command:

konsole-pal run --agent tests --label "Test suite" -- pytest

Or update the current tab directly:

konsole-pal set working --agent codex
konsole-pal set attention --agent codex --focus
konsole-pal emit working --agent my-agent
konsole-pal status
konsole-pal sound done
konsole-pal sound attention
konsole-pal completions zsh

Generate completions for bash, zsh, fish, or powershell. Human-readable commands keep routing paths private unless --verbose is supplied.

Maintenance and troubleshooting

konsole-pal doctor
konsole-pal doctor --repair
konsole-pal hooks status
konsole-pal reset

• No bunny: run konsole-pal doctor --repair, restart the agent, and submit a prompt.
• No sound: run konsole-pal sound done and install PipeWire, PulseAudio, or ALSA tools.
• Too much tab switching: run konsole-pal config set focus attention.
• Missed request: run konsole-pal inbox --verbose, then konsole-pal next.
• Prefer no motion: run konsole-pal config set animation static.
• Stale title: run konsole-pal reset.
• SSH: install on the remote host, run konsole-pal setup codex, restart Codex, then use /hooks once to trust the hook. Setup prevents Codex's own spinner title from overwriting the bunny; doctor --repair repairs that setting without replacing unrelated Codex configuration.

reset stops the shared animator, restores resting titles, and removes runtime state. It does not remove settings or agent hooks.

Privacy and security

• Runtime files live under $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/konsole-pal in a mode-0700 directory.
• State, configuration, generated sounds, hook files, and backups use mode 0600.
• State contains only a sanitized task/display label and terminal routing identifiers.
• Desktop and terminal notifications contain only the generic state and that label.
• Prompts, responses, transcripts, command output, and environment dumps are never stored.
• Labels are stripped of control characters and width-limited in titles and CLI views.
• External programs are invoked with argument arrays and shell=False.
• Python 3.11+ has no runtime dependencies; Python 3.10 uses only the small tomli standard-library backport. The package performs no network requests or telemetry.

The konsole-pal run -- ... command intentionally executes exactly the local command placed after --; it does not interpret it through a shell.

See SECURITY.md for reporting and docs/SECURITY-REVIEW.md for the release threat model and audit results.

Resource use

All tabs share one low-priority Python worker. It sleeps between 0.85-second updates and exits after work ends. A 1.0.0 release measurement showed 0.0% CPU while sleeping, approximately 19.6 MiB RSS for the single shared worker, and approximately 54.8 ms average hook startup (58.2 ms p95). Results vary by system.

The polished CLI adds no runtime dependency and does not run in the background. Static animation mode exits immediately after rendering the working title. Sounds are synthesized once, cached privately by volume, and played asynchronously.

Uninstall

konsole-pal reset
konsole-pal hooks uninstall
pipx uninstall konsole-pal

If installed with uv, replace the last command with uv tool uninstall konsole-pal. Settings remain in ~/.config/konsole-pal/config.toml until you remove them.

Development

git clone https://github.com/daredoole/konsole-pal.git
cd konsole-pal
uv sync --locked --extra dev
make verify

make verify runs Ruff, all unit tests, real tmux/Zellij integration tests when available, bytecode compilation, wheel/sdist builds, and package metadata validation. CI repeats the suite on Python 3.10 through 3.14 and validates the locked Nix flake. Locked UV commands fail fast if dependency metadata drifts.

Please read CONTRIBUTING.md, the changelog, and the MIT license.

Design limits

• Focus handoff selects a tab inside its existing Konsole window. It does not force the Konsole application above unrelated desktop windows.
• Generic terminals and SSH receive an OSC title and bell, not local GUI control.
• Plain SSH uses Konsole's OSC 30 extension after standard OSC 0, so Konsole shows the agent state even when its remote-tab format omits %w; other terminals can safely ignore the unsupported extension.
• Kitty focus requires its opt-in remote-control capability; without it the item remains unread and the CLI explains why.
• Cursor's stop event does not always distinguish an answer from a question, so it receives the configured completion handoff.

References

• KDE: Scripting Konsole
• OpenAI: Codex hooks
• Cursor: Agent best practices
• Zellij: CLI recipes
• tmux manual