ovos-tui-client

🚧 Actively under development - expect frequent changes. This is a young project with ongoing design iteration (see git history/tags for the pace of change); pin a specific version if you need stability, or just pip install --upgrade regularly to stay current.

A split-pane terminal UI for testing OVOS without a mic/speaker - a lightweight replacement for the unmaintained ovos-cli-client and the broken neon-cli-client (whose pyyaml~=5.4 dependency fails to build on modern Python/setuptools).

Layout

┌──────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Sources: [X]bus [X]skills [X]audio ...    │
│ Log Levels: [X]DEBUG [X]INFO ... Skills:.. │
│ Filter logs (free text)...                │
│ LOGS                              scroll↕ │
├───────────────────────────┬───────────────┤
│ CONVERSATION (2/3)         │ ACTIVITY (1/3)│
│ You: read me a grimm story │ 🔍 pipeline:  │
│ OVOS: Here's Cinderella... │ asking all... │
│                             │ 📥 grimm-tale │
│                             │ s: "Cindere.. │
├───────────────────────────┴───────────────┤
│ > _                                        │
└──────────────────────────────────────────┘

• Logs: tails every recognized OVOS service log file it finds (bus.log, skills.log, audio.log/media.log, voice.log, gui.log, enclosure.log, phal.log), each with its own color. OVOS's own TIMESTAMP - COMPONENT - prefix is stripped, and every [source] tag is padded to the same width so message text lines up in one column. Lines containing ERROR are bolded. Scrolled-up panes (logs, conversation, activity) are never yanked back to the bottom by incoming content - auto-scroll only re-engages once you're back at the bottom yourself.

• Sources and Log Levels (DEBUG/INFO/WARNING/ERROR/CRITICAL) are compact checkboxes directly in the main view, checked by default, no modal needed - each category on its own single line.

• Skills: - click it, or press F4 - opens a panel to filter by skill (dynamically discovered the first time a skill_id is seen in the log text - best-effort, not every skill-related line mentions its own skill_id explicitly; unchecked by default, unlike Sources/ Levels, since this list is open-ended rather than short and fixed). Kept in a modal rather than inline for that reason.

  Filter semantics: an unchecked box does NOT mean "hidden" - it means "not specifically filtered to". With nothing checked in a category, nothing in that category is restricted and everything shows. Checking one or more boxes restricts that category to only the checked ones - independently per category, applying retroactively to already-received lines too, same as the free-text filter. Choices persist across sessions (~/.config/ovos-tui-client/ state.json), saved on quit.

• F1: keybinding reference. F2: services panel (restart an ovos-*.service unit). F3: currently loaded skills (from the bus). F5-F8: jump focus straight to Logs / Conversation / Activity / the utterance input. Ctrl+P: Textual's built-in command palette - every action above is also there, fuzzy-searchable, for anyone who'd rather type a command than remember an F-key. Tab/Shift+Tab: cycle focus across everything (checkboxes, panes, input) - a Textual built-in, no custom code needed. Escape: closes whatever modal is open.

• Typing a plain character while focus is on Logs/Conversation/ Activity (none of which are normally typable) redirects that keystroke to the utterance input instead of doing nothing - almost always what was actually meant.

• Conversation: what you typed (green, full line) and what OVOS said back (blue, full line).

• Activity: a curated, simplified feed of what's happening on the bus right now - which skill is handling the request, wake word/ speech start-stop, global stop, and for ovos.common_reading.* traffic specifically, which providers answered, at what confidence, and whether content fetch succeeded.

• Input: type what you'd say to OVOS, press Enter. Up/Down arrows browse previously submitted utterances, shell-history style.

Install

pip install ovos-tui-client

Usage

ovos-tui

Connects to 127.0.0.1:8181 by default. Options:

ovos-tui --host 192.168.1.50 --port 8181 --lang da-dk --log-dir ~/.local/state/mycroft

• --log-dir: the log directory is auto-detected against a list of known candidate paths (which vary by OVOS install method). If nothing is found, the logs pane says so - pass this to point at the right directory explicitly.

Why not just fix ovos-cli-client / neon-cli-client?

ovos-cli-client (last released March 2022) installs cleanly via pip, but crashes immediately on launch on a fresh install: ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'ovos_utils.configuration' - its ovos_utils dependency is unpinned, and the module it imports from has since been removed/relocated in current ovos_utils releases. It was never updated to match. Confirmed directly (pip install ovos-cli-client && ovos-cli-client) rather than assumed.

neon-cli-client pulls in neon-utils, which pins pyyaml~=5.4 - a version with no prebuilt wheel for modern Python and a build script incompatible with current setuptools (workaround: pin setuptools<58 first).

Building this tool instead avoids both dependency chains (just textual + ovos-bus-client, both actively maintained), and adds genuinely useful features - toggleable/filterable logs, service restart, a simplified activity feed - neither of the above has.

No existing project fills this specific niche as of writing (checked the OpenVoiceOS GitHub org's repositories and general TUI project listings) - if that's changed by the time you're reading this, please open an issue and point at it.

Category

Development Tools

Tags

#ovos #tui #testing #cli #development