taut-tui

taut-tui is Taut's human-first terminal interface extension. It reflects the public capabilities of taut-chat and loaded first-party extensions in a full-screen Textual application. It does not define a second chat model or derive forms from CLI arguments.

Install it beside core, or use core's convenience extra:

python -m pip install taut-chat taut-tui
# equivalent convenience install
python -m pip install 'taut-chat[tui]'
taut tui

The extension publishes tui through the taut.commands entry-point group. There is intentionally no separate taut-tui console script. Without this distribution installed, core does not claim the tui command.

The interface provides transcript-first navigation, a multiline composer (Enter sends; Ctrl-Enter or Ctrl-J inserts a newline; Ctrl-Tab inserts a tab), native typed actions and forms, vi-like and conventional keys, mouse controls, state-preserving terminal reflow, actor-free system reports, and supervised terminal handoff to taut-summon when that extension is available. Tab and Shift-Tab remain focus navigation. : opens the textual command input from normal mode; a composer draft beginning with a whitespace- or Enter-delimited known command such as :summon grok moves into that input instead of being sent as chat. Tab, keyboard selection, or one click inserts a command completion, but the passive completion list never takes typing focus. :q and :quit use the guarded TUI quit path. Ctrl-C and Ctrl-D request that same quit from any mode or modal while Textual owns the terminal; PageDown remains the page-down key. Workspace load remains a CLI-only maintenance action.

When a first :summon grok or native Summon form will actually attach to a provider, the TUI shows a native confirmation before the provider starts. It explains that the next screen is provider setup rather than Taut chat and names the Ctrl-\ Ctrl-\ return chord. Confirming reserves the handoff for that run; Textual suspends only while the raw provider terminal is attached, then redraws and continues supervising the foreground run. Cancelling or closing the TUI before confirmation does not start the provider.

The governing behavior is in docs/specs/10-taut-tui.md. Architecture and ownership rationale are in docs/implementation/12-taut-tui.md.

Development

From the repository root:

uv run --project extensions/taut_tui --extra dev \
  pytest extensions/taut_tui/tests -n 0
uv run --project extensions/taut_tui --extra dev \
  ruff check extensions/taut_tui/taut_tui extensions/taut_tui/tests
uv run --project extensions/taut_tui --extra dev \
  mypy extensions/taut_tui/taut_tui extensions/taut_tui/tests

The retained lock runs the complete suite with Textual 8.2.8. There is no separate older-Textual compatibility lane.