TUI

The TUI is ka’s home surface, built on ratatui with a hand-rolled markdown renderer: streaming text, collapsed tool rows, live meters, and mouse support, all in the same process as the engine.

Starting

ka                    # fresh session
ka -c                 # this terminal's latest session
ka --session 3f9c     # by id prefix
ka -i "fix the tests" # run one prompt, then open the TUI resumed on that strand

With eval "$(ka shell-integration)" in .zshrc/.bashrc, the just-exited session’s resume command lands in the live shell’s history after every run: exit, press ↑ then Enter, and you are back in the exact session you left.

Keys

Key	Action
Enter	Send, or steer mid-turn (checked between stream deltas)
+text + Enter, or Alt+Q	Queue the draft until the turn settles (Ctrl+Q recalls the last queued item into the draft)
Esc	Close a popup or the path completion first; otherwise abort turn / re-pin transcript to tail
Ctrl-C	Abort turn
↑ / ↓	Input history
Ctrl-P / Ctrl-N	Input history
PgUp / PgDn	Scroll transcript (title shows ↑N above)
⇧Enter / Ctrl-J	Newline in the draft
bracketed paste	Multi-line paste arrives as one draft

Steers and queued items post a visible ack line while the turn runs; nothing you type is lost or silently dropped. Queued slash commands replay through the slash dispatcher in order when the turn settles; entries that no longer parse are skipped, and commands that cannot run headlessly (picker-openers like bare /model) are refused at enqueue time with a reason, so they never mis-run as prompts.

Mouse

Capture is the default: tool cards, the ▲▼ jump arrows, and the bottom-strip buttons respond to clicks, the wheel scrolls at line granularity, and a plain left-drag over the transcript highlights those rows and copies them to your system clipboard on release (OSC 52; a toast confirms). ⇧drag still selects natively in your terminal.

Ctrl+M (or [tui] mouse = "native" in config) flips to native mode: nothing is captured, so drag selects and pastes with the terminal’s own bindings and the wheel scrolls via alternate-scroll; click-only affordances fall back to their keys (Ctrl+O, Ctrl+↑/↓). The choice persists.

Slash commands

/help lists everything with keys. The highlights:

• Model & mode: /model [sel] (picker when empty), /mode [tier], /thinking [level] (reasoning-level picker: off | low | medium | high | max, model-dependent; Enter persists, the named form is session-scoped), /settings (persist with s), /provider, /key, /usage, /context
• Session: /session (alias /resume, type-to-filter picker), /new, /fork, /tree, /export, /rewind [N], /name <word> (set a memorable alias; ka --session <name> resumes on it), /transfer [focus] (digest the live context into a fresh handoff strand that carries only the summary)
• Work: /plan <task>, /build, /review, /ship, /approve, /compact [focus]
• Background work & debugging: /tasks (picker over background delegates, bash jobs, and debug sessions; Enter pages the selected task’s full result), /debug (live debug sessions: breakpoints and console tail)
• Safety: /undo, /checkpoint, /restore, /spills
• Toggles: /features (panel: ↑↓ choose, Enter toggles, s saves the set as your user-layer default; /features on|off <spec> toggles directly), /sandbox off|fs (bash sandbox live; fs recomputes the policy from [sandbox] allow_write). The status bar shows ⊘ N while N specs are disabled
• Extensions: /agents, /mcp, /prompt, /memory, /image
• /quit (alias /exit)

Plus your custom commands from .ka/commands/*.md, which appear in the / popup and /help like builtins.

Rendering

Markdown with headers, lists, inline code, and fenced blocks with syntax coloring behind a quiet rail. Each tool call renders as one boxed, state-tinted card (violet while running, sage on success, coral on failure) with a ▸/▾ fold marker; clicking a card (capture mode) or Ctrl+O expands its full output in place. Multi-line thinking collapses to its first line plus a count; click a block or Alt+T to toggle it. Every turn closes with a single verdict row (✓ done · 2.1s · 1.2k in · $0.0042), and small actions ack as toasts instead of transcript rows. Rendered rows are cached per entry: streaming redraws only the live region, which keeps the TUI snappy on huge transcripts. NO_COLOR is honored.