RFC · CLI / TUI design + interaction — what works, what is missing, what would you change?

[esengine]

Reasonix's primary surface is the terminal. The card-stream redesign shipped in 0.18, and the design anchor lives at design/agent-tui-terminal.html — open it in a browser, it's a static HTML "screenshot" of the intended look + every interaction state.

Want your input on:

• What is broken for you on a given platform / terminal — Win10 cmd, mosh, tmux, iTerm, ConPTY, WSL, Termux, …
• What feels slow — keystroke latency, scroll lag, dropped frames, repaint glitches
• What is missing — keys you reach for that aren't bound; common flows that take too many steps
• What is over-engineered — features you wish weren't there
• What is new — interaction ideas you have'nt seen elsewhere

A few anchors to react against:

1. Slash commands — current set is at src/cli/ui/slash/commands.ts. Should anything be promoted to a key chord? Removed? Added?
2. Keystroke vocabulary — ↵ send · ⇧↵ newline · Esc abort/close · ↑↓ history · ⌘K palette. Anything you reach for that fails?
3. Approval modals (shell / plan / edit) — explicit y / a / n (approve / always / deny). Friction or feature?
4. Status row — tools 23 · mcp 2 · last event 12s. Useful or noise? What would you put there instead?
5. Card density — full streaming + tool calls inline. Too much, too little?
6. Session lifecycle — --new preserves the old, --resume finds the latest. Right defaults?

Not asking for polished proposals — half-baked is welcome. Code references / screenshots / asciicasts all useful.

Replies in English or 中文 都行.

[lamyc]

Really nice work on this project. The DeepSeek‑specific optimizations (Cache‑First Loop, R1 Thought Harvesting, Tool‑Call Repair) are really smart.

I just started unboxing and testing it.

🐛 Bug / Broken

• The TUI sometimes glitches
  . I'm not 100% sure what triggers it, but it might be related to resizing the terminal window. (I’m on Linux Mint + WezTerm, SSH to Ubuntu.)

✨ Feature improvements

1. Portrait monitor layout – When running on a secondary vertical screen, the current TUI gets very crowded. It would help a lot if the task/to‑do list could be collapsed into a sidebar (toggleable, like opencode does).
2. Model response readability – A background highlight on responses (instead of just text color) would make long replies much easier to follow.
3. Prompt input shortcuts – Support for <Home> / <End> (cursor jump to line start/end) and common CLI shortcuts like Ctrl+U (clear from cursor to beginning of line) would make the input feel far more natural for terminal users.

I know both bug fixes (especially layout/repaint issues) and adding shortcuts / UI changes are non‑trivial. Totally understand the effort involved.

Huge thanks to the author for sharing this work. Much appreciated.

[esengine]

Thanks — really useful report.

The glitch isn't actually resize: the trigger is the approval modal anchored at the bottom while a tool card (write_file in your video) is still streaming at the top. The bottom-anchor layer and the growing-card layer fight for the same rows. I've spotted a few variants of this — sweeping them in #120.

Home / End / Ctrl+U will land in the next patch — tracked in #121. Portrait sidebar + assistant background highlight in #122.