The terminal surface

What is on screen

The terminal surface owns the whole screen for the run. Nothing sits above the transcript; the one line of furniture is under the input box.

  > what is in this workspace?

  ⏺ I'll read the manifest first.

  ⏺ Read(Cargo.toml)
    ⎿  Read 42 lines

  ⏺ reviewer(review the manifest)
    ⎿  Done (4 tools · 8.1k tokens · 40s)

  ⏺ One workspace, 27 crates: a kernel and its plugins.

  ✻ Tinkering… (esc to interrupt · 4s · ↓ 0.4k tokens)
  ╭──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
  │ > ▌                                                          │
  ╰──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯
  ⏵⏵ accept edits on (shift+tab to cycle)   context 84%   gpt-5.4

The grammar

glyph	means
`>`	what you said, on a raised bar
`⏺`	what the model said or did — a bullet per block
`⎿`	what came back: a result, a receipt, a child’s progress
`✻`	presence: the activity row while a turn runs, and the welcome mark

A tool row’s bullet carries its state: warm and pulsing while the call runs, green when it finished, red when it failed, dim while pending or interrupted. Colour never carries a fact alone — every state has a glyph or a word, so NO_COLOR and a monochrome terminal lose nothing.

A result folds to its tail with … +12 lines (ctrl+o to expand). The activity row’s verb is one of bingo’s own, drawn once per turn: Simmering, Noodling, Tinkering, Rummaging, Mulling, Weaving, Sketching, Percolating.

The status line

Three slots, under the input box:

left — the permission mode: ⏵⏵ accept edits on (shift+tab to cycle). default shows no mode, only the hint.
middle — only what is true now: 1 needs you (ctrl+g), 2 running, context 84%, or the latest notice for four seconds; ? for shortcuts while the box is empty and nothing else is true.
right — where you are and what you are on: in reviewer · gpt-5.4.

Keys

This is the binding table the ? panel reads, so a key is documented where it is bound.

keys	what they do
`enter`	send the message · open the focused block
`shift+enter`	newline (`ctrl+j` · `alt+enter` · `\` then enter)
`esc`	sheet → card → dropdown → interrupt
`esc esc`	rewind to an earlier turn
`ctrl+c`	interrupt · clear input · twice to exit
`ctrl+d`	exit on an empty input
`up`/`down`	prompt history at the first and last line
`left`/`right`	the session strip · `down` opens it
`ctrl+a`/`ctrl+e`	start / end of the line (`home` · `end`)
`alt+b`/`alt+f`	move one word
`ctrl+w`/`ctrl+u`/`ctrl+k`	delete word · to line start · to line end
`pgup`/`pgdn`	scroll the transcript
`ctrl+g`	switch to a sub-agent’s view
`ctrl+t`	plugin state (tasks, rooms)
`tab`	complete the command under the caret
`shift+tab`	cycle permission mode
`1`-`9` · `y`/`a`/`n`	answer the open dialog
`ctrl+e`	expand the dialog’s preview
`ctrl+o`	expand the latest result · again for all of it
`ctrl+b`	background the running command
`/` · `!`	run a command · run a shell line
`?`	toggle the shortcuts panel

ctrl+f searches the transcript; the search row owns the keyboard until esc closes it. The mouse scrolls, clicks a card row or a child’s row, and drags a selection — it is never required.

esc is one ordered stack, closing the innermost layer first: a sheet, then the card that is asking (leaving a card is its own cancel or denial), then a dropdown, and with nothing open it interrupts the turn.

ctrl+o only ever opens further — folded to expanded to the pager — and esc folds again.

Sessions are rows

A sub-agent is a session with a parent, and a room is a session without a model (ADR-0002). Both are drawn by the same code as everything else, and both appear where they began, as a row in the transcript:

⏺ reviewer(review the manifest)
  ⎿  Starting…
  ⎿  Running… 3 tools · 1.2k tokens
  ⎿  Done (4 tools · 8.1k tokens · 40s)
  ⎿  Needs you

enter on that row steps into the child’s transcript, and the status line’s right slot then reads in reviewer. A room’s row is its name alone; inside a room, posts read as > reviewer: … and the prompt is #design > .

Two ways to move between them:

ctrl+g opens the switcher, a dropdown above the input box with one session per row — ❯ reviewer ⏺ running · needs you. enter goes there, esc closes it.
down on an empty composer turns the status line into a chip strip — ❯ ⏺ project ⏺ reviewer #design, agents then rooms — and left/right switch the view live as the cursor moves, wrapping at the ends. up, esc or typing gives the status line back.

A child that needs a person pulses until you go to it, and the status line counts it: 1 needs you (ctrl+g).

Panels and the rail

A plugin can put a live, journaled or one-off view on the screen without knowing what a terminal is (ADR-0013). Past 120 columns those become cards in a rail down the right-hand side — todos, a progress bar, a room’s open mentions; below 120 columns the same cards draw inline under the running rows. ctrl+t opens the panel sheet, where enter pins a panel into the rail for that session. tab walks the rail cards, and a digit fires the button a card names while the composer is empty.

The vocabulary a plugin writes in is UI as data.

Resuming

/resume opens a picker: the title bingo derived for the session, how many messages it holds, and how long ago it was touched.

Resume
❯ 1. fix the parser · 12 msgs · 2h ago
  2. 请帮我把这个解析器修好 · 1 msg · 1d ago
  3. untitled · 5d ago

/clear starts a fresh session in the same directory. From the shell, bingo --continue reopens the most recent session here and bingo --resume <id> reopens one by id.

Leaving

On exit the surface prints the last screenful of the conversation into the shell’s normal screen, so the transcript is still on your terminal afterwards. --no-print-on-exit leaves the terminal exactly as it was.

Environment

The look is settled before the kernel starts, so these are environment variables rather than settings:

variable	effect
`NO_COLOR`	no colour; weights and glyphs carry every fact
`BINGO_MOTION=off`	every cue holds at its resting frame
`BINGO_ASCII=1`	ASCII stands in for the glyphs
`BINGO_THEME=light` \| `dark`	force a palette instead of reading the terminal’s