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Prompts overlay

This page lists History, Stash, and Trash keys in the sase TUI Prompts overlay.

Prompts Overlay

Stash and History live in one Prompts overlay: a single frame with a split-button Stash tab (≡ Stash N plus a 🗑️ chip) and a ↺ History tab, a consistent list/preview split, and one contextual footer per view. Trash is the Stash tab's Trash view, opened with t or the 🗑️ chip; t or Esc there returns to the Stash list, and q closes the overlay. @ on Stash restores the newest draft, so @@ pops the most recently stashed prompt when several are stashed. [ and ] cycle the two top-level tabs with wraparound (even from the focused History filter). From Trash, either bracket opens History, and coming back restores Trash because the Stash tab remembers its view. Clicking the Stash label shows the list, while clicking the 🗑️ chip shows Trash. Esc on the Stash list or on History closes the overlay, and q closes when focus is outside a text input. Each tab keeps its highlight, scroll, filter, loaded pages, preview position, and staged marks across switches, the Stash tab remembers its last view, and History loads lazily on first activation so opening Stash performs no history disk I/O.

For a goal-based workflow to search and replay an old prompt, see Find and replay an old prompt.

Press Ctrl+K from the prompt input to open the overlay on the History tab. That shortcut is available when the current prompt is a single logical line; that line's first active workspace reference (e.g. +sase) becomes an initial project:<name> filter scope once the project-identity snapshot resolves, with the remaining text preserved as a literal search (see Filtering below). A +<project> tag counts when it names a known project or leads the line, a # VCS reference always counts, whichever comes first wins, and references inside code spans are skipped. A blank prompt opens History with no project filter. Press , then . (written ,.) from a main tab, when you are not typing in a text field, to open that same unfiltered History tab. ,. reads the most recently launched workspace prefix other than the built-in #git:home default. Submitting or editing a row replaces that row's workspace prefix with that recorded prefix. A +home launch does not create a qualifying prefix. When none is recorded, sase warns No previously launched VCS macro and opens nothing. ,> opens History with cancelled prompts visible, and ,Ctrl+G skips the overlay and opens the newest history entry in $EDITOR. Both use that same prefix check and the same prefix replacement, so with no qualifying prefix they warn and open nothing. Space on a main tab is separate: it prefills the prompt input with that same non-home prefix, or opens a blank home prompt when none is recorded. The History tab loads prompts previously launched from sase's TUI or sase run in recency pages of ace.page_size rows (default 100). Normal launch writes skip prompts shorter than five words (e.g. y, ok) so they do not clutter the list, while failed-launch recovery can still preserve a short submitted prompt. The same history is available from the shell through sase prompt.

Bare prompts are stored after launch normalization, so a prompt without an explicit workspace reference appears with the default #git:home prefix. Explicit workspace prefixes also feed the prompt-input MRU controls. In the prompt input, the MRU ring is ordered from most recent to oldest: Ctrl+P moves toward older launchable workspace prefixes, while Ctrl+N moves toward newer prefixes. Each edge has a no-prefix stop that removes the first launchable workspace tag from the prompt without touching the remaining prompt text, then wraps. When no workspace tag is present, Ctrl+P starts at the most recent entry and Ctrl+N starts at the oldest one.

Keybindings

Key Action
↑ / ↓ Move the highlight (also Ctrl+P / Ctrl+N)
Enter Submit the highlighted prompt directly
Ctrl+G Open the highlighted prompt in $EDITOR
Tab / Ctrl+I Load prompt into the input widget for editing
Ctrl+J Load older prompts (+ace.page_size, default +100)
Ctrl+K Unload the last page, never dropping below the first page
Ctrl+X Toggle visibility of cancelled prompts
Ctrl+Y Copy prompt to clipboard and close the overlay
[ / ] Cycle the Stash tab and History; Trash is remembered
Esc Trash: back to the Stash list. Otherwise: close
q Close the overlay when focus is outside a text input

Enter submits directly only when the overlay was opened from a History entry point (Ctrl+K, ,., ,>). When it was opened from a Stash entry point (@, ,@, Ctrl+G p, or the stash: chip) and you switch to History, nothing launches: Enter and Tab load the prompt into the prompt bar as a draft, and Ctrl+G opens it in $EDITOR and then loads the edited text into the bar.

Filtering

Type in the search box to filter the prompts that have already been loaded. The grammar is deliberately small: one optional leading project:<value> qualifier, followed by an optional literal text substring matched case-insensitively against the prompt's canonical or humanized text — the plain-substring behavior is unchanged when no qualifier is typed. project: and its value are case-insensitive; a value ends at whitespace, or use a double-quoted value (with \"/\\ escapes) to include spaces. A project: written anywhere other than the leading position is treated as ordinary search text, not a qualifier. Write \project:... to search for literal text that starts with project:.

The value resolves against every loaded project's canonical key, configured display name, and registered aliases (including disabled projects and home) — never by splitting a displayed basename or guessing from a Patch name prefix. A resolved scope matches complete project identity (project:sase excludes sase-core and prose that merely mentions "sase"); for a multi-prompt entry, any segment belonging to the project is enough. An unknown value still matches a prompt whose own historical reference is that exact unresolved text, so a deleted or renamed project stays searchable. A label shared by more than one project is ambiguous and is reported in the helper line below the filter box instead of matching either one silently; an empty or unterminated quoted value is also reported there and selects nothing until fixed. The current scope (or the ambiguous/malformed hint) is shown on that helper line; clearing the project: prefix returns to searching every loaded prompt.

Press Ctrl+J to load older pages, Ctrl+K to unload the last page, and Ctrl+X to toggle cancelled prompts on or off — when enabled, cancelled prompts appear in the results with an x marker. The project: scope only ever considers prompts already loaded into the overlay; it does not search the whole history archive.

Prompt-history rows are compact single-line entries: cancelled marker, last-used timestamp (MM-DD HH:MM when parseable), a project column in the project's accent color, macro/directive chips, and a first-line prompt preview. The preview panel shows the full prompt, with +<project> tags in their project accent colors, and timestamp metadata. History writes use a sidecar lock plus atomic tempfile replacement of monthly shard files under ~/.sase/prompt_history/, so concurrent agent launches do not truncate prompt history. See TUI migration notes for the older single-file store.

_[project]: A sase project is a named unit of work registered with SASE. _[workspace]: A sase workspace is a numbered clone of a project's primary repo, managed by the workspace store and tracked in that project's registry.json. _[agent]: A sase agent is an agent session or a single agent that does not belong to a session. _[prompt]: A prompt is the text SASE hands to a provider to start an agent turn. _[macro]: A macro is a reusable prompt triggered with #name in agent prompts. _[Patch]: A Patch is SASE's local unit of change. _[bead]: A bead is one tracked work item in SASE's git-native issue tracker. _[plan]: A plan is a persisted, approved artifact recording the intent behind agent work. _[TUI]: The TUI is SASE's terminal interface for running agents and reviewing results. _[epic]: An epic is an executable multi-phase plan run with sase bead work. _[gate]: A sase gate is a durable, command-backed request for one user decision, created when work must pause for the user. _[monitor]: A sase monitor is a monitor turn that runs one long command under a detached supervisor, so the command outlives the agent that started it. *[stitch]: A stitch is the lightweight ordered change record inside a Patch's STITCHES: section.