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Tabs and panes

This page lists the sase TUI tab system, Artifacts panes, navigation, copy mode, marks, and the Beads pane.

Tab System

sase's TUI has three tabs, cycled with Tab and Shift+Tab:

While a prompt input bar is open, Tab/Shift+Tab belong to the prompt (snippet expansion, tabstops, list indent) and never switch tabs.

Tab Description
Agents View running and completed agents, their files and prompts
Artifacts Browse Commits, Patches, Beads, configured document providers, and Files. Agent history lives in the Agents tab Archive (,a); the Artifacts ▸ Agent sub-tab is off by default (sase flag disable artifacts_agent_pane_retired restores it). See TUI migration notes, the Artifacts pane contract, and visual grammar.
Services Monitor the service host, configured service procs, scheduler work, and background commands

Agents is the first tab and the startup default. Each tab has contextual help: press ? to open the Help modal on its Keymaps view, then ] to switch to the tab's Guide view. While Help is open, the configured tab-switch keys still switch sase's TUI tabs and refresh both views in place. By default those keys are Tab and Shift+Tab; if you remap them, the modal follows the configured keys.

Press / in the Keymaps view to open a live filter bar. Typing splits the query into whitespace-separated tokens that must all match — each token is checked against a row's section name, key display, or description, so a token that matches a section name (e.g. beads) pulls in every keymap in that section. Matched text is highlighted and a counter shows how many keymaps and sections matched. The filter follows you across sase's TUI tab switches while Help stays open, but resets whenever the panel is closed and reopened. Esc clears an active filter before it closes the Help modal.

On first use, empty tabs render onboarding states instead of blank panels: the Patches view shows a getting-started card when no Patches or saved queries exist yet, and the Agents tab walks through launching a first agent — the project/Patch launch hint appears only when a launchable target exists — and can recommend installing plugins from the Admin Center when no third-party plugins are installed. Onboarding cards carry "learn more" links into the published docs. An empty Beads pane points agents to /sase_new_task, calls out sized draft tasks, and explains how ready tasks enter TaskTriage.

Within Artifacts, number keys follow the visible left-to-right order of the strip: Commits, Patches, and Beads are always 1, 2, 3; configured document-provider tabs such as Plans and Research take the next digits; and Files, which always renders last, carries the highest digit — 4 with no provider tabs configured, 6 with two. Digits stop at 9, and the Files pane keeps 9 when the runtime strip grows past nine panes; middle overflow panes may then have no digit. Use [ / ] to cycle through the complete runtime strip. As horizontal space tightens, the strip chooses the widest tier that fits from a full → compact → micro ladder and re-renders only when the tier changes. Compact removes outer padding; micro also tightens the separators and hides inactive labels, leaving their digits and icons visible. If even micro is wider than the available space, micro remains selected. Every Artifacts tab has an icon, including provider tabs whose missing or invalid ref.icon falls back to the generic ◆, so the micro tier never leaves an inactive tab unidentified. Hovering a tab shows that pane's one-sentence description. These keys act only while Artifacts is visible. Press p on any Artifacts pane to change the shared project scope — first-open seeds from the current project — or use the command palette to jump directly to a top-level view. Patches remains query-scoped: choosing a project there rewrites the Patches query's project: token. The strip order does not change the entry point: opening Artifacts still selects Commits by default.

Moved to Artifacts tab.

Split Modes in Artifacts Panes

Every Artifacts pane starts with an even left-list/right-detail split. Press } to grow the list panel or { to shrink it. The mode is shared by every Artifacts sub-tab and cycles with wraparound in either direction:

Mode Left panel Right panel
narrow 30% 70%
even 50% 50%
wide 70% 30%

The {████} badge at the right of the sub-tab strip shows the current mode in the active pane's accent color: one filled cell is narrow, two is even, and three is wide. Clicking the badge cycles forward, like }.

The Patches pane remains content-sized instead of reserving empty list space. Its mode sets the maximum list width for the available terminal width, while the existing 43-cell readability floor and 80-cell upper bound still apply.

Pane Description Brief

Every Artifacts pane — the five built-ins, the Plans pane, and every pane a sidecar ref creates — carries a resolved, never-empty description, shown as a host-owned brief directly under the sub-tab strip. Press D to cycle it through three modes:

Mode What you see
off Nothing; the row disappears entirely.
summary One line: an icon and a one-sentence summary, ellipsized to fit.
full The summary plus a longer body, capped at 6 rows.

ace.artifacts.description_mode seeds which mode a session starts in (default summary); D changes it in memory for the current session only. Clicking the brief cycles it the same way. An unconfigured document-provider pane shows, in full mode only, a dim italic hint naming both places its description can be configured: ref.pane.description in the sidecar's ref config, or ace.artifacts.panes."<pane_id>".description in sase.yml. See ace.artifacts for the config surface and Artifacts pane visual grammar for the full rendering rules.

The Agent pane is off by default (artifacts_agent_pane_retired) and shows only with the opt-out. See TUI migration notes. The non-Patches panes share fast navigation over their selectable left-panel entries. Commits and Files skip day headings; Agent, Beads, and provider document panes skip group, section, and empty-state rows as applicable. Movement clamps at the first or last entry and silently does nothing when a list is empty.

Key Action
g / G Select the first / last agent, commit, issue, bead, document, or file
Enter Open the selected commit, document, bead, or file in its full-screen reader
Ctrl+F / Ctrl+B Move down / up 10 selectable entries
Ctrl+D / Ctrl+U Scroll the active right-hand detail pane down / up (half page)
' Show adaptive entry hints; press ' again for the first entry or the last jump origin
Ctrl+O / Ctrl+Shift+O Walk the link trail first, then the pane jump stack; back falls through to first hint
$$ / $1-$9 / $0 Follow the first / numbered artifact link, or open the complete links panel
Ctrl+J / Ctrl+K Load ace.page_size more rows / unload that page (rewrites the host limit: cap)

Hint keys select an entry without activating it. Jump-back history is kept separately for each non-Patches pane, and stale origins disappear automatically after filtering, changing project scope, refreshing data, or collapsing an expanded bead tree. Escape or an invalid hint exits jump mode. These actions use the configured keymap values; the keys above are the defaults.

On the Agents tab Archive, Enter opens the Archive chooser. l / h expand and collapse containers.

When the selected entry has declared relationships, a relation panel appears at the bottom of the list column, starting collapsed into a one-line rail that names its own expand key (. by default) so it is never hidden knowledge. Press . (toggle_relation_panel) or click the rail to expand it; the expanded panel's border carries the reverse affordance ({key} collapse, bottom-right) so it can be collapsed the same way. Its section names come from the pane contract, so examples include parents and children, document lifecycle stages, dependencies, linked beads or plans, and file-version families. Navigation is two keystrokes: first a relation mode, then the key printed in square brackets beside the target row. The modes are < for ancestors, > for descendants, and ~ for session or siblings, and the footer lists only the ones the current entry actually has; these keys stay live even while the panel is collapsed. A section header ending in (N hidden) means the query is filtering out that many targets, a row ending in (missing) points at an entry that no longer exists, and a row ending in → <pane> crosses to another Artifacts pane.

On Patches, choosing a hidden same-pane target rewrites the query to reveal it rather than failing. Patches saves the query and selection you started from first and pushes the old query onto the same history stack ^ walks, so ^ returns to the exact view you came from. Other panes run relation jumps through the same engine as $ link follows (see Link Jumps): a filtered-out target is unfolded, fetched, or revealed by one reversible query rewrite, and each jump adds a link-trail hop that Ctrl+O walks back.

Shared entry-jump surfaces allocate hints from the zero-based alphabet 0–9, a–z, A–Z. A session with at most 62 targets uses one character (0 through Z). A larger session uses two characters for every target, beginning 00, 01, …, 0Z, 10 and ending at the fixed ZZ capacity. The first character of a two-character hint keeps jump mode open; the second completes the jump. Hints remain case-sensitive.

Outside the Artifacts panes above, a single shared implementation backs ' everywhere it appears: each Admin Center working section (see Global Keybindings) and four modals — the notification options modal, the model picker, the saved-group revival modal, and Launch Control. In all of them, pressing ' a second time while the hints are painted is the jump back key: it pops the most recent origin off a bounded stack of the last ten pre-jump positions, rather than toggling between one saved target and the current row. With an empty stack it falls through to the first hinted row instead. The footer shows which of the two the next ' will do — JUMP ' back while the stack holds an origin, JUMP ' first when it does not. Changes that shift which row is where — refiltering the model picker, paging or deleting in the revival modal, drilling into or out of a Launch Control bucket, or an async provider-snapshot reload — discard the stored origins instead of leaving them pointing at whatever row inherited the index.

Copy Mode in Agent, Commits, Beads, Provider Documents, and Files

Press % on any non-Patches Artifacts pane to open the context-aware Copy as… palette for the visible entry. Rows are grouped by representation, show their configured accelerator and a warm preview, and can be selected with the mouse, arrow keys or j/k plus Enter, or the accelerator directly. q/Esc cancels. If an accelerator is configured as j, k, or q, the configured copy target wins over navigation or cancellation.

Pane Keys
Agent %@ artifact ref · %! ref in agent prompt · %n name · %l Markdown link · %p artifacts path · %c chat path · %P prompt · %j metadata JSON
Commits %@ artifact ref · %l Markdown link · %J metadata JSON · %! ref in agent prompt · %% full SHA · %m message · %r repo@sha · %p plan
Beads %@ artifact ref · %l Markdown link · %J metadata JSON · %! ref in agent prompt · %% id · %t title · %b description and notes · %d design · %u linked issue ref
Plans %@ artifact ref · %d bead design ref · %l Markdown link · %J metadata JSON · %! ref in agent prompt · %% bead id · %p path · %t title · %b body
Other providers %@ artifact ref · %l Markdown link · %J metadata JSON · %! ref in agent prompt · %p path · %t title · %b body
Files %% contents · %@ artifact ref · %L Markdown link · %p stored path · %o source path · %l label · %j metadata JSON · %! ref in agent prompt

%s captures the current sase tui tmux pane on every view.

The palette and copied value follow the active pane. After selection or cancellation, the footer returns to the active pane's normal bindings. An unknown printable key warns but leaves the palette open so another choice can be made.

When entries are marked, the reference choice copies newline-separated prompt references, the Markdown-link choice copies a bullet list, the metadata-JSON choice copies one array, and the handoff choice seeds one prompt with the marked set. Entries that cannot produce the selected representation are skipped; the completion toast reports both the copied and skipped counts. The palette title reports the visible marked count and applicable rows use plural labels such as commit SHAs.

The same % prefix opens the palette above copy-forwarding readers and modals, including the preview panel. Dismissing the palette returns to the underlying modal. Snapshot choices dismiss the palette before capture, so the palette itself is not included in the copied pane.

Marks in Agent, Commits, Beads, Provider Documents, and Files

Press m to mark or unmark the selected entry and u to clear the active pane's marks. Each non-Patches pane keeps an independent stable-target mark set, so marks survive refreshes and switching panes without affecting marked PRs. Changing the shared Artifacts project scope clears the non-Patches marks.

When marks exist, the pane's % copy targets operate on marked entries in visible order instead of only the selected entry. Identity, location, and data representations use paste-ready forms; content dumps retain labeled fenced sections. Content-shaped targets are capped at 512,000 bytes per item and per assembled payload, with an explicit truncation banner and toast. The footer shows the active pane's mark count only while that count is nonzero.

Moved to Filtering.

Beads Pane

The top-level Beads view (3) is the work-item home for standalone tasks, epic plan beads, and their phase beads. Every bead appears once: tasks occupy their own section, while epics expand with l and collapse with h to reveal phases. Rows show stored status and ownership metadata, ✦ when a task has a pending TaskTriage decision, and ▤ when the bead links a plan document. Linked issue chips use ○ for open, ● for closed, and ? for a stale issue absent from the complete cached listing; stale or drifted links are highlighted, and +N summarizes additional links. Closed beads are loaded but hidden by the visible -status:closed limit:<page_size> default; press f to edit or clear that query. Section headings report matched and total counts while a filter is active.

n collects a standalone task for the selected project. Title, filing reason, size, and task type are required. The reason is one or two sentences, at most 2000 characters, and is stored separately from the title and description. Ctrl+S creates the bead and Esc cancels. See Creation Reason.

The pane supports the full bead workflow:

Key Action
j / k Select the next / previous bead
Enter Open the complete bead detail in the preview reader
f Edit the bead filter query
Ctrl+J / Ctrl+K Load more matching beads / unload one page (rewrites limit:)
l / h Expand / collapse the selected epic
s Cycle the selected bead's status using the type-aware sequence below
z Snooze the selected task bead (or edit/cancel an existing snooze)
e Edit the bead's valid fields
N Append a note; @path attaches a snapshot and Ctrl+T cycles its audience
n Create a task bead in the selected project (filing reason required)
c Close with a required reason and optional note, or reopen a closed bead
w Launch an epic or launchable task; phase work launches with its epic
E Open a linked external issue
y Copy the bead's @bead: reference
% u Copy a linked issue reference (copy mode)
b Enter issue-action prefix mode
$ Arm the link rail, e.g. to follow the linked plan
R Open the Refresh panel

N opens a modal for appending a note and leaves earlier notes in place. Add @<path> to capture a file snapshot when you save with Ctrl+S: Tab completes paths, pasting a single existing file path inserts an attachment reference, and @@ inserts a literal @. Ctrl+T cycles the attachment audience through automatic, private, and public. Public asks you to confirm on save; policy can still reject the note and return you to the editor. The bead detail lists each attachment's 🌐 or 🔒 chip from the stored descriptor and leaves availability badges and thumbnails to the attachment viewer. See From the Beads pane.

When a bead has several issue links, E, % u, and the b-mode v, e, s, and u actions first open a selector. In b prefix mode, press v to view the cached body, e to edit supported title/body/label fields, s to close or reopen after confirmation, u to copy the provider URL, a to attach an existing numeric issue, or c to create and attach a new issue. Attach and create operate on the bead itself and therefore do not select an existing link. Availability follows the active VCS provider's capabilities. The detail reader shows each link's relation, state, labels, assignees, author, update/comment metadata, and cached body. The info line reports linked, remote-only, stale, and drifted counts, plus provider unavailability and per-project errors, so tracker health remains visible without a separate Bugs pane.

Closing offers done, canceled, and superseded resolutions. A bead with unfinished descendants is rejected unless the close modal's force option is enabled with a non-done resolution; the modal previews those descendants first. Closing or launching a task with a pending TaskTriage request settles that gate so the notification does not outlive the decision. Mutation work runs as tracked procs and refreshes the pane after completion.

The default s status action is type-aware:

task: open → ready → in_progress → closed → open
      claimed → ready
      snoozed → ready
other beads: open → in_progress → closed → open

The s action changes persisted status only; moving a task from ready to in_progress does not itself launch a worker. Use w, the matching TaskTriage notification, or sase bead work <task-id> to launch the work. The editor shows only fields valid for the selected bead type, while dependencies remain read-only in the detail panel. s only cycles a task out of snoozed (back to ready, canceling the snooze); entering snoozed needs z, since snoozing takes arguments (a wake time, and optionally a +1 target and a reason) that a blind status cycle cannot supply.

Press z on a task bead to open the snooze picker: presets for 4 hours, Tomorrow morning, 3 days, and 1 week, plus a custom duration field accepting the same "<duration> [+<N>]" vocabulary as sase bead snooze (see Snoozing a Task Bead) and an optional reason field. Pressing z on an already-snoozed task opens the same modal in re-snooze mode, showing the current wake time and offering a cancel-snooze choice. A snoozed row in the list shows the snoozed status glyph and a dim relative wake time.

When that worker appears on the Agents tab, its bead badge points directly to the task, and its SASE CONTEXT / BEAD lane shows the task title and description, plus size when one is stored, without trying to resolve an epic plan.

Moved to Files and preview.

Document Provider Panes

Artifacts includes one document pane per configured artifact-reference provider. The fixed tabs are Commits, Patches, Beads, and Files; provider-backed document tabs such as Plans and Research appear between Beads and Files when an enabled project configures the matching sidecar ref: policy. Persisted selections use stable ids such as ref:plan and ref:research, so a missing provider falls back to Commits instead of crashing startup. Each pane renders an icon before its label — the four fixed marks (◉ Commits, ⎇ Patches, ◈ Beads, ▤ Files) are built in, and a provider pane's mark comes from its sidecar ref.icon. The active tab's icon takes that pane's accent color; inactive icons render dim. A missing ref.icon, one that fails validation, or one wider than two terminal cells uses the generic ◆ provider icon instead.

Plans is the built-in provider-backed document pane for the plans sidecar. It keeps the existing plan actions: A and X approve or reject pending proposals. A plan's owning bead (and a bead's linked plan) is an artifact link, so follow it from the link rail with $. Plans groups its list by Kind, Status, or Project (o / O). Other document providers reuse the same list, filter, detail, preview, copy, and refresh behavior from their declared properties and detail fields, and group only when they declare ref.grouping (or ref.pane.group_by); see Grouping declarations.

Commit Detail and Linked Plans

Press Enter on a Commits entry to open its full message and syntax-highlighted diff. The modal uses j / k for line scrolling, Ctrl+D / Ctrl+U for half pages, g / G for the ends, y to copy the full SHA, and Esc or q to close. When the current result contains multiple commits, Ctrl+N / Ctrl+P move through them with wraparound.

The modal's header block carries a compact commit-time chip, right-aligned on the line that also shows the diff path — an absolute stamp plus a relative age, such as Today 07:05:54 · 2h ago. Today and yesterday show seconds; older commits show HH:MM after their day label. Times are the commit's author time in the configured local timezone. The chip is free on the Artifacts timeline, where the commit time is already loaded; on the Agents tab, a commit whose stored metadata records no time has it looked up from the VCS alongside the diff, so the chip appears once that load lands. Commits made by SASE persist their author time in commit_result.json / commit_results.json, so later views need no lookup at all. A commit whose time cannot be resolved simply shows no chip.

Press p in the commit modal to load the last structured SASE_PLAN footer tag and render its referenced local UTF-8 file as Markdown; press p again to return to the cached diff. This is a local-only lookup: an absolute path is expanded and checked directly, while a relative path is checked first in the commit repository, then in each known project workspace and its plans store. sase's TUI does not clone or materialize a missing store. A missing tag, invalid reference, unavailable path, non-file path, or unreadable file produces a specific toast and leaves the commit visible. Moving to another commit always returns the modal to commit mode.

Moved to Files and preview.

Moved to Files and preview.

Epic phase sizes across plan surfaces

sase's TUI uses the literal scope labels xsmall, small, medium, large, and xlarge, with mint, sky, gold, rose, and violet chips whose text remains the primary signal. Valid older plans and phase beads with an omitted size use the stable small fallback, while an invalid authored value never produces a confident chip or count. The Plans pane also uses that shared display fallback for a legacy standalone task with no stored size; launch routing uses the same @small fallback.

Surface Size contract
Agents author and lander Shows every normalized authored size in roadmap order.
Agents phase worker Shows only that worker's normalized authored size, preserving phase isolation.
Artifacts / Beads epic, phase, and task beads Shows current persisted bead sizes in rows and details; the epic detail summarizes direct children in xsmall, small, medium, large, xlarge order. Standalone tasks appear in their own section. A legacy task with no stored size displays and launches through the shared small fallback.
Artifacts proposals, linked plans, and archives Retains the authored phases property exactly once instead of adding a competing roadmap.
Telegram epic review Adds a validated textual size breakdown while retaining the detailed Properties card and source/PDF attachment.
Epic clan summary, sase bead show, and epic work preview Continues using persisted bead sizes, which these execution surfaces already exposed.
Raw approval, validation/schema, source/PDF, and mobile attachment paths Remains a lossless generic/source view; authored phase metadata is preserved without a second summary.

_[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.