Live Mode

Live mode is a “feels-attached” alternative to a full tmux attach. When you enter it, the AoE home view stays on screen (session list, preview, status bar) and every keystroke is relayed straight to the selected session’s pane. You get the ambient awareness of the dashboard and the immediacy of typing directly to the agent, without tmux taking over the whole terminal.

Unlike a full tmux attach (which replaces the screen until you detach), the dashboard never leaves, so you can watch other sessions’ states while you work.

Entering and leaving

• Enter: press Tab on a runnable session, or set live mode as your default so that Enter (and clicking a row) drops you straight into it. See Default Attach Mode and New Session Attach Mode in Settings.
• Leave (fast exit): press Ctrl+Q. This is a single press and is always available, independent of the leader below.

The status bar shows a ● LIVE → <session> banner while you are relayed, including a reminder of the exit chord and the leader menu.

Control chords reach the agent too. Ctrl+C, for example, interrupts the agent rather than quitting AoE; use it whenever you would send an interrupt in a normal terminal. The banner flashes a brief Ctrl+C sent to agent reminder on each press, next to the exit chord, so it is clear the keystroke landed on the agent and how to leave live mode. To quit AoE, exit live mode first (Ctrl+Q), then quit from the home view.

Live-send also works for the Terminal view and Tool views (lazygit, yazi, and other embedded tools), not just the agent pane: whichever pane is on screen is what your keystrokes reach.

Turning on Auto Live-Send On View Switch (Interaction settings, off by default) skips the extra Enter/Tab/click when you switch into Terminal or Tool view: live-send starts as soon as the view switches, regardless of Default Attach Mode.

Mouse input is forwarded too, when the pane on screen is a full-screen app that asked for it: clicks, drags, and the scroll wheel reach mouse-driven tool UIs like lazygit and yazi, and an agent that tracks the pointer (Claude Code highlights expandable content under your cursor) also receives hover motion. Hold Shift while clicking or dragging to bypass forwarding and use AoE’s own text selection and copy instead.

The leader menu

Almost every key you press in live mode goes to the agent, so AoE reserves a single leader chord (tmux-style prefix) to reach its own commands. The default is Ctrl+B, matching tmux and herdr.

Press the leader, then a command key:

Keys	Action
Ctrl+B then k	Open the command palette
Ctrl+B then b	Hide / show the sidebar (preview takes the full width)
Ctrl+B then q	Exit live mode
Ctrl+B then Ctrl+B	Send a literal Ctrl+B to the agent
Esc (or any other key) after the leader	Cancel the menu, send nothing

When the leader is armed, the status bar turns into a which-key menu listing these commands, so you do not have to memorize them.

Only the leader itself is taken away from the agent, and pressing it twice still delivers it downstream (the same idea as tmux’s send-prefix). Every other chord, including Ctrl+K, passes through to the agent untouched, so the agent’s own keybindings keep working.

Opening the command palette layers it over live mode. Cancel it with Esc to drop straight back into the relay; choosing any palette command leaves live mode first, so the preview never shows one session while your keystrokes go to another.

Collapsing the sidebar

Ctrl+B then b hides the session list and hands the full terminal width to the agent pane, then restores it on the next toggle. This is a live-mode focus tool: the sidebar always reappears when you exit live mode, so you can never get stranded in the normal home view with the list hidden.

Scrolling history

Shift+PageUp and Shift+PageDown scroll the preview back through the agent’s history without leaving live mode or forwarding the keys. Bare PageUp / PageDown still pass through to the agent, so agents that page their own UI keep working.

Inserting newlines

Shift+Enter inserts a newline into the agent’s input box on kitty-protocol-capable terminals (Ghostty, Kitty, WezTerm, foot, Konsole 24+, Alacritty 0.13+, recent xterm). On terminals that do not speak the kitty keyboard protocol (Apple Terminal, default iTerm2, Termius, Mosh), Shift+Enter submits like bare Enter; use Alt+Enter (or Option+Enter on macOS), which sends ESC+CR natively on many terminals, or configure the terminal to send ESC+CR for Shift+Enter as a fallback.

The VT live transport

Live views (this TUI preview and the web/mobile live terminal) render through a persistent VT channel by default: tmux pipe-pane streams the agent’s raw output into an in-process terminal grid, and your keystrokes travel back over the same socket. Compared to the older polling path (capture-pane scrapes plus a send-keys fork per keystroke), typing echo and streaming output land with near-attach latency, and agent copies (OSC 52) reach your clipboard in live-send.

The channel needs tmux 3.4 or newer. A pane that cannot arm one, an older tmux, or a non-Unix host falls back to the polling path automatically; everything still works, just with more latency.

To rule the VT transport in or out while troubleshooting, toggle “VT Live Transport” under Settings (Tmux tab, Advanced) or set it in config.toml:

[tmux]
vt_live = false   # default true

The TUI applies a change on the next capture cycle; web connections pick it up when they reconnect.

Configuration

Both chords are editable under Settings, in the Interaction section, and in config.toml:

[session]
# Leader (prefix) chord for live-mode commands. Tmux-style spec.
# Leave empty to disable the leader entirely (then Ctrl+B passes
# straight through to the agent).
live_send_leader = "C-b"

# One or more comma-separated chords that exit live mode. Single press,
# independent of the leader.
live_send_exit_chord = "C-q"

Chord specs are tmux-style: C-b, C-a, M-x (Alt), F12, and so on. A typo in the leader falls back to the default; an empty value disables it.

Why Ctrl+B?

A prefix steals exactly one chord from the agent, so the obvious single-key candidates like Ctrl+K (readline’s kill-to-end-of-line) stay free for the shell and the agent. Ctrl+B is the chord tmux and herdr users already know as a leader. If you run AoE inside your own tmux session that also uses Ctrl+B, the outer tmux will claim it first; rebind live_send_leader to something free (for example C-a or F1), and remember that Ctrl+Q always exits regardless.