moonbitlang/openseek_tui

The interactive terminal UI for OpenSeek: the openseek_tui binary. It is a scrolling transcript with a live composer that drives the headless openseek engine over its JSONL protocol — streamed answer text appears live on the activity line, each turn's reasoning is kept as a dim ✻ transcript aside above its answer, and tool results land as ⏺ blocks. Pressing Enter while a task runs steers it mid-turn; Ctrl-C cancels the turn.

The UI runs no agent code itself. The engine is the separate openseek binary from the moonbitlang/openseek repository; this module depends on that repository's published module (bobzhang/openseek on mooncakes) for the agent, session, and provider packages, and on bobzhang/openseek_protocol for the wire contract.

Running it

You need two binaries: openseek (the engine) and openseek_tui (this UI).

# 1. The engine, from the openseek repository.
git clone https://github.com/moonbitlang/openseek && cd openseek
moon build --release cmd/openseek
cp _build/native/release/build/bobzhang/openseek/cmd/openseek/openseek.exe ~/.moon/bin/openseek

# 2. This UI.
git clone https://github.com/moonbitlang/openseek_tui && cd openseek_tui
moon build --release cmd/openseek_tui
cp _build/native/release/build/moonbitlang/openseek_tui/cmd/openseek_tui/openseek_tui.exe ~/.moon/bin/openseek_tui

# 3. Converse.
export DEEPSEEK=sk-...
openseek_tui

Engine resolution. With no --engine, the UI spawns the openseek next to its own binary when launched by path (only the basename is rewritten, so an install that puts both binaries in one directory just works), otherwise the openseek found on PATH. It never spawns itself: a renamed copy, or the UI running from Moon's build tree (moon run cmd/openseek_tui), falls back to PATH. Pass --engine <path> to override. The engine is probed with --help before the UI takes over the terminal, so a missing engine fails fast.

Sessions. Every launch converses in a durable session under --session-root (default .openseek/), interoperable with the CLI's own sessions:

• openseek_tui --continue resumes the most recently active session.
• openseek_tui --session <id> resumes (or creates) a specific one.
• openseek_tui --prompt "…" sends an initial prompt once the UI opens.
• openseek sessions list (the engine CLI) shows what is resumable.

The shared engine options (--api-key, --model, --api-url, --max-steps, --thinking, --session, --session-root) are the same ones openseek run takes; openseek_tui --help lists them all.

Packages

Package	Purpose	README
moonbitlang/openseek_tui/cmd/openseek_tui	The executable: parses argv and hands the parsed matches to cmd/tui.	—
moonbitlang/openseek_tui/cmd/tui	The OpenSeek terminal UI: engine spawn and protocol handling, transcript model, slash commands, session resume.	cmd/tui/README.md
moonbitlang/openseek_tui/tui (+ core, doc, style, slash, completion)	Reusable terminal-UI framework (transcript, composer, rendering) the OpenSeek UI is built on. Agent-agnostic.	tui/README.md

Development

moon check --target native --deny-warn
moon test --target native
moon cram test tests/cram          # verified CLI docs: tests/cram/tui.md
moon fmt
moon info                          # regenerate pkg.generated.mbti after API changes

tests/cram/tui.md is executable documentation of the openseek_tui command line (help banner, argument errors, the engine preflight). It runs offline and needs no API key.

Developing against a local openseek checkout. bobzhang/openseek comes from mooncakes by default. To build against an unpublished checkout, add a moon.work (git-ignored) that lists this module and the checkout's workspace members:

members = [
  ".",
  "../openseek",
  "../openseek/protocol",
  "../openseek/editor",
  "../openseek/editor/server",
]

The editor members are needed because bobzhang/openseek itself depends on moonbitlang/editor, and the checkout's editor is the one it is developed against.

Publishing

The module is published to mooncakes as moonbitlang/openseek_tui by the publish-package workflow (.github/workflows/publish.yml, run manually via workflow dispatch) using the organization's mooncakes token. Bump version in moon.mod first.

History

This repository was extracted from moonbitlang/openseek on 2026-09-03 with git filter-repo, keeping the history of tui/, cmd/tui/, cmd/openseek_tui/, and tests/cram/tui.md.

License

Apache-2.0, see LICENSE.