Terminal dashboard

Run mend with no command, or mend ui, in a terminal to open the dashboard: every project, worktree and session on the server, updating live. The dashboard only reads until you press a key that acts. Moving the selection never attaches, resumes or starts anything.

mend
mend ui --no-tunnel

The dashboard needs Node 26 or newer, because its renderer loads through node:ffi. The CLI re-runs itself with the flag Node needs, so you never pass it yourself. On an older Node the dashboard refuses to open and says which version it found; every other mend command works on Node 22. When standard output is not a terminal, bare mend prints the command index instead.

Layout

The session pane takes three quarters of the screen. It shows a read-only detail of the selected session with the conversation record it has written so far. The remaining quarter is a sidebar of three stacked sections, Projects, Worktrees and Sessions. The section you are in stands open, and the other two fold to one line that says what is selected there.

The layout never squeezes a pane. A terminal too narrow for both sides gives the whole width to the side you are on. A terminal too short for three sections shows the open section alone. A one-line breadcrumb states whatever did not fit.

The footer lists the keys for the section you are in, most important first, and drops hints from the end when the terminal is narrow. mend help ui prints the full description.

When you run mend inside a checkout whose origin matches no project, the dashboard offers to adopt it. Enter or y adopts it, the left and right arrows (or Tab) pick its Git access (ambient, mend-key or bridge), and Esc or q declines. See Git access for what each mode means.

Keys

Key	What it does
↑ ↓ or k j	Move inside the open section, or scroll the session pane
PageUp PageDown	Move ten rows
Enter, →, l or Tab	Move one column right: projects, worktrees, sessions, then the session pane
←, h, -, Backspace or ⇧Tab	Move one column left
a	Attach this terminal to the selected live session
r	Resume the selected settled session, on a harness you pick
n	Start another session in the selected worktree; in Projects, or with no worktree, a new one
w	Start a new worktree
e	Rename the selected session; an empty name clears the label
v	Review the session’s change in the terminal
o	Open the session in the browser
⇧K or x	Stop the selected session, or every live session of the selected worktree (press twice)
⇧D	Remove the selected session, or the selected worktree in Worktrees (press twice)
⇧R	Refresh
q	Quit

In the Projects section, the verbs that act on a session (a, r, e, v, o, ⇧K, ⇧D) do nothing and the dashboard asks you to select a session first. Ctrl chords belong to the terminal and never trigger a verb.

⇧K and ⇧D arm on the first press and act on a second press within five seconds. The status line says what the second press will do, for example press ⇧D again to remove session · … — its record goes, the worktree stays. The dashboard refuses to remove a session whose agent is still working, or a worktree with live sessions; stop them first.

A stopped agent can leave its Services running, and a running Service keeps the workspace up. On such a row ⇧K stops those Services instead, and the status line names what holds the workspace.

Starting sessions

n and r open a harness picker: codex, claude, opencode, or shell (a plain bash session in its own recorded worktree). When you resume, the first entry is the session’s own harness, which resumes natively with the conversation intact. Picking another harness carries the conversation over as a distilled prompt. Enter picks, Esc or q closes the picker.

w, and n where there is no worktree to join, open the worktree form. It asks for a name, then a base branch from a filtered list, then a harness. Tab moves forward through the steps, ⇧Tab moves back, and Esc steps back or cancels from the name. When you started mend inside a checkout of the same project, the base starts on that checkout’s branch.

After starting or resuming, press a once the row reads running to attach.

Reviewing in the terminal

v opens the change review in the terminal. Inside it:

Key	What it does
Tab	Move focus between files, the diff and comments
j k, n p, ] [	Move by line, by file, by hunk
c, ⇧C	Comment on the line or range, or on the whole change
v	Start or clear a line range
d w z	Toggle split diff (wide terminals), wrap, and whitespace
s	Assemble the open comments into a follow-up for the same session
y	Deliver the pending follow-up and relaunch the session
m	Mend reads the change
g	Draft concrete suggestions
a x u	In the comments list: accept a draft or mark an open comment addressed, dismiss, reopen
t, , .	Compose the tour, and step through it
r	Refresh the live change
o	Continue the review in the web app
Esc or h, q	Back to the dashboard, quit

Review a change describes what these produce.

Attach from the command line

These commands take a session id prefix. With no id and one live session, that session is taken; with several, a picker opens.

Command	What it does
mend attach [session] [--no-tunnel]	Reattach this terminal to a running session
mend rejoin [session] [--harness <h>]	Attach when the session is live, otherwise resume it
mend resume [session] [--with <h>]	Start a new agent process from the saved harness state
mend continue [session]	Resume the session with its pending review follow-up as the first message
mend shell [session]	Open a second terminal into the same workspace, beside the agent
mend stop [session]	End the agent; the worktree, record and review remain
mend stop --all [--project <p>]	Stop every live session, optionally in one project
mend stop --services [session]	Stop the session’s Services instead of its agent

mend rejoin with no id takes the newest live session, and failing that the newest settled one. mend continue with no id takes the newest session with a pending follow-up. mend resume --with switches the harness between claude and codex, and the conversation carries over.

mend stop leaves Services running, and a running Service keeps the workspace up. The stop then prints, for example, agent stopped · 3 services keep the workspace up. mend stop --services stops them, and the workspace closes once nothing is live.

Detach

Press Ctrl+] to detach. The session keeps running, and you can reattach from any terminal, the web app or the phone. The CLI recognizes the key both as the plain control byte and in the kitty keyboard encoding that Claude Code can switch a terminal into.

Set MEND_DETACH_KEY=none when tmux, Zellij or another outer tool owns detaching. It turns the detach key off; none is the only value it reads.

Take a session back from the phone

A session picked up on the phone runs its agent as a conversation, with no terminal behind it. mend attach, or a in the dashboard, takes it back: the phone’s agent ends and the same conversation continues in this terminal.

When a live session has no terminal to attach to, for example because only a shell holds its workspace open, a in the dashboard attaches to that shell, or opens one in the workspace when none is live.

Paste an image

In an attached session, Ctrl+V with an image on this machine’s clipboard sends the image to the session and pastes its path in the workspace. Codex and Claude read the path. Reading the clipboard needs wl-paste on Wayland or xclip on X11; macOS needs nothing extra. With no image on the clipboard, or no tool to read it, the keystroke goes through unchanged.

Services while attached

When the server is not this machine, mend attach, mend rejoin, mend codex and the dashboard tunnel the session’s live Services declared --http or --https to this machine’s loopback while you are attached. Each tunnel uses the Service’s own port when it is free here, and prints one line, for example web → http://localhost:5173. In the dashboard the tunnels follow the selected session and appear in the session pane. A Service that stops closes its tunnel, and detaching closes them all. --no-tunnel turns this off. See Development services.