Terminal UI (TUI)
The DefenseClaw terminal UI — a keyboard-driven dashboard over the defenseclaw CLI. How to open it and a tour of the panels.
The DefenseClaw TUI is a full-screen, keyboard-driven dashboard over the
defenseclaw CLI. It surfaces the gateway status, your scanned inventory
(skills, MCPs, and plugins), alerts, logs, audit trail, and setup — all in
one place. Operator actions use the same supported CLI and gateway surfaces, so
you do not have to memorize their syntax.
Open the TUI
defenseclaw tuiThat's it. The TUI opens full-screen in your terminal. Use a reasonably large
window for the best layout. Run defenseclaw init first if you haven't yet, so
the panels have data to show.
Panels
Switch panels with the number/letter key shown, or cycle with Tab /
Shift+Tab. Press Ctrl+P to fuzzy-jump to any panel by name.
| Key | Panel | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
1 | Overview | Gateway status, the active connector roster (every wired connector on a multi-connector install) and policy, at-a-glance health |
2 | Alerts | Recent guardrail and hook alerts |
3 | Skills | Scanned skill inventory |
4 | MCPs | Scanned MCP servers |
5 | Plugins | Scanned plugins |
6 | Inventory | Combined inventory view |
8 | Logs | Live gateway logs with filter presets |
9 | Audit | Audit trail |
A | Activity | Live output from commands you run |
V | AI Discovery | Discovered AI agents, components, and local models, including model status and format |
R | Registries | Configured registries |
0 | Setup | Connector and gateway setup |
The Overview panel's AI Agents metric intentionally excludes local_model
rows so a large model cache cannot hide agent activity. Open AI Discovery
with V for the full model inventory; model rows add Model, Model status, and
Format columns, with recipe, modality, device, byte size, and pinned state in
the detail view when the source reports them.
Doctor status and cache
The Overview panel reads ~/.defenseclaw/doctor_cache.json; it does not rerun
credential or network probes during rendering. Doctor schema v2 keeps health
checks and repair attempts in separate ledgers, and the Overview derives the
run outcome from both. A failed or dependency-blocked repair therefore cannot
produce an all-green Doctor card.
Unknown or malformed schema-v2 state becomes a visible warning rather than
being assumed healthy. Snapshots older than 15 minutes are marked stale, and
pressing D runs Doctor in the background to refresh the view. Failed
credential checks also feed the bounded missing-credential notice without
exposing values. See the Doctor cache reference
for the on-disk format.
Handy keys
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
? | Toggle the help overlay |
Ctrl+K or : | Open the command palette (search-and-run any command) |
Ctrl+P | Jump to a panel by name |
Ctrl+\ | Theme picker |
D | Run defenseclaw doctor in the background and toast the result |
Y | Copy the last command's output |
Ctrl+S | Save the last run to a log file |
Ctrl+C | Quit the TUI |
Command generator
Build a non-interactive `defenseclaw setup guardrail` command for any connector. Pick mode, scanner backend, detection strategy, rule pack, HITL behaviour, and every advanced knob; copy the result straight into your terminal or CI pipeline.
What is DefenseClaw?
A 60-second pitch — DefenseClaw adds policy, audit, and connector-specific human-in-the-loop controls to supported AI coding agents.