Cockpit (interactive TUI)

Run sm with no arguments in a terminal and you land in the cockpit — a Bubble Tea TUI that puts the whole stack on one screen and turns every common verb into a single keystroke. It's the same surface as the CLI; sm submit, sm restack, sm modify, etc. all work exactly as they do from the shell. The cockpit just removes the "what was that flag again?" friction.

Bare sm opens the cockpit on a TTY:

sm

sm --help still prints help, even on a TTY:

sm --help

Every subcommand keeps its old behaviour — e.g. sm log always prints the tree:

sm log

In a pipe, CI, or any other non-TTY context, bare sm falls back to sm --help so existing scripts are unaffected.

What's on screen

The cockpit has five screens; the dashboard is where you start.

Dashboard

Two panes. The left pane is your stack tree, rendered the same way as sm log — current branch highlighted, needs-restack markers, PR pills. The right pane is the detail view of whatever row your cursor is on: parent, children, ahead/behind, PR state, and the recent commit list (powered by sm show).

Key	What it does
↑ / ↓ (or j / k)	Move the cursor through the tree
g / G	Jump to the top / bottom
enter	Checkout the selected branch
r	Restack the selected branch
t / T	Track / untrack the selected branch
m	Amend the current commit (sm modify)
f	Fold the current branch into its parent
a	Run sm absorb
u	Undo the last sm op
s / S / L	Submit / sync / land (shells out so gh can prompt)
d	Open the diff viewer for the selected branch
ctrl+r (or R)	Reload the snapshot
?	Help overlay
ctrl+p (or ctrl+k)	Command palette
q	Quit

Mutating actions on the trunk row are refused; the status line tells you why.

Conflict resolver

If sm restack, sm modify, sm sync, or sm submit pause on a conflict, the cockpit auto-routes here. You see the rebase origin, the branch the conflict is on, the queue of branches still pending, and the unmerged file list pulled live from git.

Key	What it does
↑ / ↓	Move through conflicting files
e	Open the selected file in $EDITOR
c	sm continue once you've staged the resolution
A	sm abort to bail out of the rebase
esc	Back to the dashboard

When the rebase clears, the cockpit bounces back to the dashboard automatically.

Diff viewer

Pressing d on a tracked branch opens a two-pane diff. Left lists the commits that branch adds on top of its parent (one row per sm show commit). Right is the rendered diff for the selected commit, fetched on demand via git show and cached per-SHA so stepping back and forth is instant.

Key	What it does
tab / n	Next commit
shift+tab / p	Previous commit
pgdn / ctrl+d	Page down inside the diff
pgup / ctrl+u	Page up inside the diff
esc	Back to the dashboard

Command palette

ctrl+p opens a fuzzy-searchable list of every dashboard action (checkout, restack, submit, …). Type to filter, enter runs, esc closes. Useful when you forget a key binding or want to pick an action without leaving the keyboard.

Help overlay

? brings up a categorised cheat sheet for every key the cockpit understands. The list is generated from the same keymap the action handlers use, so it can't drift.

In-process vs. shell-out

To keep the UX coherent, the cockpit splits its work in two:

• In-process (fast, local): checkout, restack, track, untrack, modify, fold, absorb, undo, plus the conflict resolver. These call the same internal/service layer the CLI uses, so paused-rebase semantics, the undo journal, and git config updates behave identically.
• Shell-out (tea.ExecProcess): submit, sync, land. These can prompt through gh or take a long time, so the cockpit yields the terminal to the real sm subcommand and resumes when it exits. Output is exactly what you'd see running sm submit directly.

A network action that leaves the system in a paused rebase (e.g. sm sync hitting a conflict) auto-routes you into the conflict resolver on the next snapshot reload — no manual navigation needed.

What the cockpit doesn't do

• It doesn't introduce new business logic. Anything you can do in the cockpit you can do from the CLI, and the underlying state changes are identical.
• It doesn't replace sm log / sm show for scripting. Use the CLI (with --json / --porcelain) when you want machine-readable output.
• It doesn't ship with extra dependencies. Bubble Tea and Lipgloss are already in the binary.