Interactive Shell and TUI

Run coven with no arguments when you want Coven to open its interactive front door in a real terminal.

coven

Run coven chat — or its identical alias coven tui — when you want to be explicit:

coven chat
coven tui

The interactive surface is designed for humans who do not want to memorize subcommands. It starts with setup checks and safe first actions before launching a harness.

Default interactive runtime

The default interactive path is the managed coven-code engine. coven, coven chat, and coven tui all resolve the same hand-off: Coven looks for coven-code on PATH, under ~/.coven/engine, or under ~/.coven-code/bin, and then execs into Coven Code.

On the first interactive run, if that managed engine is missing, Coven offers to install the pinned, checksum-verified engine automatically. You can also provision it ahead of time with coven engine install.

Set COVEN_LEGACY_TUI=1 only when you temporarily need the older in-process slash shell. It is a deprecated compatibility escape hatch, not the recommended default, and it will be removed in a future release.

Explicit subcommands such as coven run, coven daemon, and coven sessions are never redirected — only the interactive entry point hands off. See Core concepts for the ownership boundary.

Terminal appearance

For explicit native CLI commands, --theme auto|light|dark selects the palette for the terminal background. auto uses COVEN_THEME, then COLORFGBG, and falls back to dark without querying the terminal:

coven --theme light doctor

--color separately controls ANSI output. See the CLI color and palette rules.

Terminal routing

When stdin and stdout are both terminals, coven opens the managed interactive UI. When you pass a bare prompt, Coven routes the text as a Cast prompt instead of opening the interactive surface:

coven "summarize the current project"

Use Run if you want to choose a harness explicitly:

coven run codex "summarize the current project"

When to use explicit commands

Use explicit subcommands for automation, support, or docs:

• coven doctor for setup checks.
• coven daemon status for daemon process state.
• coven sessions --plain for copyable tables.
• coven sessions --json for client integration.

The interactive UI is the front door. The daemon and session commands are the operational reference paths.