# Hermes Agent Features and Practical Usage
🚀 For when you don't want the conversation to stop while the agent works. The modern TUI offers non-blocking input, mouse support, and rich overlays so you can watch long tasks and drop in extra instructions.
📌 Title and Feature URL
Title: TUI (Ink terminal UI)
URL:
📝 Overview
The TUI is a modern terminal UI for Hermes, launched as a subprocess from the Python CLI. It is Node.js-powered (≥20) and shares the same Python runtime, sessions, and slash commands as the classic CLI, while delivering a cleaner, more responsive experience.
🔧 How It Works
・It paints an instant first frame for a non-frozen startup, uses differential updates to prevent flicker during streaming, and provides rich modal overlays for model picking, session selection, and approval prompts.
・Non-blocking input lets you queue messages before the session is ready, and mouse selection uses uniform background highlighting instead of terminal inverse video.
・It renders LaTeX math, both inline (`$E = mc^2$`) and block (`$$...$$`).
・A status line narrates state (starting agent… / ready / thinking… / running… / interrupted) plus working directory with git branch, elapsed time, auto-compression count, active `/background` tasks, and a YOLO warning badge.
🛠 Practical Usage
・Launch with `hermes --tui`, resume the latest with `hermes --tui -c`, resume a specific one with `hermes --tui -r
`, or force classic CLI with `hermes --cli`.
・To default to it, set the env var `HERMES_TUI=1` or `display.interface: tui` in `~/.hermes/config.yaml`.
・TUI-specific slash commands are plentiful: `/model` (picker with per-provider cost hints), `/sessions` or `/switch` (live session switcher), `/skin` (live theme preview), `/details` (toggle tool detail), `/agents` or `/tasks` (observability overlay with a subagent tree), `/mouse`, and `/reload`.
・Press `Ctrl+X` to open the live session switcher and run multiple concurrent sessions within one terminal.
🎯 Use Cases
・Watch a long task progress in the live panel while dropping in mid-run instructions via non-blocking input.
・Dispatch and orchestrate many concurrent agent sessions from a single terminal.
・Survive SSH disconnects by auto-resuming with `HERMES_TUI_RESUME`.
⚠️ Caveats
・Node.js ≥20 is required (verified by `hermes doctor`), and the first launch installs TUI Node dependencies into `ui-tui/node_modules` once.
・A TTY connection is assumed; pipes or non-interactive environments fall back to single-query mode.
・It cannot attach to a remote gateway (the TUI spawns its own in-process gateway). Light-theme detection relies on `COLORFGBG` or OSC 11 probes, which not all terminals support.
#HermesAgent# #DevTools#