CLI Channel

The command-line interface is the default channel in Triggerfish. It is always available, requires no external setup, and is the primary way you interact with your agent during development and local use.

Classification

The CLI channel defaults to INTERNAL classification. The terminal user is always treated as the owner -- there is no pairing or authentication flow because you are running the process directly on your machine.

Why INTERNAL? The CLI is a direct, local interface. Only someone with

access to your terminal can use it. This makes INTERNAL the appropriate default -- your agent can share internal data freely in this context. :::

Features

Raw Terminal Input

The CLI uses raw terminal mode with full ANSI escape sequence parsing. This gives you a rich editing experience directly in your terminal:

• Line editing -- Navigate with arrow keys, Home/End, delete words with Ctrl+W
• Input history -- Press Up/Down to cycle through previous inputs
• Suggestions -- Tab completion for common commands
• Multi-line input -- Enter longer prompts naturally

Compact Tool Display

When the agent calls tools, the CLI shows a compact one-line summary by default:

tool_name arg  result

Toggle between compact and expanded tool output with Ctrl+O.

Interrupt Running Operations

Press ESC to interrupt the current operation. This sends an abort signal through the orchestrator to the LLM provider, stopping generation immediately. You do not need to wait for a long response to finish.

Taint Display

You can optionally display the current session taint level in the output by enabling showTaint in the CLI channel configuration. This prepends the classification level to each response:

[CONFIDENTIAL] Here are your Q4 pipeline numbers...

Context Length Progress Bar

The CLI displays a real-time context window usage bar in the separator line at the bottom of the terminal:

[████████████░░░░░░░░] 62% ctx  MCP 3/3

• The bar fills as context tokens are consumed
• A blue marker appears at the 70% threshold (where automatic compaction triggers)
• The bar turns red when approaching the limit
• After compaction (/compact or automatic), the bar resets

MCP Server Status

The separator also shows MCP server connection status:

Display	Meaning
MCP 3/3 (green)	All configured servers connected
MCP 2/3 (yellow)	Some servers still connecting or failed
MCP 0/3 (red)	No servers connected

MCP servers connect lazily in the background after startup. The status updates in real time as servers come online.

Input History

Your input history is persisted across sessions at:

~/.triggerfish/data/input_history.json

History is loaded on startup and saved after each input. You can clear it by deleting the file.

Non-TTY / Piped Input

When stdin is not a TTY (for example, when piping input from another process), the CLI automatically falls back to line-buffered mode. In this mode:

• Raw terminal features (arrow keys, history navigation) are disabled
• Input is read line by line from stdin
• Output is written to stdout without ANSI formatting

This allows you to script interactions with your agent:

echo "What is the weather today?" | triggerfish run

Configuration

The CLI channel requires minimal configuration. It is created automatically when you run triggerfish run or use the interactive REPL.

channels:
  cli:
    interactive: true
    showTaint: false

Option	Type	Default	Description
interactive	boolean	true	Enable interactive REPL mode
showTaint	boolean	false	Show session taint level in output

No Setup Required The CLI channel works out of the box. You do not need

to configure anything to start using Triggerfish from your terminal. :::

Keyboard Shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Enter	Send message
Up / Down	Navigate input history
Ctrl+V	Paste image from clipboard (sent as multimodal content)
Ctrl+O	Toggle compact/expanded tool display
ESC	Interrupt current operation
Ctrl+C	Exit the CLI
Ctrl+W	Delete previous word
Home / End	Jump to start/end of line