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 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.