marver

A TUI workspace for AI agent sessions — tmux orchestration, git worktree management, and repo control in one place.

Start a task, describe it, and marver opens a tmux session with an agent already working in its own worktree. Inspired by k9s, cmux, and Warp.

Status: early development. Every subsystem exists and the loop closes — describe a task, an agent runs it, review the diff, commit — but nothing has been used in anger yet. The published crate is still a name reservation.

marver                  open the interface, starting a daemon if none is running
marver status           report whether a daemon is running, and what it holds
marver restart          stop the running daemon and start this version
marver upgrade          install the newest published marver
marver daemon           run the scheduler and hook receiver in the foreground
marver scan [root]      list the git repos it can see
marver --version        print the version (-v, -V)
marver --help           print usage (-h)

Every command takes --data-dir for where the database, socket, and log live, --scan-root for the directory searched for repos, and --cap for how many agents may run at once. The interface and the daemon find each other through those paths, so a --data-dir given to one must be given to the other.

Just run marver. If no daemon is listening it starts one, detached, the way a tmux client starts the server it needs — and that daemon keeps running after you close the interface. It owns the queue: it creates a worktree per repo, opens a tmux session, starts Claude Code with hooks pointing back at itself, and notifies you when a task finishes or gets stuck. Its output goes to daemon.log beside the database.

Run marver daemon yourself to watch it in the foreground or to put it under a supervisor. Starting a second one is refused rather than allowed to displace the first.

Keys

Two rules hold everywhere:

• esc leaves the screen you are on. On the task list there is nothing underneath, so leaving is quitting.
• x discards. A task on the list, a diff in review. It is never c, which means commit.

The footer of every screen shows its own keys; the whole set is below.

Task list

New task

↵ inserts a newline in the prompt rather than queueing. A prompt is what the agent is told to do and is routinely several paragraphs, so the only way to type a newline is worth more there than the shortcut; ctrl-s is how you submit without leaving the field.

Agent terminal

Every key goes to the agent, which is the point of the screen, so leaving takes a chord.

esc is not a way out here: it is how Claude is interrupted, and the agent needs it. ctrl-esc is the binding this screen would like to have, but a terminal can only report it under the kitty keyboard protocol, which marver does not enable — turning it on changes how every key is reported, and this screen forwards every key through a hand-built encoding table. In Terminal.app and iTerm2 it will not arrive at all. ctrl-q is the one that always works, in every terminal, because raw mode clears IXON and so nothing upstream takes it for flow control.

Review

Rejecting types your instructions into the agent's live session and returns the task to running. Instructions containing control characters are refused: send-keys -l stops tmux reading them, but the agent still sees the bytes, and \r would submit half a sentence while \x03 would interrupt the very turn being asked for.

Upgrading

marver upgrade              # cargo install marver --force
marver upgrade --restart    # and swap the daemon too

marver upgrade drives cargo, because that is how the crate is distributed. If you installed marver some other way it says so rather than guessing, and you upgrade it however you installed it.

Installing a new marver does not replace a daemon that is already running: it keeps executing the old binary, and since it still holds the socket, nothing starts a replacement. This is deliberate — that daemon is supervising live agents, and restarting it underneath them would fail every task it was watching.

marver status reports both versions and says so when they differ, and marver restart does the swap when you are ready:

marver restart

It refuses while any task is running or blocked, because that is the one thing a restart can cost. marver hook always exits 0 — marver being down must never interfere with an agent — so a hook arriving while nothing is listening is simply lost, and the task is left running behind an agent that has already finished. Wait for those tasks to reach awaiting-review, or accept it with marver restart --force.

Nothing restarts the daemon on your behalf. It is supervising live agents, and the moment to interrupt that belongs to whoever knows what they are in the middle of. Agents already running in tmux survive a restart either way.

See ARCHITECTURE.md for the design and the reasoning behind it.

Requirements

tmux 3.x, git, and Claude Code.

Name

A marver is the polished steel table a glassblower rolls hot glass across — shaping the piece and controlling its temperature between trips to the furnace. It is the surface where work takes form.

License

MIT OR Apache-2.0, at your option.