Terminal UI

A live, keyboard-driven dashboard over your workstations, configs, bindings, SSH keys, and grants.

rl tui opens a full-screen, keyboard-driven dashboard over your workstations and the resources around them. If you have used k9s for Kubernetes, it will feel immediately familiar: tabs across the top for each kind, a live table in the middle, and a footer that always shows the keys available right now.

It is a convenience layer, not a separate control path. The TUI is a pure client of the same resource API every other command uses, so anything you can see here you can also reach with get, describe, and friends. Actions in the TUI do not reach around the API either: starting a workstation or toggling a share edits desired state and lets the control loop apply it, exactly as a rl apply would.

The 60-second tour

Launch it from any terminal:

rl tui
The Workstations tab: the header tabs up top, the detail pane for the selected workstation, the live table with an OWNER column, and the footer key hints.
The Workstations tab: the header tabs up top, the detail pane for the selected workstation, the live table with an OWNER column, and the footer key hints.

You land on the Workstations tab. The pane at the top is a live summary of the selected row (its status, address, and everything attached to it), and it follows your selection as you move. From here, four moves get you most of the value:

  1. Switch tabs with the number keys: 1 Workstations, 2 Configs, 3 Bindings, 4 SSH Keys, 5 Grants. Each tab is a table of that kind.
  2. Move with the arrow keys or j / k, and jump to the top or bottom with g / G. The footer always lists the actions for whatever is selected.
  3. Act on the selected row. On a workstation, S starts it, s stops it, Enter opens an SSH shell, and D shows a full describe view. The footer shows these keys, and ? lists the keys for the current tab. Ctrl+P lists every command you can run here and runs the one you pick.
  4. Quit with q.

That is enough to watch your fleet and drive the common lifecycle actions. The table refreshes on its own, so a workstation you start climbs through its phases in front of you without a manual reload.

How the tables stay current

The TUI re-reads every table on a timer, every five seconds by default. Set a different interval with --refresh. While a workstation is changing phase, the Workstations tab refreshes every two seconds. R or Ctrl+R refreshes at once. See Live updates and federation.

Launching

rl tui                       # all namespaces you can see
rl tui -n team-blue          # scope to one namespace
rl tui --theme dark --refresh 3
FlagDescription
--theme <theme>Color theme: auto (default), dark, light, basic.
--refresh <seconds>How often the tables refresh, in seconds (default 5).
-n, --namespace <ns>Start scoped to one namespace.
-A, --all-namespacesAll namespaces (the default; equivalent to -n "").
--as <subject>Impersonate a subject (requires the right to do so).
--home <dir>Data directory (default $RINGLEADER_HOME, else ~/.ringleader).

Where to go next

The pages below take you from everyday use into the corners. Read them in order for a full tour, or jump straight to what you need.