beady-eye

bdi is one unblinking eye over every beads tracker you point it at. It draws each tracker's work as a tree, and beside every bead an agent has claimed, the live herdr pane that agent is sitting in. Select a bead and the tail of its pane is drawn under the forest, so what the agent is doing is read off the same screen as the work it is doing it to.

Run a few agents through one backlog and this is the view you wanted, and not one the agents were going to volunteer. beads knows the work. herdr knows the agents. Neither has heard of the other. Something old has opened an eye over both.

Three of arkham's beads have a live agent beside them, and the band at the foot is what the selected one's pane is saying. ark-5 is what else falls out of watching both at once: beads says an agent claimed it, herdr has no pane for that agent, and the eye says so. It has seen a pane die on a Tuesday before.

The eye only looks, but for one errand: it will carry a person's answer to a bead that asked for one. Changing the work is still bd's job, and the eye finds this arrangement acceptable.

Summoning

Homebrew fetches a built binary, for macOS and Linux on Intel and arm64:

$ brew install codeforbreakfast/tap/bdi

crates.io, if you would rather compile it yourself:

$ cargo install beady-eye

herdr, as a plugin that fetches the released binary for your platform:

$ herdr plugin install CodeForBreakfast/beady-eye

That puts nothing on screen by itself, because herdr has no command palette. Bind a key to the plugin's action in ~/.config/herdr/config.toml, and that key opens the eye in a split beside the focused pane, on that pane's project:

[[keys.command]]
key = "prefix+i"
type = "plugin_action"
command = "codeforbreakfast.beady-eye.open"

The plugin keeps its bdi to itself. To run bdi anywhere else, install it another way as well.

Nix, with flakes on, builds the tip of main. The flake serves Linux on Intel and arm64, and macOS on Apple silicon. An Intel Mac takes the Homebrew or release binary instead:

$ nix run github:CodeForBreakfast/beady-eye

From your own flake, pin a release tag and take the package or the overlay:

inputs.beady-eye.url = "github:CodeForBreakfast/beady-eye/v0.22.0";

beady-eye.packages.${system}.default                # the package
nixpkgs.overlays = [ beady-eye.overlays.default ];  # pkgs.beady-eye

CI pushes every main build for x86_64 Linux to a Cachix cache, so with the cache in your nix.settings neither of those compiles anything:

substituters = [ "https://codeforbreakfast.cachix.org" ];
trusted-public-keys = [ "codeforbreakfast.cachix.org-1:W96fHCqTzLZ7Vj2TKMMRLOkWzUn7N3LxKyBuF255XKg=" ];

Both are built against this flake's own nixpkgs, which is what the cache holds. pkgs.beady-eye-rebuilt through the overlay builds bdi against your nixpkgs instead, and compiles.

Or take a binary from the latest release. There is one per platform with a .sha256 beside it, and the Linux ones are static. Rename it bdi and put it on your PATH. Apple has not been asked to sign it, so a copy a browser downloaded needs xattr -d com.apple.quarantine bdi before macOS will let it open its eye.

The crate is beady-eye. The command is bdi.

Opening the eye

Stand in a repository beads tracks and run it:

$ bdi

No config. It reads that project, draws its trees, and keeps them fresh. Three bands: the forest at the top, the tail of the selected bead's pane under it, and a foot row with notices on the left and keys on the right.

Keys to start with. ? lists the lot.

key	does
↑ ↓ j k	move
← → h l	collapse or expand; again to move to the parent or first child
Enter	open the bead, and from there, focus its pane
f	focus the selected bead's pane
a	every tree, not only the ones with a live agent
F	only the selected bead and the work beneath it; again for the whole forest
/ n N	search ids and titles
y	copy the bead id (OSC 52, so it survives ssh and a multiplexer)
^R	read the trackers again now
q	avert the eye

bdi --json writes the same snapshot to stdout instead of drawing it. That is also what to reach for when stdout is not a terminal; bdi | cat says so and exits.

bdi --beads writes each unfinished bead once instead of the forest: whether it is ready, what blocks it, the agent on it, and its labels and description. Unlike bd ready, it counts a blocker in another project, so bdi --beads | jq '.beads[] | select(.ready)' is the work that waits on nothing. With --all-projects, select(.labels | index("human")) picks out every project's beads labelled human in one query.

Several trackers

A config file opens the eye on all of them:

[[projects]]
name = "arkham"
path = "/home/you/arkham"

[[projects]]
name = "dunwich"
path = "/srv/work/dunwich"
environment_command = "nix develop -c"

That lives at ~/.config/beady-eye/config.toml, or wherever --config says, and an edit takes effect while bdi runs. Start it under one of the projects and it reads that one alone. Start it anywhere else, or pass --all-projects, and it reads them all. --project NAME picks.

Each project is read with its own bd, entered the way you would enter it yourself. An .envrc and direnv need nothing said. Anything else, say it with environment_command.

bdi bd <project> human respond <bead> <response> is the errand. It records a person's answer in the tracker of a project the config names, by running that project's own bd the way the eye reads it, so whatever asks needs no map of trackers or credentials. No other bd command is passed, and no flag but -r/--response. A response that starts with a dash goes after --. Nothing after the project can pick another tracker, so a permission rule on bdi bd <project> holds a caller to that one project.

bdi watch reads every configured project and holds what it read, polling as the eye does and taking the same reports on a socket of its own. Run one per machine under whatever supervises your processes, such as a systemd user unit or a launchd agent. The view, bdi --json and bdi --beads then answer from what it holds and run no bd of their own, and read for themselves whenever it is not there. "Running the watcher" in docs/configuration.md has an example of each.

Anything can watch beads through the watcher. A consumer connects to its socket and says what it watches. It is sent each of those beads as one line of JSON, first as they stand and then each time one changes. This one watches a project and prints every bead it hears of:

import json, os, socket, sys

project = sys.argv[1]
at = os.path.join(os.environ["XDG_RUNTIME_DIR"], "beady-eye", "watcher.sock")

watcher = socket.socket(socket.AF_UNIX)
watcher.connect(at)        # refused: no watcher, so nothing is known
watcher.settimeout(60)     # an alive line is due every 20 seconds
watcher.sendall(f"watch {project}\n".encode())

try:
    for line in watcher.makefile():
        said = json.loads(line)
        if said["line"] == "bead":
            print(said["row"]["id"], said["row"]["status"], flush=True)
        elif said["line"] == "gone":
            print(said["id"], "gone", flush=True)
        elif said["line"] == "freshness" and said["tracker"] != "ok":
            print(project, "unreachable, last read", said["as_of"], flush=True)
except TimeoutError:
    sys.exit("the watcher has wedged")
sys.exit("the watcher has gone")

It starts from the beads that are not closed. A bead filed after it connected arrives as a line of its own, and so does a bead that closes:

$ python3 watch.py summit-works
smt-4kd3p open
smt-4kd3p.20 blocked
smt-4kd3p.21 open
smt-4kd3p.20 closed

The script tells a quiet watcher from one that has gone. A watcher that is up sends an alive line every 20 seconds, however quiet its trackers are. So a refused connection, a closed one, or a minute of silence means nothing is watching, and the script stops rather than act on what it has not been told. A tracker the watcher cannot reach is reported in that project's freshness line, and the beads already sent stand as the last known. Where a project's entry sets events_journal = true, the watcher also sends each of bd's event records as an event line, which says who made a change and carries the text of a comment. docs/design.md has every line the watcher sends, under "Watching".

docs/configuration.md has the rest: badges drawn from what a bead carries, credentials, extra roots, intervals, the light theme, and the socket you can poke to say a tracker changed so the eye stops polling it.

Being seen

The eye draws only what it can find. An agent that wants to be found tells the bead which pane it is in. One that does not still toils, but toils among the unaccounted-for below the trees, and no amount of staring will move it up.

docs/agents.md is addressed to the agent rather than to you. Hand it over, and let it fold the lines into whatever it already obeys.

What it needs

• Linux or macOS. Unix sockets and unix signals. Windows would need a different ritual entirely.

• bd 1.1.0 or newer. An older one is reported on the project's line rather than obeyed. Packaged builds lag, so check what yours says.

• A tracker bd can open. Server or embedded. A Dolt server wants a password, and it reaches bd in BEADS_DOLT_PASSWORD, from your shell or from a project's credential_command.

• herdr, for the agents. Without it you get the trees and the claims, and every tree is drawn. With it you get the point: which claim has a live pane behind it, which pane toils on nothing any bead has heard of, and the tail. With bdi on your PATH, a binding in herdr's config opens it as a popup on the focused pane's project, and q puts it away again:

  [[keys.command]]
  key = "prefix+shift+i"
  type = "popup"
  command = "bdi"

• git, for worktrees. Without it the project is named after its directory and a pane cannot be placed by worktree.

• A terminal that honours OSC 52, for y. Terminal.app does not, and says nothing about it.

Status

Released, and gazed into daily by the people who wrote it. It has not yet gazed back. The design is in docs/design.md. It is made at Code For Breakfast, where it has a page of its own.

Versions are 0.x, and a breaking change bumps the minor. Pin a tag. 1.0.0 arrives when the shape has settled, not when something breaks.