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A Day In The Life

This page is for people coming from a traditional IDE workflow who want to see what "terminal-driven" can look like. The whole day happens inside tmux, and two fzf popups do most of the driving:

  • the session picker (prefix + T) for navigating, creating, switching, and killing sessions
  • the GitHub picker (prefix + G) for issues and PRs

Both wrap the lower-level comma commands (,w, ,gh-worktree) so you rarely type them by hand — the pickers handle worktree creation, session naming, and linking for you. prefix is Ctrl-Space; tmux config is home/dot_config/exact_tmux/readonly_tmux.conf.

Morning: Restore Context​

Open the session picker (prefix + T). It lists your tmux sessions, git worktrees, and recent directories in one place, with inline badges for dirty state, linked PRs/issues, and CI status. The preview pane shows the last screen of each session, so you can see where you left off and jump straight back in with enter.

The session picker is the daily driver — not raw ,w commands:

  • enter — switch to a session, or create one for a worktree/directory row (it derives a canonical session name and attaches automatically)
  • tab — multi-select rows for batch actions
  • ctrl-x — kill the selected session(s)
  • alt-x — remove the selected worktree(s) (won't tear down your current session)
  • ctrl-s — send a command to the selected session(s) without switching
  • alt-p / alt-i — open the row's linked PR / issue in the browser

Because it indexes worktrees on disk, the sessions you create with ,w (or via the GitHub picker) show up here automatically. See Session picker and Worktrees.

Work The GitHub Dashboard​

Open the GitHub picker (prefix + G) for a PR/issue dashboard with review/CI badges, hierarchy (epics, backport families), and inline actions. Switch scope with alt-1 (Focus: work you own or must act on) and alt-2 (Explore: team queues, mentions, radar), and toggle work/home with ctrl-s.

From the dashboard, without leaving tmux:

  • Create tickets — alt-i opens $EDITOR to file a new issue; alt-E files an epic (parent + sub-issues).
  • Clone and check out — enter on a PR/issue creates a worktree and focuses its session. If the repo isn't local yet, it's bootstrapped first (,gh-tfork), so cloning, worktree creation, session creation, and issue↔branch linking all happen in one step. ctrl-t batches this across marked rows.
  • Act on PRs — alt-x opens a command palette (approve, request-changes, merge, label, comment, request review); alt-c adds a comment; alt-b checks out and opens an Octo review; alt-o opens in the browser.
  • Hand off to Ralph — alt-A seeds a ,ralph go goal with the selected PR/issue context (see below).

alt-g switches between this dashboard and the session picker in place. See GitHub picker.

Agentic Tasks: Offload Work To Assistants​

Assistants are governed by a version-controlled SOP + skills layer, so behavior is consistent across tools and respects each repo's rules. See The Agentic Operating System.

The CLI assistants, in the order this setup leans on them:

  1. Cursor CLI (cursor-agent, aliased agent) — the primary interactive harness.
  2. Codex (codex)
  3. Pi (pi)
  4. Claude Code (claude)
agent      # Cursor CLI (primary)
codex
pi
claude

Per-tool configuration (auth, models, MCP, profile merging) lives in Tool configs. When you run claude, cursor-agent, or pi inside tmux, Alt-Enter prepends a calibrated verification scaffold to your prompt before submitting (toggle with prefix + W); plain Enter is never touched.

For larger, multi-step work, hand off to Ralph — a planner → executor → reviewer → re-reviewer loop with self-healing — with ,ralph go (or alt-A from the GitHub picker). See Ralph orchestrator.

Across sessions, agents carry context through two memory layers: short-lived per-workspace hook memory (/tmp/specs) and a durable knowledge base (,ai-kb). See Agent memory.

Review​

  • Use alt-b in the GitHub picker to check out a PR and open an Octo review in a new window.
  • To review the changes an agent produced before committing, use the tuicr diff loop, which feeds structured feedback back to the agent. See Reviewing agent diffs.

Code: Keep Your Editor​

You can run this whole workflow from VSCode/JetBrains using the integrated terminal — the pickers and assistants are just tmux popups and CLIs. Neovim is available if you want it, but it is optional.

Cleanup​

There's no separate teardown step: kill sessions with ctrl-x and remove finished worktrees with alt-x directly from the session picker as you go.

Maintenance​

Update dotfiles:

chezmoi update

Update packages, then reconverge:

brew update
brew upgrade
chezmoi apply