Input editor
The input editor is the rounded-box component at the bottom of the terminal: > prompt, multi-line editing, history and kill-ring, undo — the text-editing machinery comes from the underlying pi-tui Editor; Mayfly layers context and enhancements on top.
Slash-command context
Input starting with / turns the frame primary mayfly and enters command context:
- Fuzzy autocomplete — the query splits on whitespace into tokens, each matched as a subsequence, ranked by score; every dropdown entry shows a two-part
hint — description, Enter accepts the preselected entry and submits. - No-match notice — when the fuzzy filter matches nothing, the hint line says
no matching command: /…(command discovery lives in the autocomplete dropdown, which closes itself on an empty match; this notice is the only signal). - Argument ghost hints — shown at most one space after
/command(e.g./sessions [<session-id>]); a leading space is added before you type the separator.
All commands live in the Slash commands reference.
! bash mode
When the buffer is exactly !, bash mode engages (the ! never enters the buffer) with a triple cue: the ! prompt, the ! shell mode frame label, and the shellMode violet frame. Submitting returns to prompt mode automatically.
Commands run through Mayfly's own executor and echo as shell cards (sanitized, truncated per stream: 200 lines / 64KB each), failures keep an exit code N line — deliberately outside the session transcript, invisible to the model. Prompt and bash submissions share one history (Up recall is not mode-filtered).
@ file completion
@ triggers file-path completion: fd first (fuzzy-scored, top 20 suggestions), with a filesystem scan as fallback when fd is missing (2000 scanned entries, 50 suggestions). Completion covers file paths; command-argument completion is deferred.
# skill invocation
# triggers skill-name completion (the same fuzzy matching as slash completion; the /skills panel, grouped by source layer, is the full catalog). On submit, #name is rewritten to /name and routed through the harness's skill gesture path — the transcript echoes the rewritten /name, and the skill's injection renders zero lines per the injected-context rule.
Large-paste folding
Pasting more than 10 lines or 1000 characters folds into a [paste #N +M lines] marker (the full text lives in the editor and expands automatically before submit — the model receives everything); the transcript side folds the same message into a 3-line preview plus a hint row, with Ctrl-O expanding on equal terms. History recall (Up) brings back the expanded full text.
Ctrl-G external editor
Ctrl-G hands the current draft to an external editor (the mayfly.editorCommand setting wins, then $VISUAL, then $EDITOR) for full-screen editing: Mayfly suspends rendering and yields the terminal to the child process; on a normal editor exit the screen restores and the text is read back (paste markers survive the round trip). Quitting with :cq counts as cancellation — the draft stays as it was.
Ctrl-V image paste
Ctrl-V stores the clipboard image in the attachment library and inserts an [image #N] marker at the cursor; on submit the markers split into image content blocks. Markers survive theme switches.
Dependencies and limits: probes wl-paste then xclip on Linux (3s timeout); on Windows one PowerShell call saves the clipboard image or the copied files (10s budget); on macOS osascript reads the clipboard classes and converts TIFF-only copies through sips (5s budget). 10MB per image, 8 images / 30MB / 16M pixels per message; the model must accept image input (see the FAQ).
Copied files paste as one ordered batch on every platform: text/uri-list in Ubuntu Files, a FileDropList in Windows Explorer, a Finder copy on macOS. Only local regular PNG/JPEG/WebP/GIF files are accepted; remote URIs, directories, and symlinks are refused with a reason.
Editor-context keys
With the editor focused, a contextual key chain applies (see Key bindings): Escape first dismisses the completion popup, then closes a side-question pane mounted above, then clears the draft, then safely retracts the just-submitted message (falling back to interruption when retraction is unavailable). Ctrl-C never retracts: it always interrupts current work first and preserves a next-message draft; only when there is nothing to interrupt does it clear an idle draft or enter the double-press-within-1-second exit path. Ctrl-S steers the non-empty draft into the current turn. ↑/↓ always belong to editor history (the queue pane only lists pending messages — it never takes those keys); the mouse wheel and PageUp/PageDown scroll a docked side-question pane when one is mounted, and the transcript otherwise.
Draft survival
The unsubmitted draft, input mode (bash triple cue included), and hint history are mirrored into a draft stash — a /theme hot-switch rebuilds the editor fiber and restores everything, so a just-submitted /theme light won't vanish from Up history either.