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ant

v0.3.0

The terminal console: browse the whole URI namespace without leaving the terminal.

v0.3.0 adds ant tui, a full-screen terminal console over the entire ant URI namespace. It is the third human surface beside the CLI and the web console, and it shares their vocabulary and their keymap. Every screen is a thin render of the same engine the other surfaces read, so it follows links, lists members, walks the graph, and browses the on-disk cache without ever leaving the terminal.

Nothing else changed: the CLI verbs, the JSON envelope, and the web console are all exactly as they were in v0.2.0.

The terminal console

Run ant tui for the dashboard, or ant tui <uri> to open straight onto a record:

ant tui
ant tui goodreads://book/2767052
ant tui "https://x.com/nasa"

It is keyboard-driven and discoverable. Press ? for the full keymap, : to jump to any record from anywhere, and q to quit. The screens mirror the web console one for one:

  • Dashboard lists every registered domain, the place you land.
  • Domain is one driver's home: its aliases, hosts, site, and repo, a few example records to open, and what is already cached under it.
  • Resource renders a record's envelope with data, body, and raw modes you cycle through, and a links pane you can step into and follow across sites.
  • Collection lists the members of a collection URI, and links lists the outbound edges of a record.
  • Search gives every domain that supports it a query box, and each hit opens its record.
  • Graph walks the links to a depth you pick and shows the subgraph as an indented tree, with a DOT view a keystroke away.
  • Browse walks the on-disk data tree as a plain folder hierarchy, so you can see exactly what ant already knows without typing a URI.

An omnibox (:) runs whatever you type through resolve, so a bare id, a handle, a live URL, or a full URI all land on a record. It also understands the browse, domain, search, ls, graph, and links verbs, so the whole command surface is one keystroke away.

Back and forward that actually go back

The console keeps a back and forward stack of whole screens, not just URLs. Going back restores a screen exactly as you left it: the same scroll position, the same selected row, the same loaded data. Forward returns you to where you were.

Cache-first, and nothing hangs

The read path is the same one the web console uses, so it has the same guarantees. A record already on disk paints instantly with no network. A miss fills in from a background fetch with the work kept off the render loop, so the interface never freezes while a slow site answers. Viewing a record quietly warms the records it links to, so the likely next screen is often already there.

The console is read-only and local-first. It holds no credentials and changes nothing on the network. The on-disk data tree is the only state, and the console reads it freely and writes it only through the explicit export action.

Install and upgrade

Every tagged version builds the same artifacts: archives for Linux, macOS, Windows, and FreeBSD, Linux packages (deb, rpm, apk), a multi-arch container image on GHCR, and package-manager entries. The binaries are pure Go, so there is nothing to install alongside them.

go install github.com/tamnd/ant/cmd/[email protected]

Or grab a binary from the release page, or pull the image:

docker run --rm -it ghcr.io/tamnd/ant:0.3.0 tui
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