jackin console

Tip

The operator console is the simplest and most convenient way to use jackin’ day-to-day, and the surface most operators stay on. The CLI is for the advanced and very specific cases: scripted one-liners, niche flags, automation, and behaviours the console deliberately does not expose.

Today the console covers launching agents (the load flow), managing workspaces (workspace), editing per-workspace auth and env tables (config for those scopes), managing operator-level config through Settings, and common recovery actions for visible instances. The remaining CLI subcommands — hardline, eject, exile, multi-session preview — are not in the console yet and live on the CLI for now; they will land in the console as the TUI grows feature by feature. There is no feature parity by design: niche flags continue to land on the CLI first.

The expectation is most people use the TUI, and reach for the CLI only when they need it.

Synopsis

jackin console [--debug]

Opens the operator console — an interactive terminal UI for picking a workspace and an agent, managing saved workspaces, editing per-workspace settings, and launching agents into isolated containers.

Running jackin with no subcommand opens the same console when stdout is attached to an interactive terminal. On non-interactive shells (piped output, CI, very small terminals) bare jackin silently prints top-level help instead. jackin console makes the intent explicit and errors out when the terminal cannot host the TUI.

What the console gives you

The console opens directly to a workspace manager list — no separate workspace-picker stage. From there you can:

• Launch an agent into a workspace. Each workspace row opens the role picker in the sidebar, even when there is only one eligible role. Confirm the highlighted role to launch. If the selected role supports multiple agent runtimes, the console asks for that runtime next.
• Use your current directory as a workspace. A synthetic row at the top of the manager list mounts your cwd at the same path inside the container. Useful for quick one-off launches without saving a workspace definition.
• Recover active and preserved instances. Workspace and current-directory detail panes show an Instances panel when jackin-managed local state exists for that scope, with instance ID, status, agent runtime, and role. From that row, r reconnects or recovers, s starts another foreground agent session in a running instance, i prints a read-only state report, and p purges local recovery state when the guarded purge rules allow it.
• Open the workspace editor. Edit the workspace’s roles, environment variables, and authentication settings. Each editor surface lives on its own tab inside the editor.
• Open Settings. Manage operator-level jackin config surfaces from the Mounts, Environments, Auth, and Trust tabs.

For the per-axis details — what each tab manages, what defaults apply, where the launch summary surfaces what’s effective — see the per-axis guide pages linked below.

Workspace editor — what each tab is for

• General — workspace name and working directory.
• Roles — which roles may launch in this workspace, and which one (if any) is the default. See Workspaces.
• Mounts — host directories made available inside the container, with read-only / read-write and per-mount isolation modes. See Mounts.
• Environments — workspace-wide and per-role environment variables, sourced from literal values, host env, or 1Password. See Environment Variables.
• Auth — Claude Code, Codex, Amp, OpenCode, and GitHub CLI authentication forwarding modes at workspace and per-role scope. See Authentication for the shared pattern across every auth axis.

Every editor surface is reachable from the workspace manager list — you don’t need to know which keystroke opens which panel; the in-app footer shows the available actions for whatever you have focused.

When to reach for the CLI instead

jackin console is the simplified, intuitive TUI for everyday workspace launches. jackin load is the full-surface CLI — together with its neighbours (hardline, eject, exile, purge, workspace, config) it exposes every flag and capability jackin’ offers.

The console intentionally stays narrower. New niche flags and detail-level options land on the CLI first, and sometimes exclusively. The console surfaces only what fits into an intuitive flow — treat it as a fast path for the common cases, not as a visual alias for the CLI.

	jackin console	jackin load
Interface	Visual TUI	Command-line arguments
Best for	Exploring options, first-time setup, day-to-day launches	Scripting, repeatable workflows, feature-specific flags
Workspace selection	Interactive picker	Explicit argument
Agent selection	Interactive picker	Explicit argument
Feature surface	Simplified — common flows only	Complete — every flag jackin exposes
Where new niche flags land	Rarely	First, and sometimes exclusively

For a deeper operator workflow around fresh instances versus multiple agent sessions inside one running instance, see Parallel Agents.