The :command bar

A vim-style colon prompt for actions that don't fit on the keymap: jump to a screen by name, fire on-demand checks, switch profiles, export a diagnostic bundle.

Opening + closing

The screen behind the bar keeps refreshing — gauges don't freeze while you're typing.

Status line

After a command runs, the bottom line shows the result for ~3 seconds before fading:

• Info (green) — → Health, diagnostic bundle exported to /tmp/...
• Err (red) — unknown command: "...", usage: :set-logger <expr> <level> ...

If you missed the message, just re-run — the status sticks until the next command or the next 3 s tick.

Screen jumps

Every screen has a name; :<name> jumps there.

These are equivalent to pressing Tab until you reach the target screen, but faster on a 14-screen carousel.

Action commands

Why a colon prompt?

Two reasons:

1. Discoverability without clutter. The cockpit can have ten screen-jumps + half a dozen action commands without each one needing its own keybinding. The keymap stays minimal (Tab, ↵, Esc, ?, :, q); rare commands live behind the colon.
2. Familiarity. Anyone who's used vim, k9s, or lazygit has the muscle memory. The cockpit's job is to not require new muscle memory.

What's not on the bar

These actions deliberately don't have a :command form:

• Cashing out cheques. Cashout is on-chain; it costs gas; you should think about whether to do it. The cockpit surfaces the data (S3 Pane 2) but won't trigger the on-chain transaction. Use curl POST /chequebook/cashout/<peer> if you really mean it.
• Buying / topping up postage. Same reasoning. S2 shows TTL and worst-bucket; the :*-preview verbs (see stamp-previews) compute predicted TTL/cost without writing — but bee postage buy and bee postage topup themselves are operator decisions with funding consequences and stay outside the cockpit.
• Stake deposit / withdraw. Same.
• Connect / disconnect peers. Bee's kademlia handles this without operator help; manual connect is a debugging escape hatch.

The cockpit is a read-mostly observer. The mutating commands it does have are scoped to upload + diagnostic state, never chain-mutation:

• :set-logger — changes a Bee logger level (no funds, no chain)
• :probe-upload — uploads one synthetic 4 KiB chunk against a caller-supplied stamp to verify the upload path end-to-end
• :upload-file / :upload-collection — real content uploads via POST /bzz; capped at 256 MiB (collections also at 10k entries). Stamp consumption is the operator's responsibility via the explicit <batch> argument.

There is intentionally no :reupload, :tx-bump, or :grantees-create verb yet — write tier verbs that consume stamps or mutate chain state warrant their own UX + confirmation pass. The current write surface stops at uploads.

See also

• :diagnose
• :pins-check
• :loggers / :set-logger
• Stamp dry-run previews
• :probe-upload
• :upload-file
• :upload-collection
• :feed-probe
• S14 — Feed Timeline
• S15 — Pubsub watch
• :context