Terminal presentation

The taisce command shows a compact, coloured view when you run it in a terminal, and plain JSON when its output goes to a pipe or a file. Scripts keep working unchanged.

What you see in a terminal

Help, taisce health, project rebuild status and error messages use the terminal view. Long project rebuilds and fact recovery show an elapsed-time spinner on stderr while they run. The final result still goes to stdout. The spinner redraws ten times a second and clears its line when the command succeeds, fails or you press Ctrl-C.

Here is taisce health on a narrow or ASCII terminal, as the renderer draws it. A wide terminal draws the same thing with Unicode lines:

  TAISCE  instance healthy
  + memory path -------------------------------------+
  | formation    responsive                          |
  | backlog      ###............... 2/10             |
  | work         0 parked · 0 formed · 0 failed      |
  | PostgreSQL   2 instance · 3 cluster · 100 max    |
  | inference    configured                          |
  +--------------------------------------------------+

  inspect  taisce formation parked --project <name>

• work counts turns parked for an operator, turns formed, and formation attempts that failed.
• PostgreSQL shows connections to this database, connections to the whole server, and max_connections.
• inference: configured means an embedding model is configured. It does not mean a model call succeeded.
• There is no project count. The health query does not look at project names.

Colours are few on purpose: amber for the Taisce name, blue for navigation, green and red for health. A border groups one snapshot.

Changing the output

Variable	Effect
TAISCE_OUTPUT=json	Always print JSON or plain text
TAISCE_OUTPUT=fancy	Always print the terminal view, even when piped (useful for recordings)
NO_COLOR	Remove colour
TAISCE_ASCII=1	Replace Unicode graphics with ASCII
COLUMNS	Set the width, from 40 to 240

A terminal with TERM=dumb always gets the plain view, unless you ask for TAISCE_OUTPUT=fancy.

Exit codes and JSON field names are the same in every mode.

What it never shows

Before anything is drawn, labels are stripped of control characters (Unicode category Cc), which stops escape sequences from acting on the terminal, and of format characters (category Cf): direction overrides and isolates, which reorder what follows them, and zero-width characters, which make two different names print the same. Line and paragraph separators become a space. Labels are then clipped to the display width. Spacing is kept as written, so columns line up.

Today nothing but the operator can put such a character in front of this view: every value it draws is a constant, an identifier, a status the schema limits to three words, or a project name held to lowercase letters, digits and underscores. The stripping is there for whatever value is added next. The panels only show totals and operation details. They never show credentials, stored memory, model responses, or raw database or provider errors.