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kode tui launches Kode’s interactive Terminal User Interface — a full-featured front end for browsing your codebase, running tasks, reviewing Ghost Branch results, and inspecting verification output. On first run, Kode downloads the TUI binary from GitHub Releases and caches it in ~/.kode/tui/. Subsequent runs start instantly from the cached binary. You can also launch the TUI simply by running kode with no arguments.

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Synopsis

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What it does

  1. Checks the cache — looks for a versioned TUI binary in ~/.kode/tui/bin/
  2. Downloads if missing — fetches the platform-specific binary from GitHub Releases and writes it to ~/.kode/tui/bin/kode-tui (or kode-tui.exe on Windows)
  3. Launches the TUI — starts the binary, passing through port, hostname, and mDNS flags; the TUI binary connects back to kode via the KODE_BIN environment variable
  4. Logs TUI output — redirects the TUI’s stderr to ~/.kode/tui/kode-tui.log so diagnostic lines do not interfere with the terminal screen buffer

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Flags

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Examples

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First-run behavior

On first run (or when the cached binary does not match the current Kode version), kode tui downloads the platform binary from GitHub Releases:
The binary is saved to ~/.kode/tui/bin/kode-tui and a version marker is written to ~/.kode/tui/.kode-tui-version. Future runs skip the download and start immediately. The download URL is constructed as:
Where <os> is linux, darwin, or windows, and <arch> is x64 or arm64.

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Environment overrides

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TUI log file

TUI stderr output is written to ~/.kode/tui/kode-tui.log. If the TUI behaves unexpectedly or crashes, inspect this file for diagnostic output:
If the TUI download fails due to a network restriction or proxy, set KODE_TUI_BUNDLE_URL to an alternative mirror URL or a local file path and re-run kode tui.
Running kode with no arguments is equivalent to kode tui. Both commands go through the same binary resolution and download path.
  • kode loop — run tasks from the command line without the TUI
  • kode mcp serve — expose Kode as an MCP server for Claude Desktop