Interactive Mode

Start meka without the -p flag to enter interactive mode:

meka

You get a prompt:

meka [r] >

Type your instruction and press Enter to submit. The agent processes your request and prints its response (streamed in real time as Markdown). When it finishes, you get another prompt.

Keybindings

meka uses Emacs-style keybindings (provided by reedline).

Input

Navigation

Editing

Control

Prompt Format

meka [indicator] >

The indicator shows the current permission mode:

The color provides a visual cue about the agent’s current capabilities. Red means the agent can modify your system.

Multi-Line Input

Press Alt+Enter to insert a newline instead of submitting. The prompt changes to show continuation:

meka [r] > write a python script that
  ... prints hello world
  ... and saves it to hello.py

Press Enter on the last line to submit the entire multi-line input.

Pasting multi-line content also works seamlessly — all pasted lines appear in the buffer for review, and you press Enter to submit.

Slash Commands

meka supports / prefix commands for controlling the shell:

/history

Replays prior messages in the current session so you can scroll back through context without exiting and re-resuming. /history with no argument dumps every materialised message; /history 5 shows the last 5 turns (a turn = the user’s prompt plus everything the agent did to respond). Any non-numeric argument (/history all, /history foo) falls back to the dump-everything path.

The renderer mimics the live REPL: assistant text flows through the same markdown highlighter, tool calls appear as [tool ReadFile(...)] indicators, and thinking blocks honour [thinking].show_content. User prompts are prefixed with a cyan > so they stand out from agent text.

For users who always want extra context at resume time, set display.resume_show_recent — the resume code path then renders the last N turns through the same function.

/status

Print a snapshot of the current session’s counters:

Session status
  Turns:           23
  Input tokens:    234.5k  (cache hit: 92%)
  Output tokens:   12.1k
  Redactions:      2 (12 images, ~38 MiB freed)
  Messages:        47

Redactions reports any times the Claude provider had to drop oldest tool-result image blocks because the request body would have exceeded Anthropic’s 32 MiB ceiling. A non-zero count indicates the cache prefix was invalidated for the redacted messages. See display.show_token_usage for a per-turn variant of the same data.

/compact

The /compact command asks the LLM to summarize the entire conversation, then replaces the messages the model sees with a single summary message followed by the recent tail. This is useful for long sessions that are approaching the context window limit or becoming expensive.

After compacting, the session continues with the summary as context. The pre-compaction messages stay in the underlying event log on disk — the model just no longer sees them — so meka export and resume continue to work exactly as if the compaction had wiped them.

Shell Escape

Prefix any input with ! to execute it directly as a shell command, bypassing the LLM entirely:

meka [r] > !pwd
/home/user/projects
meka [r] > !ls -la
total 32
drwxr-xr-x  5 user user 4096 Mar  4 10:00 .
...
meka [r] > !ping 1.1.1.1 -c 2
PING 1.1.1.1 (1.1.1.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
...

The command runs with inherited stdin/stdout/stderr, so it behaves exactly like a regular shell. This is useful for quick checks without waiting for the LLM.

Exiting

You can exit meka in any of these ways:

• Type /exit
• Type exit or quit
• Press Ctrl+D on an empty line

Interrupting the Agent

Press Ctrl+C while the agent is running to interrupt it. This cancels the current LLM request and kills any running shell commands that were spawned by the agent.