Turn Off Agent Features

If you want only the multiplexer, turn off the agent features:

[agents]
enabled = false

The default is true. You can also change it on the settings page (, in window mode), where it is the first row, "Agent features". While a TUIOS client is open, you can also run this from a shell outside TUIOS:

tuios set-config agents.enabled false

The change applies at once, in both directions. You do not have to restart TUIOS.

What turns off

The daemon:

• It does not look for agents. It does not read the process table, pane titles, screens or agent transcripts, and it drops the OSC 9;4 progress and the agent state that programs send.
• The stall timer does not run.
• It runs no agent hook, such as after-agent-state.
• It types no queued message, and it offers to resume no agent conversation after a restart.

The client:

• The rail shows no agents section. The other sections move up to fill the space.
• The Inbox, agent mail, approvals and agent alerts are off. The Inbox key shows one line, "Agent features are off. Turn them on in Settings.", and does nothing else.
• The prefix menu, the command palette, the help and the settings page do not show agent items.

Commands and verbs:

• Agent commands stop with one line: "Agent features are off. Set agents.enabled = true in the config to use this command."
• A program that calls an agent verb gets the error code agents_disabled. --json carries the code.
• The agent verbs cover agents and fans (start-agent, fan, fan compare, fan verify, fan keep, list-agents, resume-agent, ask-agent, the explain-agent-* commands), agent state and metadata, agent mail, the Inbox and approvals (list-attention, peek-prompt, respond, ask-human), the queue, and review send.
• wait-for still works. Only its agent-state and agent-message conditions are refused.
• tuios mcp started with the features off leaves the agent tools out of its tool list.
• An agent command aimed at another machine, such as tuios list-agents -s build:work, follows this machine's switch.

With the Inbox off, push notifications have no item to send.

What happens when you turn it off

• The daemon clears the agent state of every pane, and closes every Inbox item.
• A held approval goes back to the agent, which asks in its own pane.
• Queued messages are dropped, so a message queued before cannot be typed later.

When you turn the features on again, the daemon looks at every pane at once.

What stays

• Sessions, panes, workspaces, layouts and the rest of the rail.
• Worktrees: tuios worktree new, ls, diff, rm and pull.
• tuios review and its notes. Only sending the notes to an agent is off.
• Ship: commit, merge, push and pull request.
• Checkpoints already saved can still be listed, read and restored. No new checkpoint is taken, because the daemon sees no agent turn end.
• The tmux shim, hooks for other events, and tuios notify test.

Typing between panes is stricter

A pane can answer another pane's prompt if it types into that pane. Usually TUIOS knows which pane waits on a prompt. With the features off it does not know. So a pane that does not hold the respond grant can type only into:

• A pane that it opened, for example with tuios new-window or the tmux shim's split-window.
• A pane whose own shell is at its prompt, with no program running.

It cannot type into other panes. This includes send-keys, send-text and run from a script in a pane. Your own keys, and commands from a shell outside TUIOS, are not affected.

To let every pane type into other panes, give panes respond:

[agents.permissions]
grants = ["admin", "respond"]

See What a pane may do.

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