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Commands and skills

Slash commands and $skills in mini-tui: what each command does, how skills are matched, how they reach the agent, and where they live on disk.

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Commands

Type / at the start of a message.

Command What it does
/new Start a new chat. In the web app nothing is created until you send.
/model [id] Open the model picker, or switch straight to an id.
/compact Summarize the conversation now to free context.
/subagents [name] List the subagents this session started, or open one (web app). In the terminal, /resume opens one.
/connect Connect a provider with your own API key.
/settings Open settings.
/skills Browse the skills you can reference with $name.
/help Commands and keys.

Picking a command from the menu fills it in and never runs it, so a stray Enter cannot fire /new. A path such as /etc/hosts, or a sentence that happens to start with a slash, goes to the agent unchanged.

Skills

A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md. Type $ anywhere in a message and mini-tui lists the skills, filtering on any word of the name in any order: $body and $body-pr both find pr-body.

follow $good-code, then use $better-ui and $pr-body

The agent receives each referenced skill's instructions ahead of your prompt, then your prompt as you typed it. The transcript shows only what you typed. An unknown $name stays plain text.

Where skills live

mini-tui keeps its own folder, ~/.config/mini-tui/skills/ (override with MINITUI_SKILLS_DIR). At install and at every startup, each skill in ~/.claude/skills that the folder does not have yet is copied in. Copies are never overwritten, and a skill you delete is not re-imported. bun run sync-skills runs it by hand.

Bundled skills

mini-tui ships its own skills and installs them into that folder at install and at every startup. A newer version replaces a copy you have not edited; one you edited or deleted is left as you made it.

  • $subagents: how an agent splits work across subagents of its own session (Rust agent): read the room (agent resources), size the fan-out to the free memory against a 10 GiB reserve (up to 100 live children), spawn them, keep working while they run, steer them with messages, and collect and check their results.
  • $e2e: how an agent writes and runs mini-agent-rs e2e browser tests.