Stoat Slash Commands

Stoat Slash Commands

The stoat REPL ships seven slash commands. The palette is intentionally small — the headline ergonomic is the shell-mode toggle, not a thousand slashes.

Slash	Effect
/help	Render this palette inline.
/exit (alias /quit)	Exit the REPL.
/clear	Drop conversation history (does not affect on-disk eventlog).
/model (no arg)	Show the active model id.
/model <id>	Set the active model id for the next agent turn.
/shell	Toggle between agent mode and shell mode.
/cost	Show the running cost rolled up from successful agent turns.
/history [N]	Show the last N submitted lines (default 10), tagged by mode.

Slash commands are reachable from both modes — /shell itself has to be available from inside shell mode to flip you back, and /help / /exit work everywhere.

/shell — the headline toggle

stoat> /shell
(shell mode: each input runs as 'bash -c <input>'. Type /shell to return to agent mode.)
stoat$ /shell
(agent mode)
stoat>

The slash is functionally equivalent to the Ctrl-X keyboard chord many terminal users expect from upstream shell-mode harnesses, but unlike a chord it works in every terminal regardless of keybindings.

/history — mode-tagged review

/history renders the last few submitted lines with a per-mode marker:

stoat$ /history 4
> list the top-level files
> read the README
$ pwd
$ ls -la

> for agent-mode lines, $ for shell-mode lines. The marker matches the prompt prefix you’d see inline.

/model — mid-session swap

stoat> /model
model: kimi-k2.6
stoat> /model gpt-4o
model set: gpt-4o
stoat>

The model swap takes effect on the next agent turn — the running provider isn’t recreated until the user actually fires a prompt, so the slash is cheap and side-effect-free.

/cost — running rollup

stoat> /cost
cost: $0.0421

Stoat tracks the running USD cost across successful agent turns in the current REPL. The rollup is best-effort; turns that complete without a cost field on the agent result aren’t counted.

For an authoritative cost rollup across all persisted sessions, use chimera stoat sessions cost (see sessions.md).

Embedding

The slash dispatcher lives in chimera.stoat.slash.SlashPalette. Embedders who want to reuse the palette in their own UI can construct one directly:

from chimera.stoat.shell_mode import ShellModeManager
from chimera.stoat.slash import build_default_palette

palette = build_default_palette(
    shell_mode=ShellModeManager(),
    model="kimi-k2.6",
    on_clear=lambda: print("cleared"),
)
result = palette.dispatch("/shell")
print(result.text)

SlashPalette.dispatch returns a SlashResult with text (what to render), keep_going (whether the outer loop should continue), and handled (whether the slash was recognised).

See also

• shell-mode.md — the toggle in detail.
• quickstart.md — install + first run.
• chimera/stoat/slash.py — the dispatcher source.