The Cockpit — A Complete Reference

Chapter 7 introduced the cockpit as a place you sit. This chapter is the reference: every screen it can show, every pane on those screens, and every keyboard shortcut — including the one that lets you talk to ACE out loud from anywhere in the product.

Launch it from any FlowForge project:

flowforge tui

The cockpit is a full-screen terminal application — FlowForge’s flagship surface. You never leave it to do the day’s work: you spawn workers, watch them run, read and ratify documents, merge pull requests, check your billing, and talk to ACE, all from the same screen.

How the cockpit is organized

The cockpit is one window that swaps its main screen between a handful of views, with two things that are always present:

• The ACE rail — a dockable conversation with ACE, the controller. It is always one double-tap of Ctrl away, on every screen.
• The footer strip — a live row of the highest-priority screen shortcuts, so you never have to remember where you are or where you can go. Press ? for the complete catalogue.

Every status in the cockpit is co-rendered: color is never the only signal. Each state carries a color and a glyph and a label, palettes are chosen to stay legible for color-vision-deficient users, and NO_COLOR is honored. Good terminal craft is part of the product, not an afterthought.

The screens

Each of these is one keystroke away from the main screen. The letter in the margin is the shortcut; the full shortcut tables are below.

This manual is one keystroke away. Press M anywhere in the cockpit to open the live web edition of this manual in your browser — the same page you’re reading now, always up to date. Inside the desktop app it’s also under Help ▸ FlowForge Manual. The book teaches the key that opens it.

Waves — the automated sprint

A wave fires a batch of tickets in parallel and auto-drives each one to merge — the fastest way to clear a milestone. FlowForge emits a milestone’s tickets in dependency order, then runs them wave by wave: the current wave’s workers all go at once, and the next wave unlocks only once the one before it has fully merged. A single band in the cockpit shows the live progress — a subtle done-% that climbs as tickets merge and turns green only when the whole plan is complete.

Press w anywhere to open wave control. There you can start the run, fire just the next wave (one step at a time), and stop it — the header states the current wave state (running · queued · done-%) so you always know where you are. Stopping is immediate and safe: the wave already in motion finishes cleanly and no new wave fires, so you can start another whenever you’re ready.

The shortcuts — the complete keymap

These are FlowForge’s global keybindings, grouped exactly as the cockpit’s own help overlay groups them. This table is the single source of truth — the cockpit generates its help screen from the same registry, so what you see here is what the product does. Press ? at any time to bring up the live version.

Navigation & focus

Worker lifecycle

Screens (open a surface)

Merge & tickets

Context & chrome

Every key here is real. The cockpit’s help catalogue is generated from the same keybind registry that wires these keys — a key can never be documented but dead, or wired but undocumented. If a key works, it’s in the help screen; if it’s in the help screen, it works.

Talking to ACE — voice from any screen

Voice is a first-class affordance, not a novelty. You can talk to ACE from any screen — you do not have to be on the ACE rail, and you do not have to stop what you’re doing.

• Double-tap Ctrl (or press Ctrl+L) — push-to-talk. Speak your request to ACE from anywhere in the cockpit. It degrades gracefully to typing if voice isn’t set up.
• Alt+V — a legacy alias for the same push-to-talk (also degrades to typing).

Enable voice once:

flowforge voice setup

Voice controls

The voice pause window — how long ACE waits through a pause before deciding you’re done speaking — is itself tunable in Settings (see Chapter 11), because thinking out loud shouldn’t cut you off.

Being able to say what you want, from any screen, is a feature people would subscribe for on its own. It is the most direct expression of Never Alone: ACE is always one keystroke — or one spoken sentence — away.

Why it matters

The cockpit is where FlowForge’s discipline stops being a set of rules and becomes a place you work. Everything is one keystroke away, every status tells you the truth in more than one way, and ACE is always listening. You don’t manage the workflow — you sit in it.