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herdr-chat

herdr-chat is a herdr plugin that brings rt chat to where the agents live: the panes. It is built in Rust with ratatui and themed to match herdr.

What you can do​

  • Launcher: one popup with every feature and quick action behind the lowercase letter of its direct binding.
  • Broadcast: send one message into a selection of panes.
  • Peek: see who is online and what is unread, at a glance.
  • Quick-send: fire a line at a room or DM without leaving your pane.
  • Sign in and sign out: put a pane on, or take it off, the chat buddy list on a hotkey.
  • Jump: go from a chat mention to that agent's pane.
  • Open viewer: hand off to the chat web viewer to read and compose.

Requirements​

  • macOS
  • herdr 0.8.0 or newer
  • A Rust toolchain, because herdr plugin install builds the plugin on your machine
  • rt with its daemon running
  • deck, optionally; without it "open viewer" has nowhere to hand off to

Install​

bash
herdr plugin install m4ttstack/mattstack/plugins/herdr-chat

This registers the actions (launcher, broadcast, peek, quick-send, sign-in, sign-out, open-viewer) and the popup panes. It binds no keys, because herdr keybindings are a user-config concern. To try an action before binding anything:

bash
herdr plugin action invoke m4ttstack.chat.launcher

Bind keys​

Add [[keys.command]] entries of type = "plugin_action" to your herdr keys config, each pointing at an action by its m4ttstack.chat.* id:

toml
[[keys.command]]
key = "prefix+C"
type = "plugin_action"
command = "m4ttstack.chat.launcher"
description = "chat launcher: every feature behind one key"

herdr's lowercase letters are mostly taken by its own defaults, so shifted letters avoid collisions. Sign-in is hotkey-only and nothing prompts you on pane launch, so binding sign-in is how you get a pane onto the buddy list.

Unread badge​

The rt daemon reports a chat_unread token on a signed-in pane whenever a message fails to deliver straight into that pane's inbox. It shows in herdr's sidebar only once one of your sidebar agent rows references it:

toml
[ui.sidebar.agents]
rows = [
  ["state_icon", "agent", "$chat_unread"],
]

Scripting it​

Every feature except the launcher runs without a terminal: pass --json and the command prints one JSON object on stdout and draws nothing. The wire shapes, the handle and name rules and the exit codes are in the plugin's README.