A personal fork of Hmbown/CodeWhale that rewrites the terminal UI to look closer to Claude Code's chrome-light style, while keeping every CodeWhale-specific feature (sidebar panels, mode switch, provider chip, reasoning effort chip, sub-agents, file tree, Status indicator, etc.) intact.

Languages: English · 简体中文

Empty-state welcome — chat area starts at row 0, no persistent header, sidebar shares one canvas with the chat.

A live turn — thinking block, tool calls, sidebar showing recent tools and session state, footer running the whale brand glyph next to mode · model · cost · saved, with % context left, Cache: hit and worked chips on the right.

A second active-turn snapshot — different turn, mostly tool output, showing how the cell rail keeps the chat readable even when several tool cards stack.

This is not a separate product. It is the upstream CodeWhale agent runtime with its TUI presentation layer rewritten. The agent loop, model routing, tool system, configuration format, slash commands and CLI surface are unchanged — only what you see on screen has moved.

If you want the canonical project (docs, install instructions, model support, release notes), read the upstream README:

➡️ Upstream README: https://github.com/Hmbown/CodeWhale/blob/main/README.md

If you want the binary, install from upstream — this fork has not been released and does not publish to npm / Cargo / Homebrew.

This branch was forked from upstream main at commit 8dff2f7525ead210a01347b48f53ae3f20d094ec (2026-06-03), which corresponds to CodeWhale v0.8.53. Pull from upstream periodically; this fork does not auto-track new releases.

The CodeWhale TUI ships a fairly dense chrome:

• Persistent header bar at the top (mode + workspace + model + chip cluster)
• Composer wrapped in a full Borders::ALL rounded box
• Sidebar with full-bordered panels
• Footer with an animated water-spout strip
• Tool cells wrapped in ╭ │ ╰ card frames

After spending some time using both Claude Code and CodeWhale side by side, I wanted CodeWhale to feel as visually quiet as Claude — same chat-area focus, same single-rule sidebar, same minimal footer — without losing any of the information CodeWhale's sidebar and chips actually carry.

Hard rules during the rewrite:

1. No agent / state-machine / data-flow changes. Pure presentation layer.
2. Every CodeWhale-specific cue (mode, provider, reasoning effort, sub-agents, sidebar panels, status indicator) must survive the migration — only its position may change.
3. Tests are updated alongside each phase, no skipped suites.

The migration plan lives at docs/TUI_CLAUDE_STYLE_PLAN.md. Six phases are scoped; phases 1–5 plus a follow-up visual polish pass have landed in this fork's working tree. Phase 6 is not started.

Test posture across phases 1–polish: 3986 passing, 4 ignored, 1 known baseline-flaky test (mcp::tests::legacy_sse_closed_stream_reconnects_and_retries_tool_call, fails under parallel execution but passes in isolation; predates this fork).

A short before/after by region:

• Top of screen — gone. The chat area now sits at row 0; the welcome block has 3 rows of breathing room above it.
• Welcome block — >_ codewhale (v…) heading replaced with 🐳 Welcome to CodeWhale, followed by /help / ? shortcut hints and a one-line cwd: … model: … v… row.
• Composer — top + bottom rule, no left/right sides, decorative > prefix on every input row, no Composer / Draft title (history-search mode keeps its title since there's no other affordance signalling that state).
• Sidebar — single dim top rule per section, lowercase small-caps title (work / tasks / agents / context), panel body slightly deeper than the chat surface so it reads as a distinct rail.
• Footer — 🐳 agent · deepseek-v4-pro · ¥0.13 · saved ¥1.01 ● Cache: 75.0% hit 64% context left v0.8.53. The whale glyph is the row anchor (animates during in-flight turns, static when idle); right cluster drops chips from the tail under width pressure with a 4-tier cascade so the row never overflows.
• Tool cells — phase 3 dropped the ╭ │ ╰ card frame; the tool header glyph + indented body is the only frame. Phase 6 will rewrite the body itself.

Same as upstream — see AGENTS.md for the codebase tour and docs/ for migration notes:

• docs/TUI_CLAUDE_STYLE_PLAN.md — phase plan (Chinese, with the original baseline pinned by file path + line number)

Same as upstream. The fork has no external dependency changes.

cargo build -p codewhale-tui --release
cargo test  -p codewhale-tui --bin codewhale-tui

The release-tagged binaries on the upstream GitHub Releases page do not include this fork's TUI changes — you must build from this branch to see them.

This fork isn't published to any registry — you build it from source and run it directly.

• Rust 1.88+ (rustup.rs)
• A DeepSeek API key (platform.deepseek.com/api_keys)

git clone https://github.com/ivorzhao/CodeWhale.git
cd CodeWhale
cargo build -p codewhale-tui --release

The dispatcher binary is target/release/codewhale, the TUI runtime is target/release/codewhale-tui.

Either through environment variable:

export DEEPSEEK_API_KEY="sk-..."

Or by writing a config file at ~/.codewhale/config.toml:

provider = "deepseek"
api_key = "sk-..."

See config.example.toml and docs/CONFIGURATION.md for every provider, model, and tuning knob.

./target/release/codewhale

CodeWhale starts in your current directory. Give it a task, and it reads files, runs commands, and edits code — all visible in the transcript.

For a deeper walkthrough, see docs/GUIDE.md.

Everything except the on-screen look is identical to upstream CodeWhale: configuration, slash commands, agent loop, tool system, model routing — they all work the same way. The upstream docs at docs/ and the upstream README still apply.

This fork's changes are intended to be upstreamed once phase 6 is reviewed. Until then, the working tree on tui-claude-style/phase-3-footer is the source of truth and PRs against this fork are welcome.