toktop

README

toktop

btop for AI: a terminal dashboard for LLM inference engines and the agents hammering them.

toktop --demo            # simulated fleet, works instantly
toktop                   # auto-discovers local engines (ports + processes)
toktop --agents          # also watch the coding agents on this machine
toktop ssh://user@box    # watch engines on another host

Install

CGO_ENABLED=0 go install -tags sqlite github.com/maci0/toktop/cmd/toktop@latest

On Windows the leading assignment is POSIX shell syntax and does not run in cmd.exe; PowerShell spells the same command:

$env:CGO_ENABLED=0; go install -tags sqlite github.com/maci0/toktop/cmd/toktop@latest

Building from source needs Go 1.27, the version go.mod pins. A downloaded release binary needs nothing but the platform it was built for.

-tags sqlite matches the GitHub binaries and make build: crush and opencode session databases cannot be read without it. CGO_ENABLED=0 matches those artifacts too (pure-Go net resolver, no libc); a host with gcc would otherwise produce a cgo-linked binary. Or download a binary for linux, macOS, and Windows (amd64 + arm64) from the releases. An installed binary updates itself in place:

toktop update --check    # report the latest release, change nothing
toktop update            # download it and replace the running binary

AI coding agents

toktop also watches the coding agents running on this machine, not just inference engines. It finds them by process, reads the token counts they already write to their own session logs, and shows their throughput beside the engines:

AGENTS  local, read from their own session logs
  claude   ▲ 1.1k tok/s   ▲2.4k ▼8.1k   ● live
  codex    ▲ 340 tok/s    ▲18k ▼40k     via 127.0.0.1:11434  ● live

--agents turns this on. It is off by default because it means scanning this machine's processes and reading session files nobody pointed toktop at: watching engines you configured does not imply consent to that. The watch needs each process's working directory to attribute transcripts; Windows does not expose that through a documented API, so --agents finds no agents there.

With no engines attached, agents mode is the full dashboard: header rates, throughput charts and the host strip, all driven from the session logs. Prompt, output and (when the agent reports it) reasoning tokens are shown per agent. An agent generating through an engine toktop is already measuring still appears in the list, labelled via <engine>, but those tokens are not added on top of the engine's own numbers.

Once asked for, nothing else has to be configured and the agent does not have to cooperate: claude, codex, qwen, copilot, kimi, gemini, grok, agy, pi, prime-agent, feynman, omp, cursor-agent, clanker, crush, opencode, and dsh all keep records carrying the provider's own counts (JSONL transcripts, except opencode and crush which keep SQLite stores, and grok which rewrites one usage.json per session). Gemini CLI chats live under ~/.gemini/tmp, Grok under ~/.grok/sessions, and Antigravity (agy) under ~/.gemini/antigravity-cli. An agy step that names no tokens contributes nothing. Its workspace comes from history.jsonl, or from cache/last_conversations.json when the history has no line for that conversation. cursor-agent transcripts live under ~/.cursor/projects, omp under ~/.omp/agent/sessions, and dsh also reads ~/.dsh-native/sessions. pi, prime-agent, feynman, and omp count cacheRead and cacheWrite with the prompt, and a session counts only for the working directory its header records. dsh's default log is concatenated zstd frames (session.v<N>.jsonl.zstd, or session.jsonl.zstd for generation zero); uncompressed JSONL is read too. dsh web writes every project's sessions from the harness directory, so that process is read from both session stores rather than from the harness directory alone. Agents that report nothing show no rate rather than a zero.

Two agents keep databases instead of transcripts, and both need the sqlite build tag, which decides whether a driver is compiled in at all (released binaries and make build carry it; make build TAGS= leaves it out).

opencode keeps one session store for the whole machine, so it is gated twice: the tag links the driver, and --opencode-db decides whether a binary that has it opens the operator's database. --opencode-db is on by default with --agents; pass --opencode-db=false to leave the store alone. A build without the driver reports nothing for opencode, and asking for it explicitly says so on stderr rather than reporting a silent zero.

crush keeps its database inside the project it is working on (.crush/crush.db, at the project root it resolves), with sessions.completion_tokens as output and sessions.prompt_tokens as prompt. The store is already scoped to that project, so there is no second gate: with the tag, it is read. The only JSONL crush writes is its log, which carries no counters.

Reading is done by this repo's own agentusage package, which gauntlet also imports, so both tools report the same numbers. Agents defined in ~/.gauntlet/agents.json are picked up here too; a malformed file is reported at startup rather than silently shrinking the watch to the built-in agents. The file and each agent entry must be JSON objects, not null; use {} for an empty definitions file. Invalid files leave the loaded registry unchanged. Set GAUNTLET_HOME to read that file from somewhere else; a value that is not an absolute path is ignored and named at startup. Only the usage block matters here (launch fields are ignored):

{
  "myagent": {
    "usage": {
      "roots": ["~/.myagent/sessions"]
    }
  }
}

roots are searched directories, suffix filters the files under them (default .jsonl), suffixes does the same for an agent that writes more than one extension, cumulative marks counters that already include everything before them, and header_cwd says the working directory appears once in a session header rather than on every record. A root may contain {dir}, which stands for the agent process's working directory, for an agent that keeps its transcripts inside the project it works in:

{
  "myagent": {
    "usage": {
      "roots": ["{dir}/.myagent/sessions"]
    }
  }
}

Using the Go package

go get github.com/maci0/toktop/agentusage

It needs Go 1.27, the version go.mod pins, and the sqlite build tag if you want crush and opencode (go build -tags sqlite); without it the package still compiles and Supported reports those two unreadable. Import github.com/maci0/toktop/agentusage to discover agent processes and read the token counts they already write:

package main

import (
	"context"
	"fmt"
	"sync"
	"time"

	"github.com/maci0/toktop/agentusage"
)

func main() {
	path := agentusage.DefinitionsPath()
	if err := agentusage.LoadDefinitions(path); err != nil {
		fmt.Println(err) // malformed or unreadable; a missing file is not an error
	}
	if !agentusage.EnableOpenCodeDB(true) {
		fmt.Println("opencode: build without -tags sqlite")
	}

	ctx, cancel := context.WithTimeout(context.Background(), 10*time.Second)
	defer cancel()
	var wg sync.WaitGroup
	for _, p := range agentusage.Discover() {
		w := p.Watch(time.Now())
		if w.Err() != nil {
			continue
		}
		wg.Go(func() {
			var prev agentusage.Sample
			w.Run(ctx, agentusage.DefaultPollInterval, func(cur agentusage.Sample) {
				if d, ok := cur.Delta(prev); ok {
					fmt.Printf("%s pid %d: %d output, %d prompt\n", p.Tool, p.PID, d.Output, d.Input)
				}
				prev = cur
			})
		})
	}
	wg.Wait()
}

The example watches the discovered processes concurrently for ten seconds. Only usage written after attachment is reported; existing transcript counts are skipped. Keep an agent generating during that window to see output.

Two rules the example follows, because both are easy to get wrong and neither is enforced by the types. Watch returns a nil *Watcher for an agent that keeps nothing readable, and every method on that nil is safe to call, so the test is w.Err() rather than the pointer: Err names the case, Tool and Dir return empty strings, and the error is ErrUnsupportedTool under errors.Is. And Run hands over a running total, not the interval's usage, so each callback reports cur.Delta(prev) and keeps cur as the next baseline. Printing the totals instead bills the same tokens once per poll. A delta that reports no growth is still the baseline to carry forward: the agent was quiet, or its transcript was rewritten under the watcher.

RegisterSpec teaches the package about an agent it was not compiled to know, and UnregisterSpec takes it back, restoring the adapter it displaced. The same goes for a definitions file: LoadDefinitions adds to the process-wide registry and ResetDefinitions drops everything it added, leaving the compiled-in ones. A test that loads a definitions file (or registers a fake agent) needs that undo, since every later test in the same binary inherits it otherwise; the package's own ExampleRegisterSpec_fakeAgent is that pattern end to end, writing the transcript after the watcher attaches because records already on disk belong to an earlier run. errors.Is matches ErrEmptyTool and ErrNoRoots on a rejected spec, ErrInvalidDefinitions on a malformed definitions file, and ErrCollidingDefinitions on two agent names in one file that reduce to the same key; a file that exists but cannot be read returns the wrapped os error instead, matching neither, and a missing one is not an error. SpecFor is the read side: it reports the transcript location registered for an agent, roots as written, which is how a program finds out which entries a definitions file registered and which it skipped (the agents read by a compiled-in adapter are not reported, so a usage entry naming one is skipped on load rather than registered). Use RegisterSpec to read such an agent elsewhere. A definition does replace a compiled-in definition, pi, prime-agent and feynman. Supported covers every agent. Watch returns a nil *Watcher when an agent keeps nothing readable; Watcher.Err says so, and matches ErrUnsupportedTool. Every method on it is safe to call, so a caller tests w.Err() != nil rather than the pointer. A sample is the total since the watcher attached, so a program reporting events takes the growth between two of them from Sample.Delta, which reports nothing when a transcript was rewritten under the watcher rather than a negative count. Rate is output tokens per second between two samples; InputRate is the same for billed prompt tokens, and ThinkingRate for the reasoning share. All three report whether a rate could be computed at all, and none of them extrapolates from one reading. Watcher.SetNow replaces the clock that stamps published samples, so a program driving a simulated timeline gets samples stamped on it, and the recency and rescan windows age on that clock rather than on wall time. Transcript mtimes and since stay wall time, because that is the clock the filesystem and the session stores record in; anchor the injected clock to the instant the run started and the two agree.

Agents lists every agent name the package knows (built in, defined, or registered), and Supported says whether one of them can be read here. A transcript store that cannot be walked is reported rather than read as empty, on the process logger from log/slog unless SetLogger is handed the logger the embedding program already writes to (nil restores the default).

A dashboard also needs to know when an agent's tokens are already being counted by an engine it watches: Peers lists the TCP endpoints a process is connected to, ConnectedTo answers that for one process, and MatchingEndpoints maps many processes to the first of a set of endpoints each holds a connection to, reading the kernel's connection tables once. An empty result from any of them means "cannot tell", which reads as "not connected".

What it shows

• Engines - every engine found locally or via ssh, with model, version, KV-cache pressure, queue depth and throughput. Fingerprinted kinds: Ollama, llama.cpp/llamafile/ramalama, vLLM, SGLang, TRT-LLM/Triton, LM Studio, MLX (mlx-lm / LM Studio), KoboldCpp, LocalAI, TGI, LiteLLM, GPUStack, Lemonade, OmniRoute (auto-detected via its routing header; per-model context windows shown) - plus a generic OpenAI-compatible fallback so nothing is left out (text-generation-webui and TabbyAPI are discovered by process/port but identified as generic OpenAI).
• Throughput charts - aggregate decode + prompt tokens/sec as heat-colored area charts; engine-published tok/s gauges are trusted when present. Agents with no local engine (or whose engine is not monitored) add their own rates; tokens already counted by a watched engine are not added again.
• Probes (p, --probe N) - tiny streaming generations measuring real TTFT and decode speed per engine.
• Agent feed - any harness can POST usage events:

  curl -X POST localhost:8420/v1/events \
    -H "Idempotency-Key: coder-turn-1042" -d \
    '{"agent":"coder","kind":"tool","prompt_tokens":4200,"output_tokens":310,"thinking_tokens":40,"note":"shell(git status)"}'
  

  The key names one turn, so a resend after a lost answer is counted once. A key built from the clock ($(date +%s)) is a different key on every attempt, which is a fresh operation to the feed: the retry counts again. --agents also fills this from local session logs. Per-agent rows show output, prompt and reasoning rates; an agent using a monitored engine is labelled via that engine so its tokens are not added twice.
• System strip - RAM/swap/load, CPU model, OS+kernel, GPU driver versions (incl. CUDA), NPU enumeration (Intel NPU, AMD XDNA NPU, Qualcomm Cloud AI100, Apple Neural Engine with chip generation), GPU temp/util/VRAM/ power - on Apple Silicon including live wired-memory and utilization from IOAccelerator - and a second identity row for sensors.
• Braille charts - dot-matrix rendering with btop-style fading bloom; timescale compresses leftward (t toggles) with faint grid marks showing where each doubling begins.
• Agents view - --agents with no engines found opens on the agents themselves instead of the engines setup card, and a swaps the panel estate between engines and agents on a machine running both; the side not in focus keeps the header, the shared throughput chart and the host strip.
• Hot reload - on Unix, rebuild the binary while it runs and toktop re-execs into the fresh build (--no-hot-reload to disable). Windows cannot replace a running image: the dashboard exits and asks you to start it again.

Agent feed API

The ingest server runs by default on 127.0.0.1:8420 (--ingest ADDR to move it, --no-ingest to turn it off) and speaks plain HTTP/JSON:

endpoint	purpose
POST /v1/events	record events; body is one JSON object or an NDJSON stream
GET, HEAD /healthz	liveness probe, answers ok; 503 with Retry-After: 1 naming the in-flight count while every event slot is held

Event fields are all optional; anything omitted gets the default:

field	type	default	notes
id	string	-	caller-chosen key, at most 128 characters; an id past the cap, or one that is nothing but whitespace or control characters, is a 400 naming the field rather than a truncated key, because the id is what the feed deduplicates on and two keys clamped onto one stored id would drop the second event as a duplicate. A repeat of a key recorded within the last 15 minutes is ignored. When omitted, a request Idempotency-Key header is used: the first eight bytes of its SHA-256 hash, encoded as 16 hexadecimal characters, followed by the 1-based line index (<hash>:1, <hash>:2, and so on). The handler hashes the received key NFC-normalized, without truncation or whitespace collapsing; hash collisions remain possible
ts	RFC 3339 string	arrival instant	offset required (2026-01-02T03:04:05Z); stamps more than two minutes ahead of arrival are clamped to the arrival instant
agent	string	anonymous	capped at 64 characters
model	string	-	capped at 128 characters
kind	string	turn	known kinds: turn, tool, error, note; custom kinds pass through lowercased, capped at 24 characters
prompt_tokens / output_tokens / thinking_tokens	integer	0	negative values and values above 2^40 clamp to 0; a whole JSON number such as 100.0 counts; a count outside the 64-bit integer range is a 400 naming the field instead of a clamp; thinking is the reasoning share of output when the agent says so
via_engine	string	-	monitored engine already counting this output; aggregates skip the event; capped at 128 characters
note	string	-	free-form, capped at 512 characters; a note that is nothing but a directory is reduced to its last two components, with a path under $HOME folded to ~, so client and project names above the checkout never reach the feed

One POST answers 202 with {"accepted":N,"stored":M} once every event in the stream is decoded, where accepted is what the wire carried and stored is what the retained feed took. A replayed event (an id already recorded within the last 15 minutes) decodes fine and stores nothing, so the two counts differ on a retry after a lost 202. So does an event stamped behind the whole retained window: the feed holds the newest 512 events, and one older than all of them would be dropped before any consumer read it. ts is not clamped backwards, so a sender whose clock runs behind sees the gap on the same count. The same pair is on the POST's log line. Other statuses: 400 for malformed JSON, a bad ts, a token count outside the 64-bit range, or an id that cannot be stored whole, 408 when a stream stalls mid-body (the body names which bound broke: no bytes for a minute, or the 10 minute lifetime), and 413 past the 1 MiB body cap. 503 with Retry-After: 1 means 64 bodies were already decoding, which is a pile-up and not a fault: wait the named second and resend the same request, under the same Idempotency-Key if it had one. A POST carrying an Origin header (browser-driven; scripts and agents never send one) is refused with 403, so a web page cannot forge rows into a running dashboard. Wrong methods on these paths answer 405 with Allow and a body naming the path and the methods it takes. Unknown paths answer 404 naming the two endpoints, so a POST to /events is not a generic not-found page. Error bodies are short plain-text reasons that name the field or expected shape, and a malformed line in a stream also names the body offset it failed at; unknown fields are ignored, so harnesses can include their own. The request Content-Type header is not checked: the body is always read as JSON/NDJSON, so plain curl -d works unmodified. Every POST is logged to stderr as one structured line (req, method, path, status, accepted, stored, duration, remote; failures add error). Wrong-method and unknown-path requests log the same way, so a harness posting to /events is not silent. GET /healthz is not logged. It answers 503 with Retry-After: 1 and a one-line reason while all 64 event slots are held, because the endpoint is refusing every POST then and ok would describe a service that accepts nothing. A refused POST audits in_flight and slot_cap beside the reason, so a run of them says how close the cap is, not just that it was hit. Event bodies are not logged. A handler panic is one ERROR line with req and a single-line stack. An accept failure that ends the endpoint writes one ERROR line naming the bound address and the reason. Responses carry X-Request-Id, echoed from the request when the sender set one.

Streams are recorded line by line: if a later line fails, events before it stay recorded and the error states how many. Retrying a stream (or a successful POST whose 202 was lost) is safe when each event carries a stable id, or when the POST carries Idempotency-Key (filled in for events that omit id). Without either, replaying the kept lines would duplicate them. Such a replay answers 202 with stored below accepted and logs the same pair, so a sender can tell the two apart.

Recovery after a mid-stream failure depends on how the events were keyed, and the error says which one to use. Resume the stream (send the remaining lines) when the events carry their own id or the POST had no Idempotency-Key. Replay the whole request under the same Idempotency-Key when its events omit id: a derived id is the key plus the line's position, so a resumed POST numbers its first line 1 again and the feed would drop it as a duplicate of an event it never sent.

An Idempotency-Key (and an event id) names one logical operation and nothing else: mint it per operation, and namespace it per sender. Two POSTs under the same key derive the same ids, so the second one's events decode and store nothing: they show up only as stored below accepted on that POST and on its log line, and the agent's token totals silently miss them. A key is not a session, a turn counter, or a fixed string, and the server cannot tell a retry from a second sender that picked the same one.

Zero vendor libraries

Host vitals and engine stats come from procfs/sysfs/sysctl, vendor CLIs it shells out to (nvidia-smi, rocm-smi, xpu-smi, system_profiler, ioreg - each the vendor's documented interface with no in-process alternative) or plain HTTP from the engines themselves. SSH transport is an embedded pure-Go client, so remote monitoring needs no ssh binary either. No NVML, no Level Zero, no cgo: single static binary, trivially cross-compiled.

Linux reads /proc + /sys; macOS uses sysctls and system_profiler; Windows uses GlobalMemoryStatusEx, RtlGetVersion and one CIM query for process command lines.

Engines: how discovery works

1. Running processes matching well-known names (ollama, llama-server, vllm, sglang, koboldcpp, lm studio, lemonade-server, ...) give candidate URLs, honouring --port flags.
2. A scan of well-known ports follows (11434, 30000, 8000, 13305, 8080, 1234, 5001, 5000, 4000, 1337, 4891, 7860, 20128, ...).
3. Each candidate is fingerprinted by its HTTP surface; anything unrecognized that still speaks OpenAI is shown as such.

Attach anything explicitly:

toktop --add http://10.0.0.5:8000        # repeatable
toktop ssh://user@host                   # remote engines + host vitals (no password in the URL)

SSH mode is built in (pure Go, no ssh binary needed) and the remote only needs a POSIX shell - no agent is installed. Discovery reads the remote /proc directly: listening sockets from /proc/net/tcp(+6) (with an active port probe as fallback) plus engine processes with their --port flags, so engines on custom ports are found just like locally. Engine traffic rides ssh direct-tcpip channels on that same connection. Each remote engine port is reached through a loopback listener bound to 127.0.0.1 with an ephemeral port, so local clients attach the same way they would to a local engine; those listeners are reachable by any process on this host. Host vitals stream the same way: load, memory, uptime, CPU model, OS, kernel and GPU rows (nvidia-smi, or rocm-smi on AMD boxes).

Auth tries, in order: --ssh-key PATH, keys from ~/.ssh/config (HostName, User, Port, IdentityFile are honored), your default keys, ssh-agent, and finally a password prompt when stdin is a terminal (or set TOKTOP_SSH_PASSWORD for headless runs). ssh://user:pass@host is rejected: the password would sit in argv, and is not how auth is configured. A path, query, or fragment on the URL is rejected rather than ignored. Host keys use trust-on-first-use, stored at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/toktop/known_hosts (default ~/.config/toktop/known_hosts); a changed key is refused loudly. SSH_AUTH_SOCK selects the agent; on Windows the OpenSSH named pipe is used when that variable is unset.

Keys

key	action
q / ctrl+c	quit
esc	close help / go back to engines / quit (whichever is live)
space	pause / resume streaming
p	probe every engine with a real generation
t	toggle compressed timescale + grid
a	focus engines or agents (whichever gets the panel estate)
? / h	toggle help

Accessibility

toktop is usable without a mouse, without color vision, and with assistive technology:

• Keyboard only - every action has a key (table above); nothing requires pointing or clicking, and ? always shows the full key map.

• Pause freezes everything - space stops the streaming data and the header clock, so a still frame can be read at leisure with a screen reader or magnifier.

• Status never rides on color alone - down engines show ✗ plus their error text, probes show ✓/✗, gauges print their percentage, and the engine count is spelled out numerically in the header.

• Non-visual output - --once prints one static frame instead of running the full-screen UI; a live-repainting dashboard defeats most screen readers, so the static frame is the intended path. Pair it with TOKTOP_COLUMNS / TOKTOP_LINES for a fixed size. --once --plain goes further and prints the same numbers as a linear text report: no braille chart glyphs (which screen readers announce as endless dot-pattern noise or skip entirely), no box-drawing borders, no multi-column panels - just the data in reading order.

  $ toktop --once --plain
  toktop v0.15.0
  
  5/5 engines up · out 1.5k tok/s · in 10k tok/s · 2 agents · session 24s
  
  ENGINES
  up   vllm-a100 (vllm)
         Qwen/Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct-AWQ
         out 155 tok/s · in 662 tok/s · kv cache 68% · running 2 · waiting 0 · ttft 115ms
  
  SYSTEM
  memory 64% (248G/384G) · swap 17% · load 5.06
  gpu nv0 A100-SXM4-80GB 82° 69% util vram 57G/80G 397W
  
  PROBES
  ok meta-llama/Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct-engine ttft 113ms 135 tok/s
  
  AGENT FEED
  ops-agent 293 tok/s · research-agent 247 tok/s
  03:29:23 note ops-agent model Qwen/Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct-AWQ prompt 9.2k output 783 note browser(search docs)
  

• Tested contrast - unit tests hold the palette to WCAG 2.2 AA: text colors at >= 4.5:1 on the background, and chart marks at >= 3:1 even at the deepest point of the age fade (internal/ui/theme_test.go).

• No color - NO_COLOR strips styling as usual; layout and text carry the same information without it.

Flags

toktop update     subcommand: install the latest release (--check to only
                  report it, --repo owner/name for a fork). With --check,
                  stdout is the release URL and nothing else, or nothing at
                  all when the release names no GitHub release page, which
                  stderr then says
toktop help       same as --help; `toktop help update` / `toktop help version`
toktop version    same as --version
--demo            simulated fleet, zero setup
--add URL         attach an openai-compatible http(s) endpoint (repeatable,
                  once per endpoint; host required; no userinfo, query or
                  fragment, since the URL is echoed to the log and the
                  reports; use --bearer / $TOKTOP_BEARER)
ssh://user@host   positional; monitor remote hosts (repeatable;
                  ssh://[user@]host[:port] only, no password in the URL;
                  the host and user may not carry a bidi control,
                  zero-width or other format character, tag character
                  or variation selector, and a target that does is
                  refused at startup)
--ssh-key PATH    private key for ssh targets (overrides ~/.ssh/config;
                  ~ is expanded; an empty value aborts at startup, and a
                  missing file aborts only with a non-demo ssh:// target)
--bearer TOKEN    bearer token sent to --add endpoints only; OmniRoute API
                  keys etc. (env: OMNIROUTE_API_KEY, then TOKTOP_BEARER;
                  an explicit --bearer, even empty, wins)
--agents          watch AI coding agents on this machine (session logs)
--opencode-db     with --agents: read opencode's SQLite session database
                  (default on; needs a build with the sqlite tag; pass
                  --opencode-db=false to skip it)
--probe N         auto-probe every N seconds (0=off, max 86400; with
                  --demo, every N simulated seconds, so the run still
                  replays)
--interval D      poll interval (Go duration such as 1s or 500ms; default 1s;
                  min 50ms, max 1h; nonzero values require a unit)
--ingest ADDR     agent event listen address, host:port
                  (default 127.0.0.1:8420; empty is rejected)
--no-ingest       disable the event endpoint (`--ingest` is then ignored)
--once            render one frame and exit (use when piping or redirecting)
--plain           with --once: linear text report instead of the dashboard
                  frame (screen-reader friendly)
--json            with --once: print the final snapshot as one JSON object on
                  stdout instead of a frame, for scripts (--plain has no
                  effect alongside it; TOKTOP_COLUMNS / TOKTOP_LINES have no
                  effect with either)
--frames N        with --once: snapshots to accumulate before rendering
                  (max 180, the chart history length; with --plain and
                  --json only the wait before rendering changes)
--seed N          demo RNG seed; the demo frame shows the seed it ran
                  with, and the same seed replays the run
--origin TIME     with --demo: pin the instant the simulated timeline
                  starts at (RFC3339 or Unix seconds), so a seed and an
                  origin replay a run byte for byte; without it the timeline
                  starts at the wall clock, and the JSON report omits
                  `demo_origin`
--no-hot-reload   disable restart-on-rebuild while running
--version         print version and exit
--help, -h        show usage, examples and environment fallbacks

Password auth for ssh targets: interactive prompt, or TOKTOP_SSH_PASSWORD.

Flags come before the positional ssh:// targets; a flag written after one is a usage error that says so. Results (the rendered frame, the JSON report, the version, the release URL) go to stdout and progress, warnings and errors to stderr, so toktop --once >frame.txt and toktop version stay pipeable. Exit codes: 0 success, 1 runtime failure, 2 usage error, 130 interrupted (--once, toktop update, and the live dashboard when SIGINT or SIGTERM stops it; the dashboard's own q and Ctrl+C are a clean 0).

Scripting

toktop --once --json prints the last snapshot as one JSON object: the aggregate throughput, every engine with its rates, queue depths and models, the agent feed and per-agent rates, the probe samples and the host vitals. It is the machine-readable counterpart of --once --plain, for a script that wants the numbers rather than a report:

toktop --demo --once --json | jq -r '.engines[] | select(.ok) | .label'

The chart histories are not in it: they are the frame's own buffer, sized by how long the process ran, so a consumer wanting a series should sample --once --json at a steady --interval instead.

A demo run reproduces from its seed and its origin, the two inputs a replay needs. With both, two runs render the same bytes:

toktop --demo --seed 7 --origin 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z --once --json --frames 5 \
  >run-a.json
toktop --demo --seed 7 --origin 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z --once --json --frames 5 \
  >run-b.json
cmp run-a.json run-b.json

Without --origin the timeline starts at the wall clock, so the values repeat and the timestamps do not; the JSON report then omits demo_origin.

--probe keeps that promise under --demo: the auto-probe cadence is simulated too, so how many probe waves ran and the instant each is stamped follow the run rather than how long the process took.

Environment variables

variable	what it does
OMNIROUTE_API_KEY	bearer token fallback for --bearer (checked first unless --bearer is passed)
TOKTOP_BEARER	bearer token fallback for --bearer (checked after OMNIROUTE_API_KEY)
TOKTOP_SSH_PASSWORD	ssh password for headless runs; otherwise an interactive prompt. A trailing newline (from $(cat file)) is stripped, everything else is sent as typed. Set but empty is named rather than passed over: a headless run fails saying so, and a terminal run says it is prompting instead
TOKTOP_COLUMNS / TOKTOP_LINES	fixed frame size for --once output (screenshots, capture); must be 41-1024 / 21-512, and a set-but-invalid value aborts with exit code 2. --once --plain renders no sized frame, so both are named as unused and never validated
TOKTOP_LOG_LEVEL	audit log floor for every subsystem that writes one (ingest endpoint, engine collector, host-vitals sampler, ssh client, --add attach, agent watch): debug, info (default), warn, or error; a set-but-invalid value aborts with exit code 2
TOKTOP_SCREENSHOT_FONT	used only by scripts/screenshot.py (path to a regular-weight .ttf); the toktop binary ignores it
GITHUB_TOKEN	optional; authenticates toktop update's GitHub API calls past the anonymous rate limit. A trailing newline (from $(cat file)) is stripped; a line break anywhere else is refused by name, since it cannot be sent as a header
GAUNTLET_HOME	directory holding agents.json (default ~/.gauntlet); a relative value is ignored and named at startup, matching the XDG rows, and so is an absolute one with no agents.json under it
XDG_DATA_HOME	with --opencode-db (on by default with --agents): directory under which opencode/opencode.db is read (default ~/.local/share); a relative value is ignored and named at startup
XDG_CONFIG_HOME	directory for the ssh trust-on-first-use host-key store (toktop/known_hosts; default ~/.config); a relative value is ignored rather than placing the store under the working directory, and is named at startup with a non-demo ssh:// target; a run on Linux with one fails at connect
KIMI_CODE_HOME	with --agents: directory under which kimi's sessions are read (default ~/.kimi-code); a relative value is ignored and named at startup
SSH_AUTH_SOCK	ssh-agent socket for ssh:// targets; on Windows the OpenSSH named pipe is used when unset
NO_COLOR	strips terminal styling when set to a non-empty value (honored by the terminal renderer, as usual)

An explicit --bearer, even empty, wins over its env fallbacks; otherwise the environment is used. Prefer an env var over --bearer for tokens: command-line arguments are visible in process listings to every user on the host, and passing --bearer prints a reminder of that. The token travels only to endpoints named with --add; engines found by port scanning receive no credentials, so a hostile listener on a probed port cannot collect your gateway key. --add URLs must be http:// or https:// with a host and must not embed userinfo (user:pass@); the same endpoint may not be named twice, because two polls of it read as twice the tokens. An endpoint that needs the key is attached as toktop --add http://127.0.0.1:20128 with the token in the environment. --ingest must be host:port (an empty address would bind every interface on an ephemeral port and is rejected). A bind that is not loopback is not rejected, because a relay on another host is a legitimate setup, but it is named at startup: the endpoint authenticates nothing, so every reachable peer can post events. Unknown TOKTOP_* variables are reported at startup, so a typo fails loudly instead of doing nothing (TOKTOP_SCREENSHOT_FONT is recognized so a developer export is not reported as a typo). $TOKTOP_BEARER / $OMNIROUTE_API_KEY without --add, $TOKTOP_SSH_PASSWORD without an ssh:// target, and $TOKTOP_LOG_LEVEL with --demo --no-ingest (and no --agents) are named as unused, matching the flag warnings, as is a GAUNTLET_HOME that is not an absolute path under --agents (or one with no agents.json under it), a relative XDG_DATA_HOME while opencode's database is read, and a relative XDG_CONFIG_HOME with an ssh:// target outside --demo. Out-of-range flag values (--interval 0, --interval below 50ms or above 1h, negative --probe, --probe above 86400, --frames < 1 or above 180 with --once, an empty --repo, a malformed or duplicated --add or --ingest, an ssh:// URL with a password, a path other than the root /, a query, or a fragment) abort with exit code 2 instead of being silently adjusted; so do out-of-range TOKTOP_COLUMNS / TOKTOP_LINES when --once renders, and a set-but-invalid TOKTOP_LOG_LEVEL. A bare --interval 1 is rejected because it has no unit; use 1s or 500ms. A --add endpoint reached over plain http:// on a host that is not this machine is named at startup: the bearer token would cross the network in cleartext. Startup prints one line of the knobs that apply (interval, ingest, mode flags); bearer tokens appear only as bearer=set.

Build & test

make help                          # every task, one line each
make prereqs                       # check go, a C compiler, bun, uv against the pins
make build                         # host binary, version-stamped
make demo                          # build, then run the simulated fleet
make test                          # all tests, -race -shuffle=on
make test RACE=0                   # full suite, no race detector
make pr                            # every PR merge gate except the OS matrix
make test-pkg PKG=./internal/ui    # one package while iterating
make test-pkg PKG=./internal/core RUN=TestSanitizeTextPreservesUTF8
make test-pkg PKG=./agentusage     # both halves of the sqlite tag gate
make test-pkg PKG=./internal/ui RACE=0   # faster loop, no race detector
make install                    # install into PREFIX/bin (default ~/.local/bin)

Cross-compiles (no cgo anywhere); make test-dist is the same flags the release uses (-trimpath -buildvcs=false -mod=readonly -buildmode=pie, plus -s -w -buildid= -bindnow in -ldflags, so the ELF binaries carry full RELRO):

make test-dist VERSION=x.y.z    # every release platform into dist/

See CONTRIBUTING.md for prerequisites, the edit-test loop, and what CI runs, docs/THREAT_MODEL.md for the attack surface, what toktop trusts, and the mitigations already in place, docs/DEPENDENCIES.md for every external package and the reason it is here, and docs/PRIVACY.md for what it reads, sends and stores.

Releases: push a tag v* and GitHub Actions attaches binaries for linux/amd64, linux/arm64, darwin/amd64, darwin/arm64, windows/amd64 and windows/arm64, plus a CycloneDX SBOM of every dependency (make sbom) and a buildinfo manifest naming the commit, toolchain, and flags behind those bytes. Versions are 0.x: the CLI, the ingest /v1/events body, and the agentusage Go API may change without a major bump. Consumer-facing notes live in CHANGELOG.md. CI runs govulncheck on every push; Dependabot keeps go modules, workflow actions, and scripts/ pip pins current.