illo
A prompt notepad that lives next to Claude. Write deliberately, review once more, then send — without auto-pressing Enter.
Why this exists
Claude interrupts you. You're deep in a task, and it asks a question — but you're mid-thought somewhere else. By the time you context-switch back, you've lost the thread of what you were doing. That friction compounds across a long session.
The chat input box makes it worse. You type fast, you hit Enter too soon, you send something half-formed. There's no draft space, no undo before the prompt leaves, no moment to re-read what you're about to hand off to a system that will act on it literally.
illo puts a real editor in a tmux split, right next to Claude. The left pane is claude. The right pane is yours: an event log on top (questions, notifications, what Claude just finished), and a compose buffer below where you write at your own pace. When you're ready, one keystroke injects your text into the Claude pane. illo does not press Enter for you. That last step is yours.
"Never prompt directly in chat. Write in an editor, read it twice, dehumanize it. You are configuring a system, not chatting with a colleague."
— FindingMemo
5-minute tour
Composing a thought
Open illo with /illo. A 40%-wide vertical split appears on the right. The bottom two-thirds is your compose buffer — a full text editor.
Type naturally. Use Ctrl-Left / Ctrl-Right to jump words, Ctrl-W to delete a word backward, Ctrl-Z to undo. For longer drafts, Ctrl-E opens the buffer in your $EDITOR and pastes it back when you save and quit.
┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ ┌─ prompt ──── lines: 3 · words: 18 ──┐ │
│ │ Claude, before running the migration│ │
│ │ 1. Verify /backups exists │ │
│ │ 2. Abort if row count differs█ │ │
│ └─────────────────────────────────────┘ │
│ Ctrl-S send · Ctrl-D send+Enter · ? help│
└─────────────────────────────────────────┘
Catching what Claude says
The top third of the illo pane is the event log. It shows items from Claude's hooks in real time: questions (ask_user), status updates (notification), and what you just sent (sent).
Press Ctrl-Up to focus the event log. Use j / k to scroll through items. Press Enter on any item to open a detail popup with the full text, options (for questions), and a transcript snapshot. Press v to toggle between the default low-noise filter and the full verbose log — useful when you want to see stop events or session boundaries.
Sending it across
When you're ready, press Ctrl-S. illo injects your text into the Claude pane via tmux send-keys -l (literal — no shell interpretation) and shifts focus there. A "sent →" toast appears in the status bar. You land in the Claude pane, read the prompt as it sits in the input, and press Enter yourself.
Ctrl-D does the same thing but also presses Enter for you. Use it only when you've already read the prompt once and are confident.
Make it yours
Full keybinding reference is in docs/tui.md.
Coming in v0.6: a settings panel (,) and ~/.claude/illo/config.json will let you change themes, key overrides, filter presets, and default $EDITOR behaviour without touching the plugin source. This is not built yet — the config system is in the roadmap.
Install
Requirements: Node 20+, tmux, curl, jq.
# 1. Clone anywhere
git clone https://github.com/laiadlotape/illo /path/to/illo
# 2. Install the plugin
/plugin install /path/to/illo
# 3. Register hooks in ~/.claude/settings.json
{
"hooks": { "hooksJsonPath": "/path/to/illo/hooks/hooks.json" }
}
# 4. Verify Node
node --version # 20.x or newer
The daemon starts automatically on the first hook that fires. No separate daemon install step.
Quick start
# Inside a tmux window with claude running in one pane:
/illo
A 40%-wide vertical split opens on the right. Switch back to illo with Prefix → o.
