Chat view and terminal view

A conversation with an agent can be shown two ways, and you choose which. Same session, same work happening underneath — just a different way of watching it go.

• Chat view is the friendly one: conversational bubbles with short, plain summaries of what the agent did. It reads like a chat. This is the default.
• Terminal view is the dense one: a log of the agent’s raw responses with its tool calls shown inline as it works — the actual $ commands it ran, the files it changed, the searches it made — each line stamped with the time.

Why you’d want each

Chat view is right most of the time. You want the outcome, told plainly, without the machinery — “wrote the report, here it is.”

Terminal view is for when you want to watch the machinery. If you’re debugging what an agent is doing, following a long task step by step, or you just like seeing the commands and results scroll by, terminal view puts all of that in front of you instead of summarizing it away.

Switching views

In a session, the header has a small toggle button — a speech-bubble icon when you’re in chat view, a terminal icon when you’re in terminal view. Click it to flip between the two. The switch is instant and changes nothing about the agent or its work; it’s purely how you see the conversation.

Terminal view is a desktop feature. On a phone or a narrow window there isn’t room for the dense log, so Lowkey shows chat view there regardless — your real preference is kept and comes back on a wider screen.

Setting a default

If you’d rather start every session in one view, set it as your default. Open Settings → Appearance and, under Session view, pick Chat or Terminal. New sessions then open that way.

This default is per device — it’s how Lowkey looks on the machine you set it on, so your laptop and your desktop can each have their own preference.

Staying in control

Flipping the toggle inside a session only affects that session — it overrides your default for that one conversation without changing the default itself. The button’s tooltip tells you which is which: whether you’re following your default or overriding it for this session. To go back to the default, just toggle until it matches again. Nothing here touches the agent’s work — both views are showing you the very same turns, only rendered differently.

What to read next

• What a session and a turn actually are → /sessions/
• Who’s doing the work you’re watching → /agents/
• Seeing files and previews an agent opens → /files/