The operator desk

press desk is an optional terminal interface over the press command line. It makes a book repository easier to observe and drive; it is not a second publishing engine. Everything it shows comes from the same registries the CLI uses, and every action it runs is a press child, so the desk cannot bless a stale artifact, misname a command, or disagree with the command line. Uninstall the extra and a complete command-line workflow remains.

Installing and running

The desk ships behind an optional extra so a bare install builds books without it:

pip install 'press[tui]'
press desk        # from inside a book repository

Run without the extra and press desk says so and exits; run it where there is no terminal and it points you back at the CLI. It never draws into a pipe.

What the desk shows

The home screen (DESK) is the read model, rendered:

• The book’s identity: title, authors, trim, and slug, from the typed book model.
• Every artifact the registry declares, each with its evidence state.
• The toolchain readiness, from press doctor’s findings: a one-line summary, and beneath it a panel with one row per examined capability (every tool, the API keys, the Python version, and the dependency check), each stated as a glyph plus word with the purpose the doctor prints. When a required tool is missing the desk says which and grays out the actions that need it.

The evidence language

Artifact state comes from content digests and recorded verification, never a timestamp. A file touched but unchanged is not stale, and a rebuild to identical bytes is not new work. The five states:

Keymap

The picker is generated from the one command catalog, so it offers exactly the commands the CLI runs. Selecting one opens a RUN view that streams the child’s output and shows its exact verdict: a nonzero or cancelled run reports its precise exit code, because the return code is the verdict, never re-derived from the output. Above the log a stage line advances as the build streams its markers – the check, typeset, and verify phases tick off as each completes, and a step count climbs with every tool invocation – parsed from the log text, so it can never claim progress the build did not print.

The setup wizard

w opens a guided flow for a book’s identity, pre-filled with the current values and their help. Every read and write goes through the same typed configuration boundary as press config (the one validated door every config edit passes through), so the wizard validates and preserves a book’s YAML exactly as CLI automation does. An edit is collected in memory and shown as an exact diff with the real validator’s verdict before a byte is written; Ctrl+R reviews, Ctrl+A applies a clean preview, and cancel, back, or a validation failure leaves the file unchanged. A secret-looking value is refused before it can reach the config, and a completed wizard hands back a runnable next step (press check), never a claim that the book is ready.

The CLI escape hatch

The desk is a convenience, not a dependency. Every action it runs is a press <target> you can type yourself; the RUN view even prints the exact command it launched. If the desk is ever in doubt, the command line is the ground truth, and the desk is deliberately thin over it.