Input & History

Ordinary commands use the single-line input at the bottom of the screen. It behaves like a modern shell: prefix-matching history, fuzzy search, tab completion, and word-level editing. A plain one-line paste stays in normal input and adds no mode label or other chrome.

Normal command input

Press Enter to run the input as a Rune command. Aliases, ; command separators, #N repeats, and /commands all work here.

Key	Action
Ctrl+U	Clear the input line
Escape	Clear the input line
Ctrl+W, Alt+Backspace	Delete the word before the cursor
Alt+Left/Alt+Right, Ctrl+Left/Ctrl+Right	Move the cursor by word
Home/End	Move the cursor to the start/end of the line
Ctrl+C	Clear the input line; pressed twice on an empty line, quit

(Most terminals send Ctrl+Backspace as Ctrl+H, so it can’t be bound distinctly — use Ctrl+W or Alt+Backspace to delete words.)

Multiline verbatim composer

Pasting structured text switches the input area to a taller composer. Newlines, tabs, blank lines, indentation, trailing spaces, and terminal control bytes are kept in the draft; CRLF and bare CR line endings are normalized to LF. You can also press Ctrl+Enter to insert the first newline and enter the composer.

The composer displays VERBATIM and its physical line count, so its submit behavior is explicit:

Key	Action
Enter	Send the draft verbatim
Ctrl+Enter	Insert a newline
Tab	Insert a literal tab
Ctrl+E	Edit the whole draft in $EDITOR
Escape twice	Discard the draft; any other key cancels the first warning

Verbatim submission treats only LF as a line boundary and sends every physical line exactly as written. Rune does not expand aliases, split semicolons, apply #N repeats, or interpret /quit and other slash-looking lines. Those are all data. The mode remains verbatim after edits even if you remove the last newline or tab; it ends when you send or discard the draft.

Composer editing keys are handled locally rather than by Lua binds. For example, Up/Down move through the draft’s visual rows and PageUp/PageDown move by a composer page. The ordinary one-line input and its bindings return after the composer closes.

To prevent an accidental paste from flooding the connection, a verbatim submission is limited to 1,000 physical lines and 256 KiB. Rune rejects the whole submission, leaves the draft open, and shows a warning; it never silently truncates the text.

Edit in $EDITOR

Ctrl+E opens the current input in Vim, Emacs, or whatever $EDITOR points at. Save and exit, and the edited result replaces the input without converting newlines into command separators or trimming authored whitespace. Rune normalizes CRLF and bare CR to LF and removes exactly one final LF used as the text file terminator. Additional blank lines, indentation, tabs, trailing spaces, and an intentionally empty result are preserved.

A structured editor result enters the visible verbatim composer. Editing an existing composer keeps it verbatim even if the result is now one non-empty line.

History

Up/Down walk submission history, and normal command drafts prefix-match: with tell already typed, Up cycles only through previous entries beginning with tell . With an empty line, they walk everything.

History retains both the text and whether it was submitted as a command or verbatim. Recalling a verbatim entry restores the composer, even when that entry contains only one physical line. Ctrl+R opens a fuzzy history picker and labels verbatim entries; type a few characters, watch the list narrow, and press Enter to restore the match.

For an unmodified verbatim entry restored by either route, Up on its first visual row and Down on its last visual row continue through history instead of trapping navigation inside the composer. Once you change its text, the arrows remain local to the draft.

History is owned by the client, so it survives /reload. Consecutive identical submissions in the same mode are stored once.

Tab completion

In normal input, Tab cycles completions from a cache of words seen in server output and your own input, so NPC names, item names, and player names complete after they’ve appeared once. Completion needs at least two typed characters and skips words shorter than three. Candidates cycle most-recent-first, shown in the status bar, with Shift+Tab going backward. In the composer, Tab inserts a tab instead.

Scrolling and the mouse

PageUp/PageDown scroll the output viewport; Ctrl+Home/Ctrl+End jump to the top and bottom (Home/End stay on the input line — rebind them if you prefer they scroll). The mouse wheel scrolls too. While you’re off the bottom, the status bar shows SCROLL (n new) so you know what’s piling up, and it returns to LIVE when you catch up. Composer mode uses those keyboard navigation keys for the draft; the mouse wheel still scrolls output.

The mouse is captured for scrolling, so select text with shift+drag, the standard convention in terminal apps like tmux.

The default keymap

Application actions such as history, completion, and Ctrl+E are registered with rune.bind in the core scripts and can be rebound or removed in init.lua. Input mechanics — atomic paste, composer editing, Ctrl+Enter, and Enter submission — are owned by the client. The full policy and default table are in the rune.bind reference.

Related: rune.input reference, Key Bindings for binding your own, Pickers for the overlay UI behind Ctrl+R and /