sideshow-term

A guide for publishing live terminal visualizations such as diagrams, dashboards, headings, lists, and styled text to a Sideshow terminal surface. It uses STML, a small HTML-like markup language rendered as terminal components.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to publish and update terminal sketches, dashboards, bordered layouts, menus, headings, and other visual snippets through the Sideshow terminal service.
Why use it?
It gives terminal output a structured visual layout instead of limiting it to plain text. This helps present changing information in a readable dashboard or diagram while working.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/modem-dev/sideshow/sideshow-term
Any agent
npx skills add modem-dev/sideshow --skill sideshow-term
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/modem-dev/sideshow

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 85 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 917 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00085 $0.00917
Opus 5 $0.00043 $0.00458
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00183
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00092

Measured 2d ago against content hash 72af88417e94, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

sideshow-term scanned grade A with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

sideshow-term guide # or: curl -s $SIDESHOW_URL/guide
sideshow-term/skills/sideshow-term/SKILL.md · 90 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 90 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

sideshow-term

The user keeps a live terminal visual surface open (sideshow-term watch). You publish STML — an HTML-like markup — and it renders instantly as real opentui components (boxes, borders, big ASCII text, styled text, lists, menus). This is a higher-fidelity surface than the text you normally print.

Before your first publish

Fetch the markup contract once per session:

sideshow-term guide        # or: curl -s $SIDESHOW_URL/guide

If SIDESHOW_URL is unset, the surface is at http://localhost:4243. If the server is not running, start it: sideshow-term serve. If the sideshow-term command is not on PATH but you are inside this repo, use node sideshow-term/bin/sideshow-term.js ....

Publishing

Prefer MCP tools if connected (publish_snippet, update_snippet, list_snippets). Otherwise use the CLI — session grouping is automatic:

sideshow-term publish sketch.stml --title "Cache layout" --session-title "Cache redesign"
echo '<h1>Done</h1><text>Migration applied.</text>' | sideshow-term publish - --title "Status"

Save the returned sessionId and snippet id. Iterate with sideshow-term update <id> revised.stml (same card, new version) instead of publishing near-duplicates — versions are kept. Preview without the viewer: sideshow-term render sketch.stml.

To remove stale visuals before replacing a board, run sideshow-term clear for the current session or sideshow-term clear --all for every session on the surface.

Rules of thumb:

  • On your first publish, set a session title that names the task ("Auth refactor"), not the tool. It applies only when the session is created.
  • One concept per snippet, with a clear title. A series of small snippets beats one giant page.
  • Reach for <card>, <row>/<col>, <list>, <bigtext> and the semantic color tokens (accent, success, danger, warning, info, muted) before hand-tuning layout.

Writing STML

Block tags: box row col card text h1 h2 h3 list/item hr spacer bigtext code select input. Inline tags (inside <text>/headings): b i u s dim color/c kbd badge a br. Layout attributes on blocks: width height padding margin gap direction align justify grow border border-style border-color bg title.

Read the full file on GitHub · 90 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 90 lines · 85 tokens per session scan A 72af88417e94

Subscribe to this mod's changes

sideshow-term is a skill published in the GitHub repository modem-dev/sideshow (567 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 85 tokens to every session and 917 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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