Message Input

The text box at the bottom of every Agent tab is the message input. It looks like a single line but it does a few interesting things — a toolbar of buttons on the side, image paste, a shell-command prefix, slash menus.

Sending and editing

The input grows as you type up to ~8–10 lines (about 200px), then scrolls inside the box.

CJK input methods: while a candidate window (pinyin / kana selection) is open, neither Enter nor Shift+Enter will send — those are reserved for the IME to commit a candidate. Close the candidate window first, then press Enter.

Toolbar buttons next to the input

A row of small icons sits to the left of the textarea, left to right:

• git add all changes — stage everything in the working tree in one click.
• View git changes — open the changes panel to see what's modified right now.
• View comments — opens the Comments list in Explorer.
• Message history — scroll back through user messages in this tab.
• Project notes — open this project's note (see Notes).
• Scheduled tasks — open the Scheduled Tasks panel for this tab.

These are all shortcuts for "let me line up some context before the AI starts typing."

Attaching images

To attach an image, just paste it (Cmd+V). Cockpit accepts:

• PNG, JPEG, WEBP, GIF
• Up to 5 MB per image
• Multiple images per message — paste several in a row

Each attachment shows as a small thumbnail above the input. Click the × on a thumbnail to remove it.

Drag-and-drop is not supported — only paste.

Engines that accept images: Claude, Codex, DeepSeek. Kimi and Ollama tabs silently drop image attachments (no error, no warning).

Running shell commands from chat — the ! prefix

If the first line of your message starts with !, Cockpit treats the rest of that line as a shell command, runs it, and feeds the output back into the conversation. Any following lines are sent along as your own note on top of the command output.

!ls -la src/
also check what helpers are in utils/

The AI gets the directory listing plus your note. Fastest way to give the AI ground truth from your system without leaving the chat — git log -5, npm outdated, cat .env.example, gh pr view 42, anything.

! only triggers when it's the very first character of the very first line. Use !important here in the middle of a sentence won't run a shell command. Multi-line scripts are not supported — only the first line runs. For multi-command scripts, pack them with sh -c "...".

Slash menu — /

Type / at the start of the input and a menu pops up, split into two sections:

• Commands (built-in) — /qa, /fx, /ex, /go, /cg, /cc, /cr (see AI Mode Commands).
• Skills (your installed ones) — /your-skill-name (see Skills).

Type to filter. Tab or Enter inserts the selected command into the input — then type your actual message after it and press Enter to send.

! and / don't conflict — ! only fires when first-line-first-character, slash commands only fire when you typed / first.

If you want to reference specific code with the AI, the supported path is via Comments — select code in Explorer, add a comment, paste the formatted comment block into chat.

Next

• Sessions — managing multiple chat tabs
• Skills