rebon

An agent CLI for coding and more — a terminal harness that drives an LLM through a real agent loop with tools, sessions, permissions, and a full TUI.

Install

npm install -g @boninall/rebon

Upgrade later:

npm install -g @boninall/rebon@latest

@boninall/rebon is a thin launcher that pulls the matching native binary as an optional dependency. Supported platforms: win32-x64, darwin-x64, darwin-arm64, linux-x64, linux-arm64.

If install fails with "missing optional platform package", you likely passed --omit=optional or --no-optional. Reinstall without that flag.

Quick start

# Local TUI in the current directory
rebon

# Resume a previous session
rebon --resume sess-0-1712937600000

# Override the active provider / model
rebon --provider openrouter --model gpt-5.5

# Run as an ACP JSON-RPC server on stdio (for editor / IDE integrations)
rebon --acp

The first run drops you into onboarding: pick a provider, sign in (OAuth + PKCE for Claude / OpenAI, or paste an API key), and you're in.

CLI flags

| Flag | Purpose | | ------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------ | | --acp | Run as an ACP JSON-RPC server on stdio. | | --provider <name> | Override activeCustomProvider from ~/.rebon/config.json. | | --model <id> | Override the resolved provider's default model. | | --resume <id> | Load an on-disk transcript and replay it into the TUI. |

Config & data

• ~/.rebon/config.json — providers, models, credentials, defaults.
• ~/.rebon/sessions/ — saved transcripts.
• ~/.rebon/skills/, ~/.rebon/agents/, ~/.rebon/memory/ — user assets.
• $REBON_LOG_DIR/rebon.log — TUI log file (defaults to %TEMP%/rebon/logs/rebon.log on Windows, $TMPDIR/rebon/logs/rebon.log elsewhere). --acp mode logs to stderr instead.

Project-level overrides live under .rebon/ and .claude/ in your working directory.

What you get

• Local TUI — prompt input with history, paste, image paste, @-mention and slash-command pickers, queued submissions, mode cycling; streaming transcript with markdown, tool grouping, thinking blocks, plan approval, permission modal; full dialog stack for onboarding, settings, resume, rewind, quick-open, history search, global search, tasks, background tasks, teams, agents.
• Agentic tool loop — Bash / PowerShell, Read / Write / Edit, Glob / Grep, Sleep, TaskCreate / TaskUpdate / TaskList / TaskGet / TaskStop, Agent, SkillTool, AskUserQuestion, SendMessage, EnterPlanMode / ExitPlanMode, ToolSearch, Team{Create,Delete,Files,Mailbox,Manager}, Worktree, plus MCP tools (stdio, Streamable HTTP, legacy SSE).
• Providers — Anthropic, OpenAI, and OpenAI-Responses, with streaming, compact / context-prune passes, and automatic session titles.
• Permissions, hooks, sandbox — fine-grained allow / deny for shell, filesystem, web-fetch, and skill invocations; user-defined hooks; sandbox config with violation reporting.
• Skills, agents, memory — bundled and user skills; spawnable worker agents and a coordinator for background tasks; a persistent memory layer with recall and surfacing.
• ACP server — drive Rebon from an editor over stdio JSON-RPC: initialize, session/new, session/load, session/list, session/prompt, session/cancel, reverse-RPC permission prompts, streamed tool output.

Common tasks

# Start a fresh session in the current repo
rebon

# Resume the last session you worked on (use Tab in the TUI to browse)
rebon --resume <session-id>

# Plug Rebon into an editor over ACP (the editor manages stdio for you)
rebon --acp

# Override provider/model without editing config
rebon --provider anthropic --model claude-opus-4-7

Inside the TUI:

• ? — keyboard help
• / — slash-command picker
• @ — file / symbol mention
• Tab — switch panel / list
• Esc — cancel current step or dismiss a dialog

Updating

rebon ships with a built-in updater that checks for new releases on launch. You can also just rerun:

npm install -g @boninall/rebon@latest

Troubleshooting

• "missing optional platform package" — reinstall without --omit=optional / --no-optional / --ignore-optional.
• "unsupported platform" — your process.platform/process.arch is not one of the five supported targets.
• TUI looks scrambled — make sure your terminal supports truecolor and Unicode width tables (modern Windows Terminal, iTerm2, Alacritty, WezTerm, Kitty all work). The legacy cmd.exe and conhost are not supported.
• Logs — check $REBON_LOG_DIR/rebon.log (TUI) or stderr (--acp).