Terminal UI

AQE’s terminal interface lets you supervise a backtest or live strategy without opening AQS. It reads local runtime snapshots and exposes metrics, insights, variables, watches and events.

Enable the interface

Enable tui on the AQE dependency in your strategy project; it also enables runtime:

aq-engine = { git = "https://github.com/algoquantstudio/aq-engine", features = ["tui"] }

Use the AQE revision compatible with your strategy. The controls below describe the current 0.2.0 development source and may differ from an installed release.

Run the project from an interactive terminal with cargo run --release. The TUI starts when both standard output and standard error are attached to a terminal. To keep console output, run cargo run --release -- --no-tui. Redirected output, including normal AQS capture, remains headless.

Find the information you need

Pane	What to inspect
Metrics	Equity, return, closed trades, win rate, drawdown, open exposure and backtest progress.
Insights	Active insights, their state and displayed/total counts.
Inspector	The selected insight’s order identity, prices, quantities and recent state history.
Variables	Nested strategy values; open an object or array to inspect its children.
Watch	Variable paths you want to keep visible.
Events	Retained runtime messages and their timestamps.

The active preview contains at most 128 recently updated active insights. The inspector shows up to 25 recent history entries. Use persisted results and AQS for complete historical review; absence from the preview does not mean an insight never existed.

Navigate and inspect

Key	Action
Tab / Shift+Tab	Cycle through panes
m, i, d, v, e	Focus Metrics, Insights, Inspector, Variables or Events
z	Expand the focused pane
Esc	Leave expanded or diagnostic mode first
Arrow keys / PageUp / PageDown	Select or scroll within the current pane
Enter / Right	Open a nested variable
Left / Backspace	Return to the parent variable
w in Variables	Add or remove the selected watch
Delete in Watch	Remove a watch
s	Open runtime and synchronisation diagnostics
q	Request graceful shutdown; close the interface once the run has stopped

Below 120 columns or 30 rows, the interface displays the focused pane rather than squeezing all panels into the terminal.

Interpret diagnostics

Compare the snapshot age, market clock and publisher sample age. A market timestamp and the time a screen refreshed represent different observations.

The diagnostics include local delivery mode, queued critical events, coalesced telemetry and local acknowledgement latency. Local acceptance does not confirm cloud persistence or desktop display. Remote queues and reconciliation can be unobserved in the terminal; use the runtime-host or gateway diagnostics and AQS to investigate those.

Logs and variable previews are bounded. Retained or displayed counts show when the interface is presenting a limited view.

Stop cleanly

Press q to request the normal strategy shutdown. Wait for the stopped or completed state, then press q again to close the interface. Outside expanded or diagnostic mode, Esc also follows the existing stop/close behaviour.

For unattended runs, use --no-tui and retain the execution host’s logs. See Live Runtime for recovery and monitoring.