Tutorial¶

This walks through one full loop: start Laura, open a file, comment on it, and submit a review back to your agent. It assumes laura is installed (see the README).

[!TIP] Prefer a guided version? If you're running a coding agent inside Laura and have the skills installed, ask your agent to run /laura:demo for a live, hands-on tour of this same loop — plus panels, tailing, and feedback.

1. Start Laura¶

From your terminal:

laura

Laura opens with a single tab running your shell:

+- Laura ----------------------------------------------------+
| [ 1 ]                                                      |
+------------------------------------------------------------+
| $ _                                                        |
+------------------------------------------------------------+

Type into the shell as usual — Laura hosts it, it doesn't wrap it. The bottom line shows the current key hints; press Ctrl+H any time for the full list, Ctrl+Q to quit.

2. Run your agent and mark the tab ready¶

Run your coding agent in the shell. Laura has already set LAURA_TAB in this PTY, so the agent's laura calls land in this tab. Once, at the start, enable review submission:

laura ready

Until a tab is ready, commenting and review submission stay inert — there's no consumer to read a review. An agent that has the skill runs this itself.

3. Open a file in the panel¶

Show a file beside the shell:

laura open docs/protocol.md

The agent runs laura open --split, and the tab splits: your shell stays live on the left, the file renders on the right with a line-number gutter.

+- Laura -----------------------------------------------------+
| shell (pty)                | docs/protocol.md               |
| $ ...                      | 1  # Protocol                  |
|                            | 2                              |
|                            | 3  An agent mutates a tab's ...|
+----------------------------+--------------------------------+

The panel is live-watched: if the source file changes on disk, it re-renders on its own — no re-invoke.

You're not limited to one. Each laura open splits a pane, so you (or the agent) can stack a plan, logs, and a diff in the same tab — see the how-to and CLI reference for --split/--dir/--ratio.

4. Comment on a line¶

Open the panes popup with Ctrl+P, then type the panel's id (the shell is 0) to focus it — a single-digit id focuses on keypress; for 10+ type the digits and press Enter. Move the line cursor with ↑/↓ (the mouse wheel scrolls too; over the shell, wheel and PageUp/PageDown scroll Laura's history, but on the alternate screen they drive the child's own scroll). On the line you want, press c, type your comment, and press Enter to pin it (Esc cancels). The panel title shows [review: n] as comments accumulate.

5. Submit the review¶

Press Shift+S, type an overall note, and press Enter. Laura assembles a PR-style review — each comment bound to its line number with the line's text — and injects it straight into the agent's shell as a [laura review · …] block. The agent reads it from its own input and gets to work; as it edits the file, the panel re-renders live.

That's the loop: show → mark up → submit → revise, without leaving the terminal. Task recipes are in the how-to; the exact review format is in the protocol.