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Comment by jackjeff | Hacker News Reader

In the case of TUIs I’m going to assume you review the code externally in neovim or lazy git or something like that?

I don’t like relying on GIT for that and making things as good/done as I go. But with these agentic tools that’s what I have to do. Stage everything I like, manually edits a few bits.

But what do you when you find something where you want to say the agent: I don’t like this for reasons x and y redo as z. I’m like one shortcut away in context inside cursor to say that to my agent? You have to change tab in herdr and then what? Type the file name and line numbers? Is there a way to do this that does not seem very frustrating?

Also open code, codex, etc. super slow. They grep the code. Every. Single. Time. Cursor has a semantic index

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I was looking at CLI-only solutions a while ago and the best thing I found was to use something like revdiff: https://github.com/umputun/revdiff

For instance, in Claude Code you can have it bring up this TUI overlay after every edit it makes (it literally is an overlay, rather than a separate tab in your terminal) and you can annotate line-by-line anything you want changed or rejected. Then once you exit the overlay those suggestions are automatically piped back into the agent.

I tried a few of these TUI-based code annotators, and this one is by far the best. It also works for files not under version control.

I'm currently not using it as I also prefer something more akin to "text editor with agent built in", but I wanted to mention here in case you were curious.

I usually copy paste snippet or function name that is affected and comment it. similar like you would sit next to coworker and tried to say where he/she messed up. agent is able to get location correctly

I know this is change of context, but I have full screen terminal toggled with keyboard shortcut and with middle mouse paste (Linux) I do not have to move cursor anywhere

Guake and Yakuake have this always-on-top terminal overlay mode which is really nice for this kind of workflow. Works exceptionally well with multiple workspaces I prefer one single big monitor with everything maximized and multiple workspaces.

iterm2 on mac also has a similar mode, but it is a bit finicky to set it up (it is really hidden in the settings).

Thanks for the reply. That makes sense. It’s sort of what I do too when I use codex/claude/t3 code, but usually via GUI.

The in-editor context review is something that does not seem long for first world. Sadly. Maybe I’ll be forced to make a zed extension or something, maybe on top of jujustu…

I use git diff and ctrl+click the file+linenumber which opens my IDE. Works well enough. I use this macro here when there are a lot of changes:

  gdf() { git diff '*'$1'*'; }

  gdf fileName (doesn't need full file name)

  gdf folderName (all files in a folder)

I review them on VIM, I use Zed as well.

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