Dashboard Overview¶

The Sidekick Docker dashboard is a five-panel TUI built with Ink and React. Each panel manages a different Docker resource type.

Panel Layout¶

The dashboard uses a split layout:

• Left pane — resource list (containers, images, etc.)
• Right pane — detail tabs for the selected item (logs, stats, configuration)

Press z to cycle layout modes: Normal (28-col side panel) → Wide (42-col side panel, showing full names) → Expanded (side panel hidden, detail pane only).

Panels¶

Everything else — image, ports, mount paths, IPAM, layers — is in the detail tabs.

Switch panels with the number keys 1 through 5.

State Updates¶

The dashboard stays current through two mechanisms:

1. Event-driven — Docker daemon events (container start/stop, image pull, etc.) are streamed in real time via EventWatcher; bursts of events are coalesced into one refresh, and healthcheck noise is ignored
2. Periodic refresh — a full refresh runs every 30 seconds as a fallback

This means changes appear almost instantly without manual refreshing. To refresh immediately (for example after a resource failed to load), press Ctrl+R; it also re-reads the compose file.

Actions¶

Press x on any selected item to open the context menu, or press an action's key (shown in the menu and the status bar) directly. Only actions that apply to the item's current state are offered — for example, Start is not offered for a paused container (Docker rejects it; use Unpause). Available actions vary by panel — see each panel's page for details.

Destructive actions (remove, prune) are color-coded red in the context menu and require a confirmation modal that names the exact target (e.g. Remove container "web"?, Prune 3 dangling images?); removing a running container warns that it will be stopped first. y confirms; Enter, Esc, or n cancel — Enter is deliberately the safe default.

Visual Indicators¶

• Tab bar badges — container count is color-coded: green when all running, yellow when partially running
• Status bar — shows the connection status and running/total count, any resources that failed to refresh, time since the last refresh (with a (Ctrl+R) hint once it is a minute old), the selected item's action keys, focus, contextual hints, the active filter, and an always-visible ?:Help; lower-priority segments drop out on narrow terminals
• Selection — focused items preserve their state icon color instead of overriding with a uniform highlight
• Detail tab bar — shows the tab label even for single-tab panels

Mouse Support¶

Click to select items, switch panels and detail tabs, and press overlay buttons; right-click an item to open its actions menu. The scroll wheel scrolls the pane under the cursor — scrolling up in a logs tab pauses follow (scroll back to the bottom or press G to resume).

Minimum Terminal Size¶

The dashboard needs at least a 60×15 terminal. Smaller windows show a resize prompt (with the exact columns/rows needed) instead of a truncated UI.

Toast Notifications¶

Action results appear as non-blocking toast notifications stacked in the top-right corner of the screen (just below the tab bar), with severity-specific icons and colored backgrounds. Up to three toasts are visible at once, so concurrent action results stack instead of overwriting each other. Long-running actions show a progress toast that resolves into a success toast — or an error toast carrying the actual Docker error message. Error toasts wrap to three lines and long messages stay up longer, so the reason is readable.

Colour¶

The accent colour (#5B8BD9) is readable on both dark and light terminals. NO_COLOR=1 or --no-color turns the whole dashboard monochrome.