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TUI

Use bb tui to open BorgBoi's interactive terminal dashboard.

bb tui

The TUI uses the same effective configuration as the CLI, so --offline, --debug, and BORGBOI_* overrides all apply here too.

Home Screen

When the app starts, BorgBoi loads your managed repositories into a table with these columns:

  • Name
  • Hostname
  • Last Archive
  • Size

Below the table an Archive Activity sparkline shows the number of successful archive creations per day over the last 14 days.

The header subtitle indicates whether BorgBoi is running in Online or Offline mode.

Home-Screen Keys

Key Action
q Quit the app
r Refresh the repository list and sparkline
c Open the config viewer screen
e Open the excludes viewer
b Open the daily backup screen

Config Viewer

Press c from the home screen to open a full-screen view of the effective configuration, grouped into General, AWS, Borg, Retention, and UI sections.

Press Esc to return to the home screen.

Daily Backup Screen

Press b from the home screen to open the daily backup screen.

Controls

  • Repository selector — choose which managed repository to back up.
  • Sync to S3 toggle — enable or disable the final S3 sync step. Automatically disabled in offline mode.
  • Start Backup — begins the daily workflow (createprunecompact → optional sync).
  • Clear Log — clears the log output and resets the progress bar. Available after a backup finishes.

Progress Bar

The progress bar advances gradually through each stage rather than jumping when a stage finishes. Stage progress within a step is estimated from elapsed wall-clock time against predicted durations.

Progress estimation improves over time because BorgBoi records successful stage durations in the local SQLite database and uses recent timing history to weight each stage more accurately for future runs. If no history is available yet, BorgBoi falls back to built-in default estimates.

See SQLite Database for the backup_stage_timings table details.

Daily Backup Keys

Key Action
Esc Return to the home screen (disabled while a backup is running)

Excludes Viewer

Press e from the home screen to open the excludes viewer.

The first tab shows the shared default excludes file. Each additional tab maps to a managed repository and points at that repo's repo-specific excludes file.

File Resolution

  • Shared default: ~/.borgboi/excludes.txt by default
  • Repo-specific: ~/.borgboi/{repo-name}_excludes.txt by default

If a repo-specific file does not exist, BorgBoi shows that the repo currently falls back to the shared default excludes file.

Excludes-Viewer Keys

Key Action
Left / Right Switch tabs
Ctrl+E Enter or leave edit mode
Ctrl+S Save the active file
Esc Cancel editing or go back
e Go back when not editing

Edits write directly to disk. If you open a missing excludes file in edit mode and save it, BorgBoi creates the file for you.

Unsaved edits

Pressing Esc while editing cancels your unsaved changes. Switching tabs also exits edit mode and restores the selected file from disk.

Exclude syntax help

The excludes viewer includes a clickable link to the official Borg exclude-pattern help page.