The Transcript

Redirected output gives you the transcript as objects, which is the same data the viewer draws:

Invoke-Agent "audit the error paths" -NoUi | Where-Object Kind -eq ToolCall
Invoke-Agent "audit the error paths" -NoUi | Show-Styled ./src/PsAgent.Cmdlets/styles/agent.pcss

One row type

Both cmdlets emit PsAgent.AgentEvent rows. Invoke-Agent produces them from the Anthropic Messages API; Invoke-Acp folds ACP session/update notifications into the same shape. Each row carries:

Property	Content
Name	The rendered summary line: glyph + one-line title. What Show-Styled shows collapsed.
class	Stylesheet classes the row selects on, e.g. tool ok, thought muted.
Kind	User, Thought, Assistant, ToolCall, ToolResult, Plan, Status or Error.
Title / Body	The collapsed one-line summary / the expanded detail (tool arguments, command output, full message text).
Tool / ToolCallId	Tool name, and the id correlating a ToolCall with its ToolResult.
Status	None, Pending, InProgress, Completed or Failed.
Timestamp	When the row was created (UTC).

Every row also carries a glyph, so the transcript reads under NO_COLOR or in a pipe:

Kind	Glyph
User	›
Thought	·
Assistant	●
Plan	☰
Status	—
Error	✘
ToolCall	⚙
ToolResult	✔ (✘ when the tool failed)

The viewer

On a real terminal, both cmdlets open a live transcript on the alternate screen:

ps-agent · claude-opus-5 · C:\work\core\ps-bash
› fix the off-by-one in Window()
· considering the two clamp branches
⚙ read_file src/…/TranscriptView.cs
✔ read src/…/TranscriptView.cs (9214 chars)
⚙ edit_file src/…/TranscriptView.cs
✔ edit src/…/TranscriptView.cs
⚙ $ dotnet test --filter Window -> exit 0
● Fixed. The clamp used total-window as an inclusive bound; …

[7/7] done · 18422 in / 1204 out tokens
↑↓/jk move · Enter expand · i prompt · Esc/q quit

Key	Does
↑ ↓ / k j	Move the cursor. Moving off the newest row stops the view chasing new output.
Enter / Space	Expand the focused row — full message, tool arguments, command output.
g / G	Jump to the oldest / newest row.
PageUp / PageDown	Same as g / G.
i or /	Type the next prompt.
Esc	Interrupt the running turn; quit when idle.
q	Quit.

The approval and permission prompts are modal choosers on the same screen: ↑/↓ to pick, Enter to confirm, Esc to cancel, or a digit 1–9 to select directly.

One quirk worth knowing: the viewer forces UTF-8 output while it owns the screen. Every row marker is beyond Latin-1, so a console on a legacy code page would otherwise replace them with ? — and CP1252 is worse than obvious breakage, because ›, · and — survive there while the tool and assistant markers vanish.

Styling

Colour lives in styles/agent.pcss, never in C#. Rows carry a class; the sheet decides what it looks like. The sheet’s own mapping:

.user      { color: brightwhite; font-weight: bold }
.thought   { color: gray }
.plan      { color: brightmagenta }
.tool          { color: brightblue }
.tool.running  { color: brightyellow }
.tool.ok       { color: brightgreen }
.tool.error    { color: brightred;    font-weight: bold }
.error { color: brightred;    font-weight: bold }
:focused { color: black; background: brightcyan }

To re-theme without rebuilding, drop an agent.pcss in ~/.config/ps-agent/styles/, or pass -Css a name, an inline rule, or a .pcss path.

Piping rows into Show-Styled works unconfigured — they carry the Name and class properties it reads by default — but it auto-picks ps-bash’s generic object sheet, since it does not know this module’s kind. Point it at the agent sheet to get the transcript colours:

Invoke-Agent "..." -NoUi | Show-Styled ./src/PsAgent.Cmdlets/styles/agent.pcss

The command references have the full parameter sets: Invoke-Agent, Invoke-Acp.