Interactive picker

The picker is a dual-pane terminal UI for curating context before generation: a foldable file tree on the left, a live preview on the right, and a footer with the selection total, a budget bar, and scan progress.

Launch it with bare sift or sift pick [path]:

sift
sift pick ./src

The picker needs an interactive terminal. Bare sift shows help instead when stdin is not a terminal (for example, when piping). Use sift pick from a real terminal.

Layout

• Tree (left) — navigate files and directories, expand/collapse folders, and toggle selection. Each row shows its mode (FULL/SIGS/SKIP) and token count.
• Preview (right) — the highlighted file’s content with syntax highlighting and secret warnings where relevant.
• Footer — the active style, visibility state, selection count and token total, a live budget bar, and the scanning progress line.

Press Tab to move keyboard focus between the tree and preview panes. When the preview has focus, j/k and the arrow keys scroll it instead of moving the cursor.

Keyboard reference

Navigation and tree

Selection and context density

Generation and actions

Selecting files and directories

• Selecting a directory applies the selection to all its children.
• A directory’s checkbox reflects the aggregate state of its children.
• Select a useful subset by hand, press a for everything, or press s for a Git-informed smart selection.

Modes (context density)

Each file balances detail against token cost:

• FULL — the file’s full content is included.
• SIGS — a signature-only summary keeps declarations, imports, and useful comments while dropping implementation bodies.
• SKIP — the file is excluded from the output.

Press m on a selected file to cycle its mode. The picker can mix modes freely; the footer’s token tally and budget bar update live.

Smart select

s chooses a selection automatically from Git history and commit size. Working tree edits and small, focused commits favor FULL; large bulk commits favor SIGS. The result is shaped by your current --budget.

Follow imports

f replaces the selection with the import-graph walk from the cursor file (dependents: what could break), F walks the other way (dependencies: what the file needs). The seed renders in full, near hops in full, far hops as signatures; everything else is skipped. Hop info lands in each file’s mode reason, visible in the inspector. Same defaults as the CLI: depth 2, full-depth 1.

Filtering and visibility

• Press / to fuzzy-filter the tree by path. Type to narrow, Enter to commit, Esc (or q) to clear the filter.
• . reveals hidden (dotfile) entries and H reveals Git-ignored entries. These are display toggles inside the picker; what ends up in the output depends on your selection. Hidden and Git-ignored files are shown muted (dimmed) so they stand out from tracked files; hovering or selecting one restores full emphasis so it stays easy to work with.

Task prompts

Press p to open the directive builder. It offers presets — such as code review, refactoring, bug investigation, unit tests, and architecture explanation — plus a custom mode (Tab or c) for free-form instructions. The chosen prompt is prepended to generated or copied output.

Color themes

Press t to open the theme selector. The built-in catalog includes Catppuccin Mocha, Tokyo Night, Dracula, Gruvbox Dark and Light, Nord, Rosé Pine, Kanagawa Wave/Dragon/Lotus, Everforest Dark and Light, One Dark, Solarized Dark and Light, Monokai, GitHub Dark and Light, Night Owl, Poimandres, Classic/default, and Terminal (Emulator). Terminal (Emulator) uses the configured ANSI palette (including the terminal’s foreground/background colors) instead of fixed RGB colors. Your selection applies immediately and is saved for future sessions. A theme picked in the web UI follows into an open picker within a second, since both frontends share the same preferences file. The theme also recolors preview syntax highlighting to match, so keywords, strings, comments, diffs, and markup follow the same palette as the rest of the picker.

Use --ui-theme-file to load custom TOML themes. See Configuration and profiles for the file format and inheritance rules. If your terminal does not show the default Nerd Font glyphs, run with --no-nerd-fonts to use plain ASCII icons.

Incremental deltas from the picker

Press d to open the delta modal. It lets you choose the comparison range (by checking/unchecking commits), the strategy (FULL content vs a raw --patch stack), and whether to generate a document or copy it. See Incremental deltas.

Generating and copying

• g renders the current selection to the configured output destination (default codebase.md) without leaving the picker, so you can keep tweaking.
• y copies the selection to the clipboard without writing the output file.
• Y generates the current selection and copies codebase.md to the clipboard. It renders the document once and copies those same bytes, instead of rendering and re-reading the file.

Generated output includes the active task prompt and applies secret redaction.

Work runs in the background

g, y, and Y hand their render/copy work to a background job, so the picker stays responsive while a large selection is processed. The footer shows the running job with a live elapsed-time counter (refreshed every 250ms), then the outcome:

• While a job is running, pressing g, y, or Y again is refused with a notice rather than stacking a second render over the same selection.
• Only one job runs at a time; the notice is replaced once it finishes.
• Quitting (q/Esc/Ctrl+C) during a job waits — up to 30 seconds — for the in-flight write to finish so the output document is never left truncated.

A failure (for example a missing clipboard tool) is reported in the same notice line instead of interrupting the session.

Clipboard helpers

y and Y hand the document to your platform’s clipboard tool (wl-copy, xclip, xsel, pbcopy, or clip on Windows). wl-copy and xclip hand the data off and then keep running in the background to serve the selection, so the copy is treated as successful once they have taken the payload rather than when they exit — waiting for exit would hang the picker indefinitely. xsel and pbcopy return once the data is delivered, so those are waited on as normal, with a 30-second bound.