Dashboard

Launch screen and mj ui (new)

Run mj with no arguments for the launch screen: an animated gradient wordmark, then a checklist of what is on this Mac that fills in live as each check finishes — the runtime, After Effects, Cinema 4D (Redshift, c4dpy), the GPU, your local library, the audit log, and the last render. Anything not set up yet shows the command that fixes it.

mj ui opens the full-screen dashboard:

Key	Action
1 2 3 4	Overview, Renders, Library, Audit
Tab / Left / Right	next / previous tab
r	refresh now (library and audit refresh every 10 s on their own)
q, Ctrl-C	quit — the terminal is always restored

• Overview — hosts, library health, audit chain, last render with a duration sparkline, tips. A running render shows a pulsing marker.
• Renders — history of every ae.render / c4d.render: time, host, status, frames against expected, seconds.
• Library — index health and the top effects by number of projects.
• Audit — hash-chain status (a tampered log shows CHAIN BROKEN at line N) and the most recent requests.

It adapts to your terminal: truecolor gradient with COLORTERM=truecolor, 256 colors otherwise, plain with NO_COLOR=1 / MJ_PLAIN=1, ASCII borders with MJ_ASCII=1 (automatic when piped), no animation with MJ_NO_ANIM=1. mj ui --once prints one frame and exits. Strictly read-only. mj cd goes to the install folder.

Live progress, notifications, status line

While ae.render or c4d.render runs, the dashboard shows an animated progress bar with frames done, percent, fps and ETA (give range=START-END so the total is known), and the Terminal title shows MJ · rendering 42%.

mj notify on        # macOS notification when a render / golden check / recipe / 10 s+ operation finishes
mj notify test
mj status           # one line: live progress, or the last render

Notifications pass text to macOS as plain arguments, never as script text. There is no menu-bar process (that would be a daemon); if you already use SwiftBar, integrations/swiftbar/mj.10s.sh shows mj status in the menu bar.

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Tier 0 observer dashboard

tools/mj-observe-dash.zsh is a btop-style live terminal view over your Tier 0 data. It is itself Tier 0: strictly read-only — it only ever runs project.ingest and expression.lint, and never modifies projects or snapshot history.

Run it

tools/mj-observe-dash.zsh --versions ~/AE_Versions --receipts ~/AE_Receipts

• --versions — your snapshot versions folder (required).
• --receipts — your scrape receipts folder (optional, but vitals/lint panels need it).
• --interval N — refresh period in seconds (default 5).
• --once — render one frame and exit (for scripting/screenshots).

Keys: q quit · r refresh now.

The panels

Project snapshots — one row per versioned project: snapshot count, total size bar, latest snapshot age, and a sparkline of snapshot sizes. Tells you at a glance which projects are churning.

Project vitals — from your newest scrape receipt: comp/layer/expression/effect/font/footage counts, missing-footage and unlinked-footage warnings, truncation flags.

Expression lint — error/warning/info counts with mini distribution bars, plus the top findings (code, layer, message).

Watcher — whether the LaunchAgent is loaded, plus the tail of watcher.log.

First run looks empty?

That's normal — the dashboard shows your data, and it only exists once you have it:

1. Snapshot a project: mj project.snapshot path=/path/to/Proj.aep output=~/AE_Versions
2. Scrape it in AE (AE Scraper) into ~/AE_Receipts
3. Re-run the dashboard — panels fill in.

Notes

• Needs a terminal at least ~80 columns wide; it adapts to your window size.
• Colors follow the btop-ish dark palette; box drawing stays aligned at any width.
• Temp request files are created per refresh and deleted immediately.