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scoot

Agents

An agent setting up a machine should find this page first. The whole stack an agent needs: a headless session with no display, the IPC socket to drive it, screenshots to see it, and this documentation as plain Markdown.

The loop

Section titled “The loop”
Terminal window
scoot --headless --outputs 2 -- foot &
scoot msg windows
scoot msg screenshot --out /tmp/shot.png

--headless renders into a framebuffer with no display at all; scoot msg is the control client (byte-for-byte scootctl, which also builds on macOS to drive a compositor in a VM). windows answers every window’s id, app id, title, output, workspace and rectangle — what you click. screenshot answers the output’s own pixels. Then act: scoot msg action focus-column left, scoot msg pointer click X Y, scoot msg type "hello", scoot msg key super+Return.

Read Drive scoot over IPC for the socket, then the rules that keep automation honest:

  • Rules an agent needs — window focus vs keyboard focus, the popup_grab rule, physical-vs-logical conversion, pointer locks, wait-idle pacing.
  • Screenshots — capture reproducibly, the pointer, retry rules.
  • What the socket refuses — the nine bounds, paced captures, connection limits.
  • Events — subscribe instead of polling.

wait-idle is the pacing primitive: block until nothing has redrawn for --quiet-ms (default 200 ms) before screenshotting or typing.

Machine-readable docs

Section titled “Machine-readable docs”

Every page of this site ships as plain Markdown: the three bundles (/llms.txt index, /llms-full.txt everything, /llms-small.txt compact) plus one twin per page at a stable /<slug>.md URL. Per-app sets (one per sidebar section) live under /_llms-txt/: the scootctl / IPC set is the grammar reference in one file. Commands in fenced blocks, nothing meaningful only in an image.

--help prints the usage text, every request and every action, with topics (scootctl --help, help <verb>) and --help --json for the machine-readable form — the contract every binary meets. Per-CLI pages generated from that JSON land in Reference next; until then this site’s Actions and CLI reference pages are the prose source.