The field

f—the field view#

f summons the topology as an in-window card: every host from your ssh config, this Mac first. Each row carries a verdict — reachable · 2 days ago, never visited, unreachable—and the host's capability tokens: its userland flavor, zfs, rsync, sudo, and how many datasets it remembers. Under a ZFS host, the datasets themselves, with their mountpoints; unmounted ones dimmed and labeled—visible, but not somewhere you can go.

Walk it like a pane: j/k move, l folds a host open or closed, ⏎ points the focused pane at the node and dismisses the card, esc just dismisses. r re-probes the host under the cursor—the row says probing…, then answers with fresh facts. One keystroke heals a stale picture: a host that changed its userland, grew rsync, or finally came online is re-read in place.

The card's own footer is the cheat sheet: ↵ / dbl-click point · l toggle · r re-probe · esc dismiss — and one line of field wisdom: ~ is the remote user's home · grey = unmounted, not a place.

Failures come back as sentences, not codes. A probe refused for key reasons says no usable ssh key—key setup needed; a host that answered gibberish says answered, but the probe came back unreadable.

Remembered, and marked as remembered#

Discovery happens on demand—when you probe, when you point, never on a timer. What the Field learned is cached locally as a plain JSON file, so the card opens instantly on the remembered shape of your field, each fact carrying its age. The cache records your last visit; it is not a live status feed. Delete it any time; the hosts are the system of record and the Field rebuilds from them.

A dated cached result is more useful than a background status check that quietly changes the state of your machines.

F—the host map#

F floats the deeper map as its own window—one you can park on a second display while you work. Where the field view answers "where do I point a pane," the host map answers "what ground does each machine stand on": every host with a probe button, its ZFS pools, and the full mount table—target, filesystem type, source, ro where read-only — plain mounts included, because not everything you manage is ZFS. System-mount noise is folded away and counted: 14 system mounts not shown.

Its markers are the same ones the field view uses: an unprobed host reads not yet asked—probe gathers the ground, and every probed host's facts are dated—ground as of 2 days ago. The legend names the one glyph that matters everywhere in pālana: the filled drive is a dataset, the hollow one a plain mount.

The config is the control#

The field's roster is your ~/.ssh/config—pālana never keeps a second list. The pane header's ▾ menu carries edit ~/.ssh/config… and reload hosts; settings can add, remove, and hide hosts, always by editing that same file, always after backing it up. Hiding tucks a # palana: hide comment into the host's block. The host stays out of menus, but a typed address still works.