cdno now

What you are in the middle of: the action most recently started, unless it has since been completed, dropped or paused. Focus is one slot: starting something new displaces the old start, which never comes back.

cdno now [OPTIONS]

There is no state behind this. It replays the ## Logs of today and of the [focus] carry_over_days days before it (default 1, so a start left open yesterday is still your focus this morning), so a start made from cdno action start, from an agent over MCP, or typed into the daily note by hand all count — and a completion, a drop or a pause clears it. Nothing to keep in sync, and nothing to go stale.

cdno action promote rewrites the bullet it matched, and the focus follows it: the action promoted on line it logs renames the open start to the new note, with the original start time, so action complete and action drop still close it.

A line you type yourself has to match the shape the writers emit:

- **09:30**: started [[surrogate-model]] — Draft the methods section (deep)

Both halves are required. The - **HH:MM**: stamp is what makes the line a log entry at all, and the separator is an em dash (U+2014), not a hyphen. The parser requires that exact codepoint, so that ordinary prose beginning “started something” is never mistaken for a focus. That strictness means a line missing the stamp, or typed with -, is simply not picked up here — but cdno lint reports it, naming the line and the likely cause, so a near-miss does not stay invisible.

$ cdno now
On surrogate-model — Draft the methods section (deep), since 09:30 (1h 30m).

cdno now has three shapes.

Something is in focus. The line above. A start carried over from an earlier day names it (since Saturday 14:05 (21h 7m)), and the elapsed time counts across midnight.

A carried focus that was picked up again. A focus carried over from an earlier day and re-anchored with action resume reads the new time first and keeps the original:

$ cdno now
On surrogate-model — Draft the methods section (deep), picked up 08:50 today (started Saturday 14:05).

Resuming a pause shows the plain since HH:MM shape, because the pause had already closed the earlier start.

A day more than six days back is shown as a date (2026-09-22 14:05), since a weekday name would be ambiguous.

Nothing in focus. It says so, and shows the most recent pause that nothing has picked up since, with its re-entry hint:

$ cdno now
Nothing started.
Last paused: surrogate-model — Draft the methods section (10:40), next: pick up at "Prior approaches"

The pause is looked for in the last paused_lookback_days days (default 14), so a Friday pause is still there on Monday. Pick it up with cdno action resume.

--line

--line prints one sanitised line of at most 160 characters for a prompt segment or hook:

Focus: surrogate-model — Draft the methods section (since 09:30)
Focus: none (last paused: surrogate-model — Draft the methods section, next: pick up at "Prior approaches")

Control characters are stripped and an over-long line is cut. It prints nothing and exits 0 when no vault is found or anything goes wrong, so it can sit in a prompt without ever breaking it. With --json as well, --line wins. The Claude Code hook example runs it before every prompt.

--json

Every key is always there and is null when it has no value (all of them but last_paused when nothing is in focus), so a caller can test one field without first branching on the shape of the document.

The action field is the bullet text exactly as logged, energy suffix and all. That is the same string cdno action complete matches, which is why the pairing works.

Related MCP tools

current_focus — the same read, for an agent.

See also

• Focus — the idea behind the slot and the window.
• action start — what puts something here; pause, switch and resume move it.
• orient — what to begin when nothing is open.