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The Mobile tab

The Mobile tab mirrors a connected Android device inside the panel, so the app your agents are building stays on screen while they edit it. It works with a phone plugged in over USB and with a running emulator.

What you need: Android platform-tools (adb) on your PATH — Android Studio installs it — and USB debugging enabled on the phone. The first time you plug a phone in, Android asks you to allow debugging from this computer; until you accept, the device is listed as needing the prompt and cannot be mirrored.

  • Pick a device from the dropdown; a single connected device starts on its own. ↻ re-lists devices.
  • Click, drag and type into the picture — it goes to the device. The row underneath has Back, Home and Recents.
  • The picture streams at the device's native resolution by default. It fits the panel; press 1:1 in the toolbar to show it at actual size (one device pixel per screen pixel) and scroll around, and press it again to fit.
  • Mirroring stops when you leave the tab or close the panel, so a phone is never left encoding video in the background.
  • TAO CODING ships scrcpy's own device-side server and pushes it for you; nothing is installed on the phone permanently.
  • Audio, file transfer and wireless debugging are not wired up yet, and iOS is not supported.

Send a region to an agent

The ✂ button turns the mirror into a selection surface: drag a box around the part of the screen you want to talk about, type what should happen to it, and press Enter. The region becomes a card in the tray under the mirror — its own PNG, its own request — and you can add as many as you like before sending anything, which is the point: fixing four things on one screen means four images that must not get mixed up.

Drag a card onto any terminal pane and the pane receives the request with the image path appended, pasted but not submitted, so you can read it before it runs. "Send all" does the same for every card at once, numbered so each request stays attached to its own image. The PNGs are written to .taocoding/captures/ inside that pane's folder, and .taocoding/captures/ is added to the repository's local .git/info/exclude (never your .gitignore).

If the picture is choppy on Linux, the panel is decoding in software (a "software decoder" note appears next to the nav buttons): that webview has no WebCodecs support.