Environment

Markdown Card Variable Capture

Markdown cards can reference shell variables with ${NAME}. Subspace resolves them by spawning the configured shell as a login but non-interactive shell (<shell> -lc env), parsing its output, and substituting the values into rendered cards.

Because the spawn is non-interactive, .zshrc / .bashrc are not sourced. Any variable you want subspace to see must be exported from a login init file:

Shell	Put exports in
zsh	~/.zprofile, ~/.zlogin, or ~/.zshenv
bash	~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, ~/.profile

Interactive shells are deliberately avoided: they take over the controlling terminal (job control, /dev/tty, terminal mode setup), which would leave the terminal hosting subspace serve in a state where ctrl-c no longer reaches the process.

Proxy Variables

Subspace clears all proxy-related environment variables on startup:

• HTTP_PROXY / http_proxy
• HTTPS_PROXY / https_proxy
• NO_PROXY / no_proxy
• ALL_PROXY / all_proxy

This prevents the proxy itself (and its upstream dialers) from being influenced by system proxy settings. Routing is controlled exclusively by the config file.

XDG Config

Subspace respects $XDG_CONFIG_HOME for locating the default config directory.

Variable	Default	Used for
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME	~/.config	Config file and control socket default paths

Default paths when $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not set:

• Config: ~/.config/subspace/config.kdl
• Control socket: ~/.config/subspace/control.sock

When set:

• Config: $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/subspace/config.kdl
• Control socket: $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/subspace/control.sock

Color Output

Subspace auto-detects terminal capability for colored output.

Variable	Effect
$NO_COLOR	Set to any value to disable all colored output

Color is also disabled when stderr is not a terminal (e.g. when piping output).

Control Socket

The status and logs commands communicate with a running server via a Unix domain socket. The socket path is determined by the config file's control_socket setting.

The socket serves an HTTP API with the following endpoints:

Endpoint	Method	Description
/status	GET	JSON status with health checks, stats, and pool info
/stats	GET	JSON statistics snapshot
/logs	GET	Streaming log lines with level filtering

/logs Query Parameters

Parameter	Default	Description
n	10	Number of historical lines
level	info	Minimum level: debug, info, warn, error
follow	true	Stream live lines after history (false to stop after history)