Quick Start

Quick Start

This page gets a Hermes Agent installation onto Token Terminator v0.6.0 with the fewest moving parts.

1. Optional: install RTK

RTK is only required for terminal-command rewriting. Native compression, vaulting, recovery, request compilation, and token-aware acceptance work without it.

brew install rtk

For security-sensitive deployments, prefer an explicit executable path later with TOKEN_TERMINATOR_RTK_PATH.

2. Replace any older distribution

token-terminator and the old rtk-hermes-plus package both own the rtk_hermes_plus Python import package. Do not install them together.

HERMES_PY="$HOME/.hermes/hermes-agent/venv/bin/python"

hermes plugins disable rtk-plus
hermes plugins disable token-terminator

"$HERMES_PY" -m pip uninstall -y rtk-hermes-plus token-terminator
"$HERMES_PY" -m pip install \
  'git+https://github.com/AronAxe/Token-Terminator.git@v0.6.0'

hermes plugins enable token-terminator --no-allow-tool-override

On Windows, use the Hermes virtual-environment Python under %LOCALAPPDATA%\hermes\hermes-agent\venv\Scripts\python.exe.

3. Optional: exact tokenizer alignment

"$HERMES_PY" -m pip install tiktoken tokenizers

Use a Hugging Face tokenizer.json or a supported tiktoken encoding through the configuration variables described in Configuration. If no exact tokenizer is available, the strict character-reduction invariant remains active.

4. Start a fresh Hermes session

Then check:

/token-terminator status
/token-terminator stats

You want to see the plugin enabled, the expected mode, and a usable vault. If temporal delta or token budgeting is configured, their status is shown here too.

5. First recovery smoke test

After a large supported tool result is compressed, its receipt contains an artifact ID. Recover the exact content with the model tool:

{
  "action": "artifact_get",
  "artifact_id": "a_<content-address>",
  "offset": 0,
  "limit": 8000
}

If exact write/read-back verification fails, Token Terminator must leave the original result untouched.

Recommended starting mode

Use balanced unless you have a specific reason not to. It enables terminal rewriting, temporal terminal deltas, native compression for large search/process results, and final request compilation without aggressive large-file rewriting.