Dill is the terminal-driver vane. You run your urbit in your Unix terminal, and Unix sends every event –⁠ such as a keystroke or a change in the dimensions of the terminal window –⁠ to be handled by Dill. Dill acts as an intermediary for anything that uses keyboard events, which results in a slight input lag in Urbit’s command-line interface.

A keyboard event's journey from Unix to Dojo, the Urbit shell, can be imagined as diagrammed below:

Keystroke in Unix -> Vere (virtual machine) -> Arvo -> Dill -> the Dojo

Dill is located at /base/sys/vane/dill.hoon within Arvo.

Further Reading

• The Dill tutorial: A technical guide to the Dill vane.