Pause and resume the engine

The top of the board says engine running with a pause beside it.

What pause does

Pause stops anything new from starting. Whatever is already working carries on, and resume puts it back.

Pausing creates .torta/DISPATCH_OFF in the workspace, checked before every launch rather than once per tick.

Why a file

A file is one fact both the board and a separate torta watch read:

• touch .torta/DISPATCH_OFF and rm .torta/DISPATCH_OFF do exactly what the buttons do.
• A paused workspace is still paused after you restart the board.

The file has a sentence of text inside it; only its name is ever read back.

What the board shows

The header strip carries three things:

• what the dispatcher last wrote: queue depths, sessions and the tick clock
• whether an engine process is up right now, probed rather than read
• whether the kill switch is on

The strip is pushed when the control is used and by the watch on .torta/.

Starting without an engine at all

torta start --no-engine

That gives you the board with nothing behind it. Approving still moves tickets; it starts nothing. torta board is the same.