ida-tui.git/docs, branch main

docs: blueprint for generalizing the TUI-driving layer (e.g. gdb)

2026-07-10T17:25:34Z

A design reference for bringing the idatui spawn/drive/introspect experience to other terminal apps. Captures the invariants worth keeping, the reusable core vs per-target Adapter split, a target taxonomy (embedded / control- channel / black-box PTY), the three hard problems (injection, settle, introspection) with technique gradients, tmux as the universal substrate, and a concrete gdb worked example (TUI pane + gdb-Python plugin as the adapter). No code.

app: multi-line comments via literal \\n (long notes were clipping)

2026-07-10T14:43:32Z

The comment prompt is single-line, so a long note rendered as one giant '//' line that ran off the right edge and got clipped. Interpret a literal '\\n' (backslash-n) in the comment text as a real newline in _do_comment (the single choke point for the ';' prompt and the RPC 'comment' verb) — Hex-Rays renders each as its own '//' line. Verified live and locked in the comment_func scenario (multi-line render); suite 104 green.

drive: add save + retype; point docs/skills at the ergonomic frontend

2026-07-10T14:21:36Z

Round out idatui.drive with 'save' and 'retype ' so the whole common RE loop (orient/understand/act/persist) has a terse command. Update docs/RPC.md and both skills (idatui, idatui-rpc) to recommend idatui.drive as the day-to-day driving surface, with rpcclient/raw as the fallback for unwrapped verbs.

app: drop the Header (keep the Footer); rpc: function-scope xrefs_from

2026-07-10T14:01:54Z

The clock/title Header added noise (and made screen() non-deterministic); remove it from the app itself — the Footer stays. Layout shifts up a row; scenario suite still 101 green. xrefs_from on a function was near-useless: the server's xrefs_from is address-scoped, so passing the entry ea only returned the fall-through from the first instruction. For a function target it now returns whole-body references from the decompiler (callees + string/data refs: {to,name,string,is_func,type}); an explicit 0xADDR stays address-scoped. Verified live: xrefs_from main now lists setlocale/getopt_long/sub_* etc. rpc_smoke: 25 green.

rpc: cursor_on + word= edits, single-driver gate, colored screen

2026-07-10T13:45:51Z

cursor_on {word,line?,occurrence?} places the cursor on a token, verified with the app's own tokenizer (so 'main' won't match inside 'domain'); rename/retype/follow gain an optional word= that runs it first — the ergonomic way to edit a named symbol without a manual view+cursor dance. Single-driver gate: the socket now serves one client at a time; a second concurrent connection is refused with 'busy' (no multi-driver support yet, by request). Sequential connections are unaffected. screen gains format=text|html|svg (html/svg are colored — for an out-of-band web viewer). rpc_smoke: 24 green.

rpc: more verbs — structured reads, modal select, in-view search, save

2026-07-10T13:29:21Z

Introspection (offloaded to a thread so a big fetch can't freeze the render): pseudocode (full body), disassembly (bounded), xrefs_to/from (structured), resolve (name->ea). These let an agent reason about a function and the call graph without scraping screen(). Semantic: select (choose the highlighted/nth item in the open xrefs or symbol-palette list and activate it — the natural follow-up to xrefs/ symbols), search (/ or ? incremental in the active code view), save (Ctrl+S). rpc_smoke exercises all of them end-to-end (18 green).

docs: RPC protocol reference (docs/RPC.md)

2026-07-10T13:17:05Z

names: command-palette fuzzy finder (Ctrl+N), overlay-first

2026-07-09T21:00:32Z

Replace the docked names pane as the primary way to jump to symbols with a command-palette overlay: Ctrl+N opens SymbolPalette, type to fuzzy-find (scored subsequence match with matched-char highlighting), up/down to select, Enter to open, Esc to close. Mouse-clickable too. The docked FunctionsPanel now starts hidden and is still reachable/toggleable with Ctrl+B (classic table view, sort, filter, goto all unchanged); a code view takes focus on startup. Status hints 'Ctrl+N: find symbol'. Pilot checks for open/fuzzy/subsequence/select/close. Tests reveal the docked pane (Ctrl+B) for the existing table-driven checks. full suite 74/74.

decompiler: fix stale scroll frame on same-function jump

2026-07-09T19:27:24Z

DecompView.goto derived its scroll with _scroll_cursor_into_view() -> a plain scroll_to, which updates scroll_offset but doesn't repaint at the new offset (Textual only repaints on a rounded scroll change, and there's no layout pass since the pane isn't reloaded). So a same-function xref jump landed the cursor correctly but painted the old scroll until the next cursor move nudged a repaint. Route goto's scroll (derived or explicit) through _apply_scroll, which re-applies after the next refresh with layout=True -- the same pattern show() uses. The cross-function path already worked because reloading + clearing the loading cover forces a fresh paint. Document the gotcha in TEXTUAL_NOTES. full suite 64/64.

docs: TEXTUAL_NOTES.md — Textual pitfalls, app patterns, testing gotchas

2026-07-09T17:38:46Z

Companion to PAGING_FINDINGS.md capturing the hard-won Textual behaviour (bindings/mixins, ScrollView repaint & scroll-clamp, loading cover blurs focus, mouse offset mapping, Input/Footer overlap, no cpp grammar) and the app patterns (name-gen cache invalidation, cursor+scroll history, name+address follow).