sl0ppij.git/zellij-utils/src/ipc/protobuf_conversion.rs, branch main

sl0p: --purpose flag and tab-level purpose

2026-08-12T16:44:24Z

Completes the two pieces deferred from the first workspace-hints pass. `zellij run --purpose X` / `zellij action new-pane --purpose X` tag a pane at spawn time, which is what an agent wants for panes it creates itself; the OSC wrapper still works for programs that declare their own role. Not supported with --in-place, which replaces another pane rather than being a pane of its own: clap rejects the combination rather than accepting a flag that would do nothing. `tab name="work" purpose="agent-work"` gives a whole tab a role, reported by `list-tabs --json`. It rides the tab's ROOT layout node, reusing the pane field because a tab's root is the tab container and never itself a pane -- asserted by a test for the tightest case (a tab holding exactly one pane), since a leak there would silently mislabel a pane. The interesting part is why the flag first shipped broken. There are TWO protobuf boundaries -- the plugin API and the client->server IPC contract -- and a CLI flag must cross the second one. Defaulting the field in the conversion (what "no protoc" usually forces) compiles cleanly and then silently drops the value in transit, so --purpose parsed, printed a pane id, and did nothing. Fixed by adding the field to both contracts by hand, in the .proto AND the committed generated prost, kept in lockstep so a future regeneration reproduces it: protoc is only needed to regenerate, not to build. Both boundaries now have a round-trip test, and the IPC one was confirmed to fail when the wire read is removed. Sanitising moved to Grid::set_authoritative_purpose, the single choke point every out-of-band source passes through, after the CLI path was observed delivering `bad purpose; rm -rf /` intact into list-panes --json.

sl0p: per-pane workspace hints (purpose=)

2026-08-12T15:05:34Z

Implements the zellij half of sl0p/workspace-hints-proposal.md: a pane can carry an opaque agent-facing hint for what it is FOR, so a project can ship a layout that an agent is able to navigate instead of guessing. zellij never interprets a purpose. The consuming agent owns the entire vocabulary, which is what keeps this to one string threaded along the existing status_bar path rather than a policy engine, and lets the vocabulary change without a rebuild. Two ways in, because declared panes and agent-created panes are different: layout: pane name="server" purpose="dev-server" in-band: printf '\033]5577;1;purpose;agent:build\033\\' The second exists because tagging at spawn time would mean threading a field through 28 SpawnTerminal call sites, and a new action variant is impossible while protobuf enums cannot be regenerated. Wrapping the command costs one printf. A declared purpose outranks an in-band one and cannot be overridden or cleared by it. OSC arrives from whatever the pane happens to be showing, so otherwise a `cat hostile.txt` in the human's editor pane could relabel it as the agent's scratch pane and invite an agent to run commands where the human is working. A layout is written by a human in a file they can read; in-band data only fills a blank. Exposed on PaneListEntry (`list-panes --json`) rather than PaneInfo, which crosses the plugin protobuf API we cannot regenerate; resolved in the screen thread where panes live rather than via route.rs's per-pane PTY round-trips. Values are sanitised to a bounded [A-Za-z0-9_.:/-] token at both entry points, because a purpose is never rendered -- it is matched against and pasted into consumers' shell and JSON pipelines. Verified end to end rather than by inspection: purposes from a layout appear in list-panes --json against the right pane ids, an agent-spawned pane tags itself, a declared purpose survives an in-band override attempt, all of it comes back after kill + resurrect, an unknown pane property is still a parse error, and a layout with no purpose leaves dump-layout unchanged.

sl0p: clickable action buttons in the pane status bar

2026-08-12T13:18:33Z

Second slice of the status/action frame. A program declares buttons, and a click is reported back to it: printf '\033]5577;1;buttons;approve:Approve;reject:Reject\033\\' -> click -> program's stdin receives OSC 5577 ; 1 ; click ; approve ST The report is a FIXED format carrying only the id, never bytes the payload chose, and ids are restricted to [A-Za-z0-9_-]. The sequence that creates a button is in-band and untrusted -- `cat` of a hostile file emits it as readily as a cooperating program -- so a click that could send arbitrary bytes would let viewing a file inject into the stdin of whatever is running, a shell included. Labels are '%'-escaped since the wire format is ';'-separated, and both the button count and id length are capped because the list lives as long as the pane. Positions come from one layout_status_bar function that the renderer draws from and the hit-test resolves against. Computing that geometry twice is how the stacked-pane picker once selected the wrong pane; a test asserts every drawn column resolves back to the button drawn there, across 100 widths. Two things the drive caught that unit tests could not: - The first delivery path pushed onto grid.pending_messages_to_pty, which is only drained when the PANE produces output -- so a click on an idle program sat in the queue forever. The write now happens at the tab level, which owns the senders. - The hit-test derived the frame row from the pane's raw geometry, but this fork draws the frame inset by gap_offset, so with `gap 1` every click missed by one row. It now derives from the CONTENT rect, which is by definition the inside of the drawn frame and therefore the same columns the renderer lays out. Buttons serialise with the session like the status text, so a resurrected pane comes back with its buttons intact.

sl0p: serialise the pane status bar for resurrection

2026-08-12T12:52:43Z

The status bar survived detach/reattach (it lives on Grid) but not a serialise/restore cycle, so a resurrected pane came back blank. It now travels the whole per-pane serialisation pipeline, mirroring the fork's existing default_fg/default_bg: pane -> PaneLayoutMetadata -> PaneLayoutManifest -> TiledPaneLayout -> a status_bar property in the serialised KDL, then back through the normal layout parser and applied by LayoutApplier when the pane is recreated. The sanitiser moved from grid.rs into zellij-utils so both entry points share one definition. That matters: a layout file on disk is no more trustworthy than the escape sequence that wrote it -- it may have been hand-edited, or copied from somewhere else -- so restored text is stripped and length-capped on the way in just like the OSC payload was. Verified end to end rather than by unit test alone: set the bar, waited for a serialisation pass, confirmed status_bar="..." in session-layout.kdl, killed the session until list-sessions reported EXITED, then attached and watched it come back from disk. The earlier attempt only proved detach/reattach because Quit had left the session alive.

sl0p: separate the hover resize hint from the hover highlight

2026-08-12T12:09:21Z

Upstream's mouse_hover_effects governs two unrelated things: the frame highlight on hover, and the "Ctrl or to resize" hint. Its own comment in default.kdl admits as much. So silencing a beginner reminder you have outgrown also costs you a highlight that stays useful indefinitely. mouse_hover_help_text (default true) gates only the hint. One line in execute_send_to_terminal; the highlight is set in execute_update_hover and is untouched. Config-file only, deliberately. The option has no protobuf slot, so it does not cross the client/server IPC contract -- the roundtrip test asserts exactly that, with the fixture set to None and a comment explaining why. It still works from the config file because the server parses the file itself and Options::merge keeps the file value when the client sends None; a CLI flag would be silently ignored.

sl0p: add close_if_focused to LaunchOrFocusPlugin

2026-08-12T11:16:00Z

Upstream's action focuses an already-running plugin, so a chord bound to it can only ever open one -- there is no way to dismiss with the same key. This cannot be fixed in a plugin. Keybindings are resolved into actions in route.rs before a key reaches a pane, so the launching chord never arrives at the plugin. intercept_key_presses does not help either: the intercept lives in screen.rs and only sees keys that already became Action::Write, i.e. keys destined for a pane. Confirmed empirically -- an intercepting build received Ctrl-u but never Ctrl-;. Closes only when the plugin is the focused pane in the client's ACTIVE tab, so the chord cannot close whatever pane the user happens to be on. A plugin that exists but is hidden behind a floating-layer toggle, or is focused in a different tab, is revealed or brought over as before. Defaults to false, so every existing binding is unaffected. Config-only, with no protobuf representation: defaulted at both boundaries and dropped when an action crosses the plugin API, so no prost regeneration is needed. The 24 snapshot lines are the new field appearing in serialised keybind dumps.

sl0p: add `arrangement` to build a tree for N panes

2026-08-10T22:50:30Z

A `children` placeholder inserts every pane it receives as a flat sibling. That single hardcoded policy is why a layout can only express "N equal columns", "N equal rows" or "one stack" without hand-writing a variant per pane count -- the max_panes=5 / max_panes=8 / max_panes=12 ladders in a swap layout file exist purely to work around it. `pane arrangement="grid" { children; }` builds a tree for N panes instead. Two to start: grid (ceil(sqrt(n)) columns, rows filled left to right) and master-stack (one 60%-wide master, the rest beside it). Generates a TiledPaneLayout rather than geometry, so everything downstream works unchanged: split_space, the minimum-size feasibility check, LayoutApplier, swap-layout damage tracking, and the responsive collapse. It composes with that last one for free -- a grid is simply infeasible on a narrow terminal, so it is skipped and the collapse takes over. The arrangement builds ONE self-contained subtree rather than splicing a variable number of nodes in among the placeholder's siblings, so it stays well defined next to the pre-existing "children node with sibling nodes" TODO rather than leaning on it. Like default_fg/default_bg, the field has no protobuf representation, so it is defaulted at both plugin-API boundaries and does not survive a round trip. This is why it is a field rather than a LayoutConstraint variant: a new enum variant would have no representation when converting TO protobuf, and the committed prost assets cannot be regenerated here (no protoc). The 48 snapshot updates are the new field appearing in TiledPaneLayout debug dumps (324 lines, all `children_arrangement: None`). No snapshot content was removed. The `expression:` metadata churn in those files is pre-existing drift that regeneration swept up: the stored snapshots recorded the expression before normalize_layout_debug was introduced.

Support the Kitty Image Protocol (#5428)

2026-07-31T17:19:49Z

* initial implementation - kinda working * tests and fixes * fix bounds * tests and compatibility fixes * fix: cursor scroll, clears, deletes, key tolerance, and host id range * fix: keep images alive across resize, relayout and history scroll * anchor to lines, not pixels * fix image/text alignments * config to allow disabling * fix pinned pane issue * never let host graphics replies reach the keyboard parser * fix nested session * properly handle fullscreening a pane * rustfmt * cleanup of ignored test * add pr

Nested session handling (#5417)

2026-07-27T16:24:37Z

* fix: theme query and updated pixel dimensions * add no-ui-fullscreen key/action/capability * protocol core * integration test harness * fix integration tests * fix flaky tests * nested ui (dimming) and directional focus initial implementation * integration tests for nested ui dimming and directional focus * initial full screen nesteed implementation * fix: keep hidden floating panes hidden across nested no-ui fullscreen * fix integration tests * no ui fullscreen integration tests * hardening behavior/tests * fix(nested): re-derive descend/dim on host tab switch and new-tab so clicking dimmed chrome ascends * initial modal implementation * initial ui improvements * fix integration tests * improve nested selection ui * nested session modal refactoring and tests * improve integration test speed somewhat * some ui adjustments * simplify full/auto nested session handling * hints in compact-bar * guest stdin leak fix * allow floating panes to be fullscreen * make nested session handling configurable * protocol reannounce * refactor: naming confusion * improve ux somewhat * rustfmt * merge fixes * improve integration test rate limiting (fix ci) * add pr

feat(config): add mouse_scroll_resize option (#5283)

2026-07-17T07:20:38Z