sl0ppij.git/zellij-utils/src/kdl, 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: add an indexed style for status bar buttons

2026-08-12T14:15:19Z

`status_bar_button_style "indexed"` renders `1:Approve 2:Reject` instead of `[Approve] [Reject]`, so the bar doubles as a key legend for a harness that binds alt+1..9 to the same actions. A config option rather than a protocol field: whether the numbers mean anything depends on what the USER has bound, not on what the program knows. It needs no wire change and so no version bump, and the click report still carries the id -- never the index -- so a program is unaffected by which style is in force. The style is threaded into layout_status_bar, the one function the renderer draws from and the hit-test resolves against. That is what makes this safe: changing a button's rendered width necessarily changes its clickable span too, verified by a test asserting span width equals the drawn width and that every drawn column resolves back, for both styles. Also fixes the web client's Style construction to read the option from config rather than defaulting it -- my first pass claimed that code had no pane_frames config available, which was wrong; it uses it two lines further down.

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 a minimal style for the stacked-pane picker

2026-08-11T18:08:23Z

The boxed entries read as clutter: every entry bracketed in vertical bars, and the active one marked by a "> " that sits outside its own cell. `stack_list_style "minimal"` drops both. The active entry is shown by inverting it instead, which needs no glyph and no column, and the padding is moved inside the styled run so the inverted block covers the whole cell rather than leaving unstyled gaps at its edges. Four fewer columns of decoration per entry, so more fit per row in grid mode. Uses ribbon_selected rather than text_selected. Themes give ribbon_selected real contrast because it marks the selected item elsewhere in zellij's UI -- gruber yellow here, white-on-blue in the TempleOS theme -- whereas text_selected's background is 40,40,40 against a 24,24,24 terminal and read as essentially no highlight when tried. Decoration width comes from the style itself, so Tab's column arithmetic and the renderer cannot disagree about how wide an entry is. Default stays boxed, so nothing changes for anyone who does not ask.

sl0p: optionally render the stacked-pane picker as a grid

2026-08-11T14:33:46Z

`stack_list_layout "grid"` packs picker entries several per row, which turns stack_list_max_rows from a count into a space budget: eight panes in a wide terminal now fit on one row instead of spending three and hiding five. The entry renderer already drew each entry as a single chunk at its own x/y, sized by its geom and centring its own label, so a grid needed no rendering changes at all -- only the loop assigning every entry the same x and the full width. Column count is derived from the widest label rather than configured, so it adapts to the titles; one column is the floor and reproduces the previous full-width rows byte for byte. The row -> member mapping now has a column axis, and it had already caused one wrong-pane bug when two consumers disagreed. So the layout is computed once, by one function, into explicit cells; the renderer, the reserved-row budget and the mouse hit-test all read those same cells rather than each doing their own arithmetic. Windowing is by row, so a grid scrolls a whole row at a time and degrades to the old per-member window when there is one column. Cells are separated by a two-column gap: without it the focused entry's "> " marker sits flush against the previous cell and reads as belonging to it.

sl0p: cap how many rows the stacked-pane picker takes

2026-08-11T12:14:53Z

A stack reserves one row per member plus a padding row, so a deep stack spends most of the screen listing itself. `stack_list_max_rows` caps that; the list windows around the focused member and reports the rest as "+N more". The indicator goes in the padding row the list already reserves, so it costs no extra row and never displaces a real entry. Entries keep their real rank rather than renumbering from 1, otherwise the numbering stops meaning anything once the window has scrolled. The window slides on ordinary focus movement, which is also why this needs no new keybinding -- Action is a protobuf enum and the prost assets cannot be regenerated here (no protoc). A fixed cap rather than hover-to-expand on purpose: reserved_top_rows feeds pane geometry, so growing the list on hover would resize the pane's PTY and reflow whatever is running in it on every mouse move. A real expand/collapse has to be an overlay that reserves nothing, which is a much larger change to the render path. reserved_top_rows and the renderer both go through stack_list_window(); if they disagreed the list would draw into rows the geometry never reserved, i.e. over the pane beneath it.