an opinionated terminal multiplexer in C with programmable pane chrome https://git.sl0p.foo/slosh.git/atom/config?h=docs-new 2026-08-28T12:41:42Z 2026-08-28T12:41:42Z Peter Geissler peter@haxx.in 2026-08-28T12:41:42Z urn:sha1:2fbd36c1cef6ea6c9fcf9c36afb5209089288257 Windows has no VEOF. The console driver does not know the character, so ^D arrives at cmd.exe and PowerShell as an ordinary keystroke and they ignore it -- it even echoes, which is how you find out: the line reads `echo hello^D`. The one key that closes a pane on every other platform does nothing at all, and closing a pane becomes a word you have to type. That you can type `exit` instead is the tell: the intent was never ambiguous, only unspoken. So slosh speaks it. What goes to the pane is the word, not a signal and not a close from outside -- the shell runs its own cleanup, returns its own status, and keep_dead decides what is left behind, all three of which reaching past it would skip. It is also what the user would have typed, so there is nothing new to explain. The knob is what makes it honest, because a wrong guess costs a pane. It fires only with the shell itself in the foreground (a program that is running may want the EOF for itself -- `cat` reading to end is the whole job), only on the primary screen (in an editor or a pager ^D is half a page down, and the alternate screen is the pane stating that rather than us matching process names), and only on an empty line (POSIX sends EOF there; what it does not do is discard what you typed). The line is an estimate. The shell's editor is on the far side of a pty, so pane_send_key counts what it forwarded since the last Enter. Editing it does not model -- a recalled history entry, ^U, completion -- leaves the count too high, which forgets to exit. That is the direction to be wrong in; the other one throws away a half-typed command. Default true on Windows, false on POSIX, where the line discipline already does this and does it properly: ^D there is also EOF for `cat` and every REPL, none of which is ours to intercept. A knob rather than an #ifdef so the guards are the same code everywhere and can be tested where the test suite runs -- test_ctrl_d.py turns it on and drives all four decisions, plus the case that does exit. Telling trapped from forwarded needs a program that reports what it received: on POSIX a forwarded ^D also ends an idle shell, and looking for the word `exit` cannot separate them either, because bash prints `exit` itself on EOF. Verified on the Windows box as well, where it is the default: ^D at an idle cmd.exe prompt takes the pane (and with it the session, having no panes left), `more` in the foreground keeps its own EOF, and a half-typed line survives with the line still on screen. 2026-08-27T13:09:02Z user user@clank 2026-08-27T13:09:02Z urn:sha1:2ee881452aa4b19701a071f0333a15265e3b314e Text taller than the viewport was not selectable in one gesture: the drag stopped dead at the pane's border. Two faults, one visible and one waiting. The visible one: DRAG_SELECT motion subtracted the content origin in uint16_t, so a pointer above or left of the pane underflowed, the grid lookup failed, and the selection froze. The waiting one: the anchor was a pair of *viewport* coordinates re-resolved on every extend, so the moment anything scrolled mid-drag the anchor would have drifted with the viewport, re-anchoring to whatever slid under the press. The anchor is now a tracked grid ref -- the thing lib-vt documents as being for 'long-lived anchors such as selections' -- so it follows its cell across scrolling, pruning and reflow, and only the near end of the selection moves. If a program flooding output prunes the anchored row out of scrollback entirely, the selection keeps what it had; there is no cell left to anchor a new answer to. Motion clamps into the content rect (a pointer past an edge is pointing at the nearest cell), and holding past the top or bottom edge scrolls on a clock rather than on motion, because a resting pointer sends no events and 'keep going' is exactly what resting it there means. app_tick() does the step, app_next_deadline_ms() wakes the poll loop for it -- the same mechanism toasts and hover guides already use -- and both front ends call the tick, so the behaviour exists under the server and the headless harness alike. Rows per step is how far past the edge the pointer sits: one row past creeps, further hurries, so the hand already dragging is also the throttle. The metronome is select_scroll_ms, a knob so the test can configure the clock down instead of sleeping. The test drags to one row above the pane and simply holds: the viewport walks to the top of scrollback (clamping makes the endpoint exact), the copy starts at a line that was never on screen with the press, and still ends at the pressed row -- that last check is the tracked anchor's. 2026-08-26T20:04:02Z user user@clank 2026-08-26T20:04:02Z urn:sha1:88a1488a0b97f0c47ac215aabf3b23135c8c846d An audit of every claim in docs/config.md against the parser and the dump found the page complete -- all 47 top-level settings named, no ghosts, defaults and error strings as printed, 48 theme colours exactly -- and three statements wrong or imprecise, all fixed here and in the two comments that repeated one of them: - compact does not switch off gap_aspect. The divider ignores it, but padding is still aspect-corrected through it and the float nudge step still uses it; saying it 'stops applying' was wrong in config.md, config.h and config/config.kdl alike. - 'Two of those take more than one value' miscounted: padding, min_pane/min_split (cols=/rows= properties, whose syntax the page never showed) and project_roots all do. - a compact boundary saves four *columns* or three *rows*; 'four' with no axis was the columns number wearing a general claim. 2026-08-25T12:23:33Z user user@clank 2026-08-25T12:23:33Z urn:sha1:b744a90859bf248bfbea97f990668301b5fa9537 One knob, `compact true`: panes pack flush against 1-cell divider lines that meet in real junctions, one frame rings the tab, and a pane's title rides the line above it -- a boundary costs one cell where the default look spends four. The lines are strokes: each write says which edges of its cell it needs, unions with what is there, and never clobbers text, so ├ ┬ ┼ fall out of paint order and the focus ring recolours without inventing arms. The divider *is* the gap (eff_gap, one answer for the layout, split_fits and the resize clamp), so gap hits, hover hints and corner drags work unchanged. Interior edges give up click-to-split -- one cell cannot hold two verbs -- and a pane's status row overlays its last content row. Floats, zoom and the D6 flatten keep classic frames through place_hidden: zero new tree cases. Underneath it, mode or no mode: a border drag now moves the boundary on that side, converted on the first motion so the press that never moves keeps its old meaning -- the handle's click still splits, the rim's is still deliberately nothing (drag.rim). Which is also the fix for gap 0, where flush panes leave no gap cell to grab and the resize gesture had silently vanished with it. 2026-08-20T22:27:58Z user user@clank 2026-08-20T22:27:58Z urn:sha1:2e74c6dceef18f75b849c729bd768330f73396fb Plain ASCII that says what it means, over a dot that had to be noticed. The mark was always a short string rather than a glyph (the emoji-width argument in config.kdl stands); the default just stops being shy. 2026-08-20T21:56:37Z user user@clank 2026-08-20T21:56:37Z urn:sha1:c7a45c4ff8825ff564fa7852a08e9bbac2c2b7c8 Four rows deep at 60 a row instead of three at 45: the edge row is nearly gone (#0e0e0e from white) and the melt reads as "there is more this way" rather than as a rendering artefact. The quarter-viewport cap, the (above > 0) gate and everything else about the derivation stand; a config that writes its own scrolled chain is untouched, as ever. 2026-08-20T21:22:33Z user user@clank 2026-08-20T21:22:33Z urn:sha1:b33e8c13ff7981effc7ec2735e6aeaaaf1705af7 A pane can float: lifted out of the layout, drawn over the tiled panes and under the modals, freely moved and shaped. The model is a flag and a rect on the leaf, exactly like `minimized` -- the seat in the tree is kept, layout skips it, the siblings absorb its share, and un-floating returns it home. The drawn rect is the wanted one clamped to the tab every frame, never written back, so a terminal squeeze round-trips exactly; an explicit move or resize *does* write back, because the hand is the author of the intent. Floating pops the pane to the centre: the jump is what says it happened. Painted after everything tiled, so the hit list -- searched backwards -- resolves an overlap to the float you can see: the z-order and the click order are the same list. It casts a shadow (float_shadow, one number), and `floating` joins the states table above `unfocused`, so a float is never dimmed as merely-unfocused. The hands: the title moves it, any other border resizes it (a bottom corner on both axes; the grabbed edge pins at walls and floors, never sliding the window), H J K L move a focused float, the =/+ key grows it about its centre, `-` shrinks it (its split was a refusal anyway), and hovering shows which edges a grab would take, from the same derivation the press uses. Equalize moved to `0` to free the key; `C-a f` floats (finder went to `s`, where it reads as search); `C-a F` opens a new floating shell -- the throwaway terminal; the function row f1..f12 became nameable in configs along the way. Guards throughout: the last tiled pane cannot float or minimize away, closing it lands the top float, splits are refused with their own words, floats are not swap targets. Dropping got a grammar: while a pane is carried, the pane under the pointer subdivides into a swap centre and four edge bands meaning "insert me beside this pane, on this side" -- detach_leaf + place_beside, the surgery cross-tab moves already had. Bands are thirds (the first map of quarters showed the swap owning half of each axis), the hovered band fills the half the drop would hand over, the release resolves against the painted frame's hits so it cannot disagree with the fill, and a drop between siblings along the axis is a reorder that always fits -- refusing it was refusing the most ordinary drag there is. Also: rename-pane/rename-tab as palette actions (renaming was a double-click and nothing else, the one verb the palette could not reach), and C-u clears the rename editor like it clears the picker's query. Design log in PLAN-FLOATING-PANES.md; to fold into DESIGN.md as D22/M10-11. 2026-08-19T13:25:28Z user user@clank 2026-08-19T13:25:28Z urn:sha1:49ac13f70aa3a9224e90699fe68d8463909239db The old name argued that the extension should say how to read the file. The argument lost to a collision: zellij speaks the same KDL syntax under that same extension with a different schema, and to anyone arriving from there .kdl said *whose* file it is -- naming the wrong owner is worse than not naming the parser. So a layout is x.layout, a project's is slosh.layout, the name says what the file is and --check says how it was read. (It is still KDL underneath; point your editor's highlighting at *.layout.) Nobody's checked-in workspace vanishes on upgrade: the project scan still finds slosh.layout.kdl, never writes it, and where both spellings exist the new one wins, because two files disagreeing needs one answer. The unparseable-file heuristic in --check learned the new suffix -- it matched '.layout.' with a trailing dot, which the new name no longer has. The webdemo overlay moves with it (demo.layout), rebuilt and boot-checked. 2026-08-19T12:10:52Z user user@clank 2026-08-19T12:10:52Z urn:sha1:1f5b55bc323e89399ec82eca392612ce2c0167a4 logo.txt is the source of truth; the Makefile bakes it into build/logo.h the way version.h is baked. When a client attaches (MSG_HELLO turning a connection into the display), the logo appears centered over everything for splash_ms (900, 0 for never), on a cleared backdrop, in the accent -- and one of six effects runs over its rect through the ordinary shader pass: a diagonal sheen, plasma, rings, sparkle, a left-to-right reveal, a breathe. Which one is picked by the splash's own timestamp, so every attach looks a little different without anybody keeping a counter. Every effect reads the clock, so the frame clock runs only while the splash is up (note_animation, same as any animated chain), and `since` in a splash context is milliseconds since it appeared, so one-shot effects sweep exactly once. Any key or click ends it and still lands where it was aimed: a greeting is not a modal. A screen the box does not fit on gets no greeting rather than a cropped one. Headless and scripted sessions never attach, so the whole fast suite never sees it; {"cmd":"splash"} triggers it on demand, which is what makes it testable from a scripted session -- and lets you replay the greeting whenever you like. 2026-08-19T11:46:57Z user user@clank 2026-08-19T11:46:57Z urn:sha1:42b3c10995eb67778d9dd3aa2fd80624896acd5f The out-of-the-box look, rethought as one piece: - the compiled-in palette calms down: muted blue #7aa2f7 on the same neutral darks, with the colours that mean something kept semantic -- amber bell, red-orange dead. sl0p stays one include away as the house style, and contrib/themes/default.kdl is the starting point written down (theme-tour shows it). - derived state defaults now actually follow the theme: the scrolled wash is rebuilt from scroll_bg after the theme block (it used to bake the compiled accent), and declaring a state -- in any file of an include chain -- still wins. The dump writes derived states as comments so C-a e cannot pin what is meant to keep following. - a bell you can see: the frame blinks three times in theme's bell colour then breathes until answered, and a soft diagonal shimmer -- the bell colour halved towards default_fg, width breathing on a sine -- crosses the body for the same 900ms. bell_indicator false silences all of it; states { bell { } } replaces it like any state. since carries the clock dependency, so an idle session pays nothing. - scrollback says where it continues: while scrolled, the viewport's top and bottom rows melt towards an edge with content past it and turn solid at the buffer's end. New expression variables above/below (lines hidden past each edge, own dependency bit, cached per scroll position), carried in shade_ctx_t -- SLOSH_SHADER_ABI 3 -> 4. - expressions survive the dump: a program keeps its source and cb_chain writes it back, so amount="(y % 2) * 40" no longer dumps as a number. - headers move to include/, -Iinclude everywhere; the plugin Makefile's SLOSH var becomes SLOSH_DIR because slosh exports SLOSH=1 into every pane it runs, and building from inside a session read that as a path. - comment drift culled where features outran the prose, and the derivation boilerplate folded into derived_pass()/ctx_scroll().