slosh.git/config, branch master

theme: the busy spinner is its own colour (tab_status_spinner)

2026-09-22T13:38:08Z

It was drawn in tab_status_busy, the colour of the words it sits beside, which made one decision out of two. The words have to stay readable at a glance and a mark does not: a theme may well want the glyph loud and the text calm -- or the text in the accent and the mark a quiet dot -- and with one entry neither is available without moving both. Unset it follows tab_status_busy, derived after it and from whatever that resolved to, named or derived, so nothing changes for anyone who does not ask and no theme in contrib needs a line. `--dump-theme` writes both, like every other colour the compositor draws.

sidebar: room for the spinner, by default (tab_bar_padding 0 1 0 2)

2026-09-22T13:24:16Z

`│⠋bash: cd` -- the mark landed in the one column of left padding there was, so it ended up welded to the first letter of the status. The rule was "the mark takes a column the padding was already holding blank", which is right about not reflowing and wrong about there being enough of it. So the mark takes the *first* column of the indent and whatever is left over is the air after it, and the default indent is two columns instead of one. One column is still available -- `tab_bar_padding 0 1` -- and now means the squashed look on purpose rather than by default; three gives two spaces; zero still puts everything against the frame. Nothing reflows when a program starts or stops working, which was the point of taking a column that was already blank. The labels and the tab numbers move with it, because the indent is the strip's and not the status's -- a status still starts in the column its tab's name starts in, which is the rule the leading space existed for in the first place.

osc 5577: `busy`, and a sidebar that shows it (busy_mark)

2026-09-22T13:12:02Z

A status is a line of text, and a line of text cannot say whether it is still true. "building 3/7" reads exactly the same while it builds and ten minutes after it stopped, which is the one thing somebody reading it from another tab wants to know -- and the only workaround available to a program was to write the answer into the words and keep rewriting them. So `busy`: printf '\033]5577;1;status;make test\033\\' printf '\033]5577;1;busy;1\033\\' ... printf '\033]5577;1;busy;0\033\\' A flag of its own rather than a field of `status`, because a status is the *whole* payload after the verb -- `status;a;b;c` has always been the text "a;b;c" -- so anything added to that line would change what every existing sender means, including the five pi extensions D1 promises byte compatibility to. Orthogonal, so a program can leave one line up and toggle the other; anything but 0/false/no/off is on; `clear` takes both; and a pane whose program has gone is never busy, whatever it last claimed, because a spinner turning under a dead tab is a lie you keep looking at. In a sidebar the row turns `tab_status_busy` -- the theme's accent, derived like the other status colours, so no theme needs a line -- and takes a spinner in the column `tab_bar_padding` was already holding blank, so nothing reflows when a program starts or stops working. `busy_mark` is the frames, separated by spaces: one frame is a static mark and costs nothing, several make it turn, and only then does the session keep a frame clock -- via the same `animating` flag an animated shader uses, so the cost lands only while such a row is actually composed, and `""` drops the mark entirely and leaves the colour to say it. The frame is a pure function of the clock, like every other pulse here, so two clients attached to one session show the same one. `panes` now reports `status` and `busy`, which is the scriptable half of the same fact: what a pane says about itself, without reading its screen.

sidebar: air inside it, the way panes have padding (tab_bar_padding)

2026-09-22T13:01:07Z

`padding` is a pane's: the ring between a frame and the text it holds, in rows times gap_aspect so a `1` looks square around a block of prose. Handing the same knob to the sidebar looked tempting and is wrong twice over. The sidebar is chrome, not a pane, and its width is fixed by tab_bar_width -- so `padding 1` would quietly eat four of a sixteen-column strip (two cells a side, aspect included) and shorten every tab name, because somebody wanted their terminal text to breathe. And its two axes are not one idea: the columns are an indent for labels, the rows are air above a list. So tab_bar_padding, its own knob in the family the rest of the sidebar's air already lives in (tab_bar_pad, tab_gap, newtab_pad), taking the same 1/2/4 CSS-order values as `padding` -- one reader for both, so they cannot drift into meaning different things -- but counted in cells. The default `0 1` is what the sidebar already drew: that one column is where every label's leading space has been hard-coded since the sidebar existed, and moving it into a setting is what makes `tab_bar_padding 0` possible at all -- names flush against the frame, which was not previously a thing anyone could ask for. The statuses, the `+ new tab` row and the pane count follow the same indent, since they were each carrying their own copy of that space. It is air *inside* the plate: a tab's fill still spans the whole row and the whole row is still the hit, because the row is what you click and a highlight that stopped short of the frame would read as a highlighted word rather than a chosen row. The bottom rows are given up when the strip is short of them, like every other piece of air in here. tab_bar_pad is the older name for the top component alone. It still works, still means exactly that, and wins where a config writes both -- it is the more specific of the two. The dump writes tab_bar_padding and mentions it.

sidebar: align the numbers by default

2026-09-22T12:49:40Z

The knob landed defaulting to "prefix" on the grounds that it is what the strip has always drawn -- but the strip is not what this is about. A sidebar row is wider than the name on it, and `1:api` spends the first two or three cells of every row (three or four once you have ten tabs) on a number nobody reads until they reach for C-a 2, pushing the names in by a distance that depends on how many tabs are open. Right-aligned, the names start where the statuses under them start and the numbers make a column of their own. `tab_bar_index "prefix"` is still there and unchanged, and the top strip is unaffected either way -- it ignores the setting, having no far end to align against. The tests that used `1:` as the anchor for "where a tab's name starts" now anchor on the name, which is what they were about; two new ones cover the default and the prefix form explicitly, so neither mode is tested only by being the default.

sidebar: the tab number at the far edge (tab_bar_index)

2026-09-22T11:14:24Z

`1:api` puts a number at the start of every row, and in a sidebar that is a column of digits in front of the thing you are actually reading -- the names start one, two or three cells in depending on how many tabs you have, and the numbers are only wanted at the moment you reach for C-a 2. tab_bar_index "right" moves them: │ tests 1 │ │ 1:tests │ │ verylongproj 2 │ vs │ 2:verylongproje│ │ api 3 │ │ 3:api │ Every name starts in the same column and the numbers line up in one of their own, which costs a column of sidebar and buys the list a shape. "prefix" stays the default, because it is what the strip has always drawn and the strip is where most people meet it. Sidebars only, and not by omission: a tab in the top strip is exactly as wide as its label, so there is no far end to align against and a number floating after a name it does not belong to would be worse than the prefix it replaced. The setting is ignored there rather than half-honoured. A row too narrow to spare the columns (under the number plus five) also keeps the prefix, since the name is the part you came for, and the rename editor keeps the whole cell as it always did. A name long enough to reach the number stops one cell short of it, because `verylongproje2` is a tab called verylongproje2 as far as any reader can tell. The cell comes back as padding, so the plate is unbroken and the hit is still the whole row -- clicking the number is clicking the tab, and the number brightens with the label under the pointer rather than leaving half a row lit. The bell mark keeps its place between them, budgeted first as before, so a long name cannot eat either of the two things that are not the name.

theme: a name and a directory, not sixty colours in your config

2026-09-22T10:42:15Z

Wearing a theme meant pasting its `theme { }` block into config.kdl, or including a path to a file you had copied there yourself. Both make the palette a literal in your config, and a literal is the one thing you cannot change cheaply: not from a script, not from a running session, not by a list of what is available, and never again from upstream -- the colours you pasted are the colours that theme had the day you pasted them. So a theme is a file in a directory now, and a config names it: theme_name "phosphor" theme { frame_focus "#00ff88" } // ...but that one colour is mine theme_name is applied after the includes and before everything the file says itself, which is the rule includes already follow and for the same reason: the loader reads a document by asking it for names rather than walking it in order, so "here" is not a position it could honour, and "what you asked for is the base, what you wrote is yours" is the rule worth having. Two directories, yours first: `themes/` beside the root config -- beside the file that was loaded, so a config somewhere else (SLOSH_CONFIG, or one handed to --check) takes its themes with it -- and then /share/slosh/themes, compiled in from PREFIX. install(1) has been putting themes there all along and nothing could read them; now a shipped theme is nameable without being copied, and a file of yours with the same name shadows it, which is how a root-owned theme gets edited. A name, not a path. The directory is what makes a theme switchable, listable and shadowable, and a path silently does none of those, so `theme_name "../x.kdl"` is refused with a line pointing at `include`, which still works and is still the answer for a file somewhere a directory of names cannot reach. A theme that is not there is one complaint and no more (D9): the rest of the config applies, because losing your keybindings over a mistyped colour scheme would be the wrong trade. A theme file is read by the same loader, so it is watched like any other: saving one reloads the session wearing it, and the derivations (tab_status_fg, tab_idle_bg) run over the theme's own colours exactly as before. Switching without editing anything, over the socket a session already has: slosh -s main cmd theme # amber default* ... slosh -s main cmd '{"cmd":"theme","name":"amber"}' # now slosh -s main cmd '{"cmd":"theme","name":"amber","save":true}' The session holds the name over later reloads, so saving your config for an unrelated reason does not put the old colours back; `save` writes the theme_name line into the file, replacing the one already there and leaving every other line and comment alone -- dumping the whole config back over itself would reformat a hand-written file and drop its comments, which is not a fair price for changing a colour scheme. A name is tried on a throwaway config first, so a typo costs nothing. An empty name gives the answer back to the file. --dump-config stops writing colours: it writes the theme's name and the colours a config overrode by hand, so a dumped config keeps following its theme instead of freezing it. --dump-theme is the other half and is new: the resolved palette as a theme file, which is how you start one from the session in front of you rather than from an empty file. It is also what keeps contrib/themes/default.kdl honest -- that file is now the annotated reference (the commented palette moved there out of config.kdl, where it was 119 lines of colour in the middle of the prose), and a test compares it against the compiled-in one. While in there: tests/test_themes.py's "every theme sets every colour" guard had been grepping for `&c->`, the spelling before the colour table moved to offsetof, so it had been finding zero colours and passing for months. Fixed, with the derived and opt-in colours exempted for the reasons they are derived and opt-in, and with a check that the guard found a table at all.

tabs: idle tabs you can actually read across the room

2026-09-22T10:17:33Z

Seen next to the accent, the first plate was too polite to do the job it was added for: a 30% lift off the background under labels in the same #45454a the idle frames use. From another monitor the strip still read as one dark band with a blue block in it. Both ends move. tab_idle leaves the ambient chrome grey and becomes #8a8a95, because a tab you are not in is a place to go and has to be legible at a glance, where a dimmed pane border only has to be findable. The plate follows it to 43%, which is not a taste constant but a contrast ratio: the same step taken from a dark background upward and a light one downward lands at about 1.9:1 either way, so paper's #bdbebe on near-white and the default's #3b3b40 on black are the same amount of plate. The six themes in contrib named their idle tab colour as their frame grey, so each gets the same move in its own family -- 40% of the way from that grey to the colour the theme writes text in -- and their plates follow by derivation: amber #a67c26, mono #909090, paper #666a6e, phosphor #4a9c5d, slate #70789c, sl0p the house #8a8a95. Nobody who named a colour loses it; the derivation only ever fills in a theme's silence.

tabs: a plate under the ones you are not in (tab_idle_bg)

2026-09-22T09:59:10Z

The active tab has been filled with the accent since the strip existed; every other tab was words on the background. That leaves the strip with one shape on it and nothing to compare it against -- where a tab ends, how far the row you are about to click reaches, and in the sidebar which rows are tabs rather than statuses, all had to be read off the text. tab_idle_bg fills them. Barely off the background and in the label's own grey, because this is not a second highlight: it gives a tab edges, and it gives the accent something to be brighter than, which on a strip of short labels is most of how the eye finds the tab it is in. Hover keeps it for the same reason the active tab keeps its fill -- losing the plate under the pointer would read as the tab going away -- so hovering still lands on the text, and the bell mark sits on the plate rather than punching a hole in it. Derived a third of the way from default_bg to tab_idle when nobody names it, the same bargain tab_status_fg and tab_status_stripe already make: both ends are colours every theme in contrib defines, so each gets a plate in its own family -- paper lightens, phosphor greens, mono stays grey -- without a line added to any of them. Naming it wins, and naming your own background is how you ask for the bare tabs back. The `+ new tab` button and the gaps between tabs stay unpainted: the button is the one row in the list that does not mean "go here", and tab_gap is air between plates, which is what makes them read as separate tabs at all.

tabs: air before the new-tab button, and the option to do without it

2026-09-20T17:40:05Z

The `+` is the one entry in the strip that does not mean "go here", and it sits at the end of a list where every other entry does. Flush against them it is what you hit when you meant the last tab -- most easily in a sidebar, where the target is the full width of the row and the pointer only has to be one row low. newtab_pad is the nothing in between: blank rows in a sidebar, blank columns on top, one by default, which is enough to make the slip a miss. It is paint rather than layout, like tab_bar_pad: the panes' rectangle is the same at 0 as at 5, so tuning it repaints without reflowing anyone. And it is given up before the button is -- a strip short of room drops the spacing one cell at a time and still draws what the spacing was protecting, because spacing must never cost you the thing it spaces. newtab_button false removes the button outright, for people who make tabs from the keyboard and would rather have the row (or the columns) back. Only the place to click it goes: the chord and the palette entry still work. Setting newtab_mark "" already did this by omission; this says it on purpose, and says it in --dump-config.