slosh.git/docs/layouts.md, branch docs-new

docs: deprecate boring design narrative, more trimming and culling

2026-09-02T10:32:45Z

docs: big overhaul

2026-09-02T09:55:35Z

layout: a float sized but not positioned is centred, per axis

2026-08-30T13:22:51Z

docs/layouts.md always said an absent coordinate takes the centred default; the loader said 0, and a layout float with only w= h= landed in the top-left corner. Now an axis the file does not name is FLOAT_CENTRE, a sentinel no real coordinate can reach, and float_clamp answers it with the middle -- every frame, at whatever size the terminal is by then, until an explicit move or resize writes a real number over it. The webdemo's welcome float is the customer: it must sit centred on a terminal whose size the layout file cannot know. The dump writes a still-centred axis by omission, because the number it happened to land on would pin to this screen's size the one intent that deliberately has none. Every mutating verb already writes back from the drawn rect, so the sentinel survives nothing it should not.

docs: less wordy

2026-08-29T18:25:39Z

README/docs: stop leaning on the aside dash

2026-08-27T14:11:26Z

Some 230 sentences hung their qualifications between dashes, and at that density the tic reads as the writing's signature rather than a tool it occasionally picks up. Each one is now the punctuation the sentence actually wanted: a colon where the aside defines, parentheses where it whispers, a comma where it barely pauses, a full stop where two thoughts were pretending to be one. Definition lists and reference tables take colons throughout. Two double hyphens remain on purpose, both literal: the argv separator in a shell example, and a table cell that means 'takes nothing'.

README/docs: spell the dash --, as the rest of the tree does

2026-08-27T14:04:37Z

Every C comment, commit message and generated config in this repo writes the aside dash as a spaced double hyphen; the Markdown alone used U+2014, some 220 of them. One spelling, and the ASCII one -- the prose now matches the code it documents. Mechanical (every occurrence was the spaced form, checked including the one inside a code fence, where it was comment text), so the words themselves are untouched.

slosh: M10c, the memory -- floats survive being written down

2026-08-20T21:53:43Z

A dumped session quietly re-tiled its floats, which was the one data-loss gap left in D22. dump-layout now records `floating=true x= y= w= h=` -- the *wanted* rect, because intent is what survives a session and the next screen's layout clamps it like any frame -- layout files declare the same (linted: floating is a bool, x/y/w/h mean nothing without it), and a file whose every pane floats self-heals through ensure_tiled: the top float lands, the same rule closing the last tiled pane follows, no lint required. save-workspace inherits all of it from the shared dumper. `float` over the API takes x/y/w/h and then *places* rather than toggles -- a placement is a statement about where, not about whether -- floating the pane first when it is tiled, re-placing when it already floats, with omitted fields meaning "keep". The intent is stored exactly as asked: the write-back rule is for hands, whose drags need the clamp to agree with the eye; a script means what it typed. And kitty graphics respect the stack. The cell compositor gets occlusion free from paint order, but placements are sent after the diff and would paint an image straight over a float covering it. Each pane's placements are now clipped by the float rects above it -- every float for a tiled pane, the higher-raised for a float -- cropping what one clean edge can express (the pane-edge source-rectangle arithmetic aimed at another clipper, including from the top and left, where the source origin moves and the sub-cell offset is consumed) and suppressing what it cannot: a strip across the middle or a corner overlap leaves a shape one placement cannot say, and the image returns whole when the float moves. No z= needed -- clipping is the z-order, since nothing is ever allowed to overlap. D22's "still owed" paragraph is paid and rewritten; M10 is fully checked.

slosh: layout files are .layout, not .layout.kdl

2026-08-19T13:25:28Z

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.

slosh: rename the project from sl0ppty

2026-08-18T19:26:00Z

sl0p + pty was error-prone to type and the zero made it worse; slosh (slop + sh) is one syllable, impossible to typo, and slosh.foo is ours. Mechanical rename everywhere it appears: binary, env vars (SLOSH, SLOSH_SESSION, SLOSH_BIN, SLOSH_CONFIG), socket dir (/tmp/slosh-, $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/slosh), config path (~/.config/slosh), header guards, src/sl0ppty.h -> src/slosh.h, contrib/sl0ppty-dev -> contrib/slosh-dev, the driving-slosh skill, docs and tests. The sl0ppi fork references and the sl0p theme stay: one is history, the other is the brand. The rename surfaced a latent bug in test_osc5577: the hello-reply answer always appeared on screen twice (ECHOCTL echo plus cat -v), but a seven-character implementation name happened to wrap the second copy across the 60-column boundary, so counting substrings in wrapped text found one and passed for the wrong reason. A five-character name moved the wrap and exposed it. The loop guard itself is correct -- with echo off before the request there is exactly one reply -- so the test now counts on de-wrapped text and tolerates the pane's own echo.

sl0ppty: workspaces, and layouts that write themselves

2026-08-17T10:56:42Z

A **project** is a directory on disk. A **workspace** is the tab it occupies in a session. Two words because they are two things, and conflating them is how a session grows a second source of truth about what it is looking at. `project_roots "~/dev" "~/work" depth=2` is scanned for subdirectories holding a `sl0ppty.layout.kdl` -- or a `.git`, which is the project that has not said what it needs yet. Both markers, because a `~/dev` of forty checkouts and three layout files is a picker with three rows, and `C-a W` is how a project stops being the second kind. A directory that *is* a project is never descended into, so the walk stays off `node_modules` without anyone writing a rule about `node_modules`. `C-a w` is the third subject of the one picker (D19): the finder searches what this session has, this lists what is on disk, including the projects with no workspace open yet, which is most of them and the whole point. **Identity is the tab's `purpose`** -- `project:.` of the resolved path, the shape D3 already published -- so there is no second field to disagree with it, membership is a string comparison, and a dumped session restores it for free because a dump already writes tab purposes and applying one already locks them (D8). Hashed on the *path* rather than the name, so two worktrees of one repo are two workspaces, which is what they are. A tab whose layout gave it a purpose of its own keeps it and is simply not a member: overwriting a declared purpose is the one thing D8 forbids, and the reply counts the ones it left alone. **Nothing watches the filesystem.** The list is derived when it is asked for -- one `readdir` per root and two `stat`s per entry -- and an answer nobody remembered cannot be stale, which is a promise no watcher can make on a bind mount. The picker scans once as it opens, not per frame, because `draw_picker` asks for its rows every frame and a `readdir` per repaint is a filesystem walk at 120Hz. Opening is idempotent (`sl0ppi up`'s property): the same request twice is one workspace, focused, and the answer says which branch it took. Four things had to be true before `save-workspace` could exist, and none of them were. **A relative `cwd=` in a layout file now means that file's own directory** -- the rule `include` already followed for configs, applied to the other half of the same syntax. A project's layout could previously only name absolute directories, which are right on exactly one machine and wrong in a worktree of the same repo. **A dump can be asked for one tab, against a base.** `dump-layout` takes `tab`, `relative_to` and `suspend`. Writing it also turned up a bug: `dump_node` asked `cur(a)->focus` whichever tab it was writing, so a dump of three tabs restored the focus of one. **A dump records what a pane is *running*.** `label` only ever knew what a layout said, so a pane you split and typed `npm run dev` into had nothing to say for itself and came back as a bare shell -- which made arranging a project and writing it down two jobs instead of one. The kernel knows what the label does not: a pty has a foreground process group, and that group is by definition the job that owns the terminal, so the answer is read the way `live_cwd` already reads `/proc/PID/cwd`. Three things are deliberately not commands: a shell at a prompt (its group is the pane's own, and `command="zsh"` on every idle pane restores a session where each shell runs inside a shell), a background job (it does not own the terminal), and an ephemeral pane. A declared label still outranks a live process, because it survives the program exiting (D14) and re-saving must not degrade `npm run dev` into whatever the process tree looks like this minute. argv is joined with shell quoting, since `command=` goes through `/bin/sh -c`. **A pane from a split starts where the pane it came out of stands**, not where the server was launched. Wrong on its own, and it had been quietly writing an absolute path to somebody else's directory into every saved project. A saved project defaults to `suspend="commands"`: the pane running this morning's dev server is written asleep, because a *project's* layout is a statement of shape and a *session's* dump is a statement of fact. Over the API, replacing a layout that is already there is refused without `force`; from the keyboard `C-a W` replaces and says `replaced`, because a key cannot pass a flag and the file is committed text whose diff is the review. `--check` now holds a layout to the layout schema instead of answering with the name of the flag that reads one. `unknown pane property: cmd`, `split is cols or rows`, `purpose is ignored on a pane with panes in it` -- the mistakes a layout can make that still parses. The lists live beside `build_pane` and a test greps for every prop the loader reads, the arrangement that keeps `KNOWN_TOP` honest. **`C-a P` sets a pane's purpose**, a third subject on the editor the pane title and the tab label already share. A purpose is what tooling finds a pane by, and it could only be declared by a layout or set over the socket -- so every pane anybody arranged by hand had none, and a layout dumped from one was a shape with no tags in it. Typed by an operator it counts as declared (D8: "a layout or an operator"). Clearing one now *unlocks* it: a lock held over an empty string was the one state nothing could escape. `set-purpose` also reads `id: 0` as the focused pane now, which every sibling verb already did. Two gaps found on the way, both reachable only over the socket before: **`C-a X` closes a tab.** It used to be a side effect -- press `x` once per pane and the tab evaporates when the last one goes -- so four panes meant four presses and counting. It says how many panes went, since most of them were not the one you were looking at, and on the last tab it refuses and points at `q`: a key that closes a tab four times and ends your session the fifth is one you cannot press without counting first. No `✕` on the tabs, for the arithmetic that took the per-pane `+` away. **`scrollback` is a number we choose.** D4's "free from lib-vt" was true of the machinery and quietly false of the size: handed no limit, lib-vt picks its own -- 10,000 *bytes*, which measured at 622 lines of an 80-column pane, less than one `make` run. `scrollback` is lines, defaulting to the 10,000 every other multiplexer settled on, and `scrollback_bytes` is the ceiling it runs into, because either limit can be reached first and neither can see what the other depends on. Measured at 10,000 lines of styled output: ~6 MB at 80 columns (the ceiling never bites), ~15 MB at 200 (2% of the lines), ~32 MB at 400 (half of them). No `unlimited`, deliberately: the ceiling is per pane, and a negative is refused rather than wrapped into eighteen quintillion lines. Read when a pane is created, so it applies to the next pane you open -- same rule as `shell`, because shrinking a pane's history retroactively throws away output somebody is reading. `--project-root` was considered and dropped: the config is the one place projects are declared, and tests pin a config like every other config-driven feature. Verified: 1752 checks, all green. 90 in `tests/test_workspaces.py` (the two markers, depth without descending into a project, two worktrees as two workspaces, idempotent open, the honoured-purpose count, the save/close/open round trip byte-for-byte, the set-up-by-hand-and-write-it-down flow, the picker, and every verb's bare form); 53 in `tests/test_portable_layouts.py` (relative and absolute `cwd=`, text having no base, per-tab focus, the four `suspend` words, captured commands, an idle shell and a background job captured as nothing, spaces surviving the round trip, label precedence, and the checker's lists not going stale); 21 in `tests/test_purpose_editor.py`; 14 in `tests/test_scrollback.py`; 5 more in `tests/test_tabs.py`. `tests/test_osc5577.py` had a vacuous check: `\033` through the driver's unescaper is NUL + "33", so "a pane cannot relabel a declared purpose" passed without the sequence ever arriving. It uses `emit_cmd` now and has a positive control that the same sequence lands once the purpose is cleared. Three cheatsheet tests were pinned to terminal sizes that exactly fitted the old sheet, which four new bindings pushed past. They now ask for room; truncation has its own test.