an opinionated terminal multiplexer in C with programmable pane chrome https://git.sl0p.foo/slosh.git/atom/docs/slosh.5?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. 2026-08-27T13:27:51Z user user@clank 2026-08-27T13:27:51Z urn:sha1:b5df6a7b1d73fc9740a077e8eca2d7fc8f6afe60 Section 5 is where unix keeps its file formats, and slosh has two documents sharing one syntax -- the configuration and the layouts -- so they share a page the way they share a parser. docs/slosh.5 covers the KDL subset, where the file lives and how reload refuses a broken one, include and its precedence, every top-level setting grouped the way config.md groups them, the theme block, the shader vocabulary with the expression language summarised, the states and their ranking, the keys block including direct bindings, and the layout schema (tab, pane, and their properties). Held to the source like slosh.1 before it: every name in config.c's KNOWN_TOP -- the list the loader refuses unknown settings against, itself held to the loader by test_config.py -- must appear in the page, so a knob cannot be added without this page hearing about it. The pair must cross-reference each other, and both must be pure ASCII and lint clean under groff -ww. slosh(1) grows a SHADERS section -- the one feature a synopsis reader would never guess a multiplexer had -- and its SEE ALSO now names slosh(5) and nothing else: the other multiplexers can advertise themselves. Install puts the page under share/man/man5, the release tarballs carry both pages, and the Homebrew formula installs what the commit it is building has, guarded as before.