slosh.git/include/slosh.h, branch v0.1.8

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.

themes: ask the binary where it is, not the prefix it was built for

2026-09-22T10:57:26Z

`theme_name "sl0p"` with all seven themes sitting in /usr/share/slosh/themes: "no theme named sl0p". The lookup knew two places -- your own themes directory and the PREFIX this build was compiled with -- and on that machine the first did not exist and the second was /usr/local, because that is the Makefile's default and the package was built with PREFIX=/usr. Neither was where the themes actually were, and nothing in the search could ever have found them. A compiled-in prefix is a guess about where the binary will end up, and the binary is the one thing that knows where it really is. So the search now asks it: path_self() (/proc/self/exe, _NSGetExecutablePath, GetModuleFileName -- lifted out of server.c, which was already doing this for SLOSH_BIN) gives /../share/slosh/themes for an installed slosh wherever it was installed to, and /contrib/themes for one being run out of a build tree, which makes a checkout able to name a theme without installing anything first. The compiled-in prefix stays as the last candidate, for a binary sitting somewhere that says nothing about its data, and duplicates collapse so the usual install does not report the same directory twice. Your own directory is still first and still shadows everything, which is the property that matters; the rest is about the shipped set being findable at all. The tests that assumed a closed world of two temp themes now narrow to their own names by typing, since the shipped ones are (correctly) always in the list -- and the "no themes anywhere" toast lost its test, because with the shipped set reachable that state takes a binary with nothing beside it. The case that started this is a test of its own.

search: a scrollback search bar on /, matches highlighted

2026-09-08T14:58:24Z

C-a / opens an inline search bar on the focused pane's status row, on lib-vt's GhosttySearch (D4's pattern: the scrollback walk, reflow and alt-screen survival are the library's, the UI and the wiring are ours). Type to search live; the viewport follows the current match; up/down (or C-n/C-p) step through them with wraparound; Enter keeps your place, Escape snaps back. A k-of-n counter reads on the right, or "no matches". Every match on screen is tinted, and the one the bar is on is tinted apart -- warm gold by default, painted after the shader pass so the scrolled wash does not dilute a match you are hunting for. Four themeable colours (search_fg/bg, search_cur_fg/bg). Bare / took the key from help, which keeps ?; that needed the legacy decoder to read the shift out of a punctuation byte the way it already did for capitals -- without it ? and / decode identically (SLASH, no mods) and cannot be two keys on a client without the kitty protocol. tests/test_search.py drives it end to end (39 checks): the bar, the counter, stepping and wrap, all-match vs current highlighting, Enter/ Escape, new output updating the count, case-insensitivity, the keyboard belonging to the bar, click-away, and that / and ? no longer collide.

pane: drop the render snapshot of panes on hidden tabs -- 154K -> 66K each

2026-09-03T14:26:41Z

An updated GhosttyRenderState retains a full copy of the pane's viewport (rows, cells, per-row arenas, styles) so renders can read it without the terminal lock. Measured with bpftrace and a lib-vt micro-benchmark, that copy is ~140KB for an 80x24 pane -- more than twice the terminal it mirrors (~57KB) -- and every pane kept one forever, composed or not. Only the current tab is ever composed, so app_compose now drops the snapshot of every pane on the other tabs (a pointer test once dropped), and pane_new no longer creates one at all: pane_compose and pane_select_word build it on first use. Both already begin with ghostty_render_state_update(), so a dropped snapshot is rebuilt, never missed, and the tab switch already forces a full repaint. Server memory per empty 80x24 terminal drops from 154K to 66K anon (Superlogical reports 68K on macOS; tmux 4K, zellij 1.2-6.2M). Fifty background tabs: 8.2M -> 3.8M, reclaimed on close, and cycling through tabs does not ratchet. What remains is the lib-vt terminal itself.

pty: install the terminfo entry implicitly when it is missing everywhere

2026-09-02T14:24:41Z

The lookup miss now writes the embedded entry to ~/.terminfo and uses it, so a bare box gets the full TERM with no step at all. An entry that exists anywhere is respected -- possibly newer, certainly somebody's -- and a HOME that cannot be written leaves the xterm-256color fallback standing. --install-terminfo stays as the by-hand spelling; the writer moved to pty.c where the panes are.

Add competitive multiplayer support.

2026-09-02T12:51:02Z

Last input wins, canvas size is adjusted to active connection.

path: a directory ends at either separator on Windows

2026-08-28T13:09:18Z

Two places split a path by hand, both with strrchr(path, '/'), both falling back to "." when there was none: include_path() in config.c and watch_config() in server.c. On Windows "none" is the ordinary case. `SLOSH_CONFIG=C:\Users\you\slosh\config.kdl` is how a person writes it, and a path that has been near a native API comes back all backslashes whatever it started as. So an include resolved against "." -- `cannot open ./themes/t.kdl` -- and, worse and quietly, the config watcher watched "." too. Not the config's directory: the current directory of whatever started the session. Hot reload did not fail, it watched somewhere else and waited. Saving your config did nothing at all, with no error to go looking for. The default path escaped this by accident. slosh builds it as `C:\Users\you/.config/slosh/config.kdl` -- mixed, because a literal joined to $HOME always is -- and that one embedded '/' is what strrchr found. It worked for the path slosh writes and not for the one a user does. Both callers now use path_dir(), which learns to stop at a backslash too, and server.c takes path_base() for the other half rather than keeping its own copy of the arithmetic. Windows-only: a backslash is a legal character in a POSIX file name, and splitting on it there would invent a directory out of a file called `a\b`. path_dir() also keeps the separator when what is left would be a bare drive, because `C:\config.kdl` lives in `C:\` and `C:` names the current directory on drive C, which is a different place. Verified on the Windows box with a fully backslashed SLOSH_CONFIG: --check passes, the include loads, and editing the config reloads the running session. Watching a second directory is still unreliable; that is the watcher's own bug and the next commit.

path: an absolute path does not always start with a slash

2026-08-28T13:02:49Z

`include "C:/themes/t.kdl"` on Windows did not fail to find the file. It found a different one, or rather looked for it: absoluteness was tested as `path[0] == '/'`, a drive letter is not that, so the path was read as relative and joined to the including file's directory. The result was cannot open C:/Users/you/cfgA/C:/Users/you/cfgB/t.kdl which at least says what happened. A layout's `cwd="C:/srv/api"` took the same turn through path_resolve() and said nothing at all -- the pane started in the wrong directory, which is the failure this file's own header comment is about. Windows spells absolute three ways and all three now count: rooted on the current drive (`\dir`), rooted on a named one (`C:\dir`, `C:/dir`), and a UNC share. A drive letter has to be followed by a separator to qualify, because `C:file` is relative to the current directory *of that drive* -- a real thing, and not one we can resolve for anyone. Windows-only, deliberately. `C:` is an ordinary file name on POSIX and a path beginning with one is relative there, so reading it as a drive would break the platform that works in order to fix the one that does not.

ctrl_d_exits: Ctrl-D at a prompt, where the tty cannot do it

2026-08-28T12:41:42Z

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.

windows: a native port, on ConPTY and AF_UNIX

2026-08-27T22:23:19Z

slosh builds and runs on Windows 10/11, x86-64 and ARM64, as one exe with no runtime dependency beyond the OS: panes, splits, tabs, detachable sessions, the config file and its live reload, the control socket, the mouse. The port is a compatibility layer rather than a fork. compat/win holds stub , , and friends that redirect to include/compat_win.h, which is force-included ahead of every translation unit -- so the existing sources keep their POSIX includes and their POSIX call sites, and the platform differences are answered in one place. Two decisions carry most of it. Everything the event loop waits on is a socket. On POSIX a pty master, an inotify descriptor and a unix socket are all file descriptors, so one poll() covers them; Windows has no such union, and WSAPoll waits on SOCKETs and nothing else. Rather than rewrite server.c's loop around WaitForMultipleObjects -- which caps at 64 objects and cannot express POLLOUT -- each non-socket source gets a pump thread that copies it into one end of a loopback socketpair. The loop is then the POSIX one unchanged, and only what sits behind the descriptor differs. Socket descriptors are tagged rather than guessed: a wrapped SOCKET comes back as SL_SOCK_BASE + slot, so read, write, close and poll can tell a socket from a CRT descriptor with certainty instead of inferring it from the numeric range. That is why socket() and accept() are shimmed too -- an untagged descriptor escaping into the loop is the one failure mode this scheme has, and it is worth closing completely. Three things bit hard enough to be worth naming. A pseudoconsole does not stop the child inheriting your stdio. CreateProcess copies the parent's standard handles into the child when STARTF_USESTDHANDLES is absent, and those win. With slosh's own stdout redirected -- a pipe under ssh, a file under --script, a log under the daemon -- the shell wrote its banner into slosh's output instead of into the pane, and the pane had a correct title (ConPTY emits that itself) over an empty body. The three handles are cleared for the duration of the call, leaving the child nothing to inherit. A ConPTY never reports EOF. The output pipe belongs to the pseudoconsole, not to the child, so it stays open after the child exits and pane_pump()'s read() -- the entire mechanism by which a pane learns its program is gone -- never returns 0. A pane whose shell had been told `exit` sat there looking alive forever. So the exit is waited for on the process handle, and ClosePseudoConsole is what then produces the EOF. That third thread is also why the per-pty state is reference counted: a pump blocked on a dead pipe must not be waited for, or pty_close would hang the session on the one program that misbehaves, so whoever finishes last frees. cmd.exe does not use CommandLineToArgvW's quoting. A literal quote is \" to an ordinary program and a backslash-then-end-of-quoted-section to cmd, so building `cmd /c notepad "C:\...\config.kdl"` the first way handed the editor \"C:\...\config.kdl\", backslashes and all, and notepad answered "Not a valid file name" about a path that existed. cmd /c now gets the rest of the line verbatim -- the caller composed a complete command with its own quoting, exactly as it does for sh -c. Paths are mixed, and only some programs mind. slosh joins with '/' while the environment supplies '\', so the config landed at C:\Users\you/.config/slosh/config.kdl. The CRT opens that without complaint, which is why --check reported it fine, but a GUI file dialog rejects it outright. Anything handed to another program now goes through sl_path_native() first; the internal representation is left alone. The rest is small. Panes run %ComSpec%, sessions live in %LOCALAPPDATA%\slosh rather than $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR because a session socket must not follow a roaming profile to another host, there is no SIGWINCH so a resize is noticed by comparing the console size on a bounded poll, no fork so the daemon is a fresh detached process that reconstructs its arguments on the command line, and no process group on a pty so the foreground program is the youngest descendant of the pane's shell. C-a e prefers whichever console editor is actually installed -- notepad is a GUI program, so a pane running it draws nothing and looks broken -- and says so when it has to fall back. make -f Makefile.windows ARCH=x86_64 (or aarch64) cross-compiles from a mac or Linux, and builds natively on the box with zig on PATH.