slosh.git/src/app.h, branch master

slosh: defaults most people can live in, said by shaders

2026-08-19T11:46:57Z

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().

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: clang-format the tree

2026-08-17T12:22:38Z

The bumpy one. `make fmt` over every `.c` and `.h` outside `vendor/`: 32 files, 1,843 lines rewritten, no behaviour changed. Nothing here is worth reading -- the next commit adds it to `.git-blame-ignore-revs` so `git blame` walks past it. Two thirds of it is alignment the formatter now owns: trailing comments in a struct, continuation lines under a signature. The rest is the hand-packed tables opening up to one entry per line -- `ACTIONS`, `NAMED_KEYS`, `ACTION_HELP`. That is a real loss of density and a real gain in diffs: adding an action was a reflow of the block and is now one line. Anything worth keeping packed can be fenced with `// clang-format off`; nothing was, on the grounds that a table is the thing a formatter is for. **One change is not formatting.** `src/config.h` had three trailing comments glued onto one field: uint16_t hover_delay_ms; /* how long the pointer must rest to arm a guide */ /* how long an announcement stays up */ /* rows per wheel notch */ -- `toast_ms`'s and `scroll_lines`' comments, landed on their neighbour by an earlier edit, documenting the wrong things ever since. It is in this commit because it is what caught it: clang-format could not settle on that line, wrapping it one way and then re-indenting the wrap on a second pass, so `make fmt` was not idempotent. The comments are back where they belong and it is. Verified after the reformat, not before: `make clean && make all` is warning-free, `make retest` is 1801 checks green, and `make fmt` twice in a row changes nothing the second time. A formatter that alters behaviour would be worse than none, so the gate was the whole suite rather than a reading of the diff.

sl0ppty: `set-name target="pane"`, so a script can overrule a program's title

2026-08-17T11:38:33Z

A pane's name already outranks the title its program sets -- `pane_title` prefers the name while there is one -- and that is the whole remedy for a program announcing something it stopped meaning: an agent still spinning the summary of a task it finished, a build script that titled itself once. The remedy was reachable by double-clicking the title on somebody's screen, and from a layout file, but not from the socket, while `set-purpose` next to it has taken `target:"pane"|"tab"` all along. `target` defaults to `tab`, which is what this verb has always meant. Two verbs whose defaults differ is a smaller wrong than a verb that quietly changes its subject under scripts already written against it. The refusals say `no such pane` or `no such tab`, so a mistyped target shows up in the reply rather than as a label that did not move. The gesture now calls the same function, so the two ways in cannot disagree about where a pane's name lives -- there is a test that a name set over the socket is the name the double-click editor offers to edit. Verified: eight checks in `tests/test_pane_title.py`. A pane named while its program keeps setting OSC 2 titles keeps the name; clearing it hands the label back to what the program calls itself *now*; `id: 0` is the focused pane and leaves the other one alone; `set-name` with no target still renames the tab and leaves the pane's title alone.

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.

sl0ppty: a pane can change tabs

2026-08-16T17:13:28Z

sl0ppty cmd '{"cmd":"move-pane","id":3,"tab":2}' sl0ppty cmd '{"cmd":"move-pane","id":3,"tab":2,"dir":"rows"}' sl0ppty cmd '{"cmd":"move-pane","id":3,"tab":0,"name":"logs"}' The mechanism only. There is no key and no gesture for it yet -- that is the next conversation, and guessing at it now would mean building the wrong one twice. **The pane keeps running.** Measured, not assumed: `pid=3062557` before the move and `pid=3062557` after, in a different tab, with its scrollback intact and still answering what it is sent. That is the whole reason to move a pane rather than open one where you wanted it and close this one. It is tree surgery and it reuses the surgery that was already here. `place_beside` is the second half of `split_node_with` -- everything after "make the leaf" -- lifted out so that a leaf which already exists somewhere else can be grafted the same way, flat sibling or new split, on either side. It takes the tab rather than `cur(a)` now, because replacing a root has to land on the right one and `cur(a)` was only right while the sole caller was splitting the pane you were looking at. `detach_leaf` is `close_leaf` without the funeral. Three decisions worth naming: **The destination is a tab id, not an index.** A tab whose last pane leaves has nothing to be, so it is removed -- and every index after it moves. An id survives that; an index quietly means a different tab. The move re-finds the destination by id *after* the removal for exactly this reason, and there is a test that empties a tab and checks the pane landed where it was sent. **A move drops what the old tab thought about the pane** -- a zoom naming it, and its minimised flag. Both are the tab's opinion and not the pane's: carried across, the first zooms a pane that has left and the second files the arrival in a strip nobody asked for. **It does not follow the pane.** Which tab you are looking at is a question about intent, and this is the mechanism; `move-pane` answers with the tab id so a caller can select it if that is what it meant. "Into a tab of its own" is its own call rather than new-tab-then-move, because a pane that is the only thing in its tab would otherwise have its tab removed from under the new one, and the order those two happen in is precisely the bug. Verified: `tests/test_move_pane.py`, 25 checks -- the pane still running and still talking afterwards, placement beside and under the destination's focus, focus landing on the arrival, the emptied tab, a tab of its own, every refusal (no such pane, no such tab, already there, already alone), the dropped zoom and minimise, and after three moves a layout with no overlaps that dumps and rebuilds as itself.

sl0ppty: the prompt speaks config, not a dialect of it

2026-08-16T16:57:44Z

chrome> include "contrib/chrome/heartbeat.kdl" heartbeat.kdl: 1 chrome, 0 content chrome> shaders { ...> tint where="chrome" color="#ff5fd7" amount="abs(sin(t / 5))" ...> dim where="content" amount=80 ...> } 1 chrome, 1 content Both of those were errors an hour ago, and the second one was my fault twice over: `:paste` printed `include "..."` and printing something you cannot type back is a prompt lying about its own output. Pasting it answered `unexpected argument for include`, and `load "..."` answered the same about `load`. So the grammar is now the config's, all of it: an entry, several with `;`, an entry with its own `where=`, a whole `shaders { }` block over as many lines as it takes, `include "f.kdl"`, `load f`. There is a test that reads `:paste`'s block off the screen, clears the pane, types it back line by line and compares the cells -- round-tripping is the property, not a nice-to-have. **The text is a document.** What it says replaces both chains, exactly as naming `shaders { }` in a config replaces the block rather than adding to it, and an entry's `where=` decides which rect it lands on. That drops a rule I invented last week -- "one chain, one rect", which refused an entry that named the other one -- because it made the prompt's mode a law rather than a default and made a two-rect block, the thing `:paste` prints, impossible to paste back. The prompt now keeps the document and sends all of it, so a line aimed at the frame leaves the contents alone, and the reply says `1 chrome, 1 content` rather than `ok`: with routing visible, the counts are the answer worth reading. `route_entries` is the one place routing is decided now -- config file, preset file, typed line, same function. `config_parse_chain_doc` takes the wrapper or the bare entries, because both are things a config contains and therefore both are things somebody will paste. Still nothing in the prompt parses KDL. A file goes by path; a pasted block goes via a temporary file, since an OSC payload cannot carry a newline -- a control byte ends the sequence, by the spec -- and joining lines with `;` would need exactly the comment-and-quote scanner I refused to write. The only syntax the script looks at is counting braces to know whether you have finished typing, and an empty line gives up on that. One hint, for the mistake that started this: when the session says `unknown shader`, the prompt adds `(a file? :load , or include "")`. After the fact rather than before, so a plugin's shader name is never second-guessed. Verified: `tests/test_shader_repl.py` is 41 checks -- every input shape, the multi-line paste and giving up on one, the round trip, the hint -- and `tests/test_inband_shaders.py` gained the document rule in both directions, including that a document naming only the frame takes the contents pass off. Full clean suite green.

sl0ppty: `:load` a preset, without a second KDL reader

2026-08-16T16:40:42Z

chrome> :load sine-comet sine-comet.kdl: 1 chrome, 0 content chrome> :paste // sine-comet.kdl include "/home/user/dev/sl0ppty/contrib/chrome/sine-comet.kdl" A path, or the bare name of anything in `chrome/` or `shaders/` beside the script, from any directory. Entries land wherever their own `where=` says, so one file can fill both chains and a preset goes where its author put it. Tab completes filenames after `:load` and vocabulary everywhere else. **The prompt does not parse the file.** I started writing the scanner -- find the `shaders {` block, count braces, strip `//` outside quoted strings so that `color="#ff0033"` and `t / 8` survive -- and stopped, because that is a second reader of a format that already has one, and the two would disagree exactly where comments meet strings. Instead the session gets the path and reads it with the parser it already has: `config_parse_chain_file`, built on the same `parse_shader_entry` a config file goes through. Anything that is not a top-level `shaders { }` block is ignored, so a whole `config.kdl` can be handed over and only its shaders apply. The alternative was regenerating all 45 presets into something easier to read from Python. That would have cost them what makes them useful: each one is a config fragment today -- pasteable, `include`-able, checkable with `sl0ppty --check`, and loaded as a config by `tests/test_chrome_presets.py`. A format only the prompt can read would be a fourth thing to keep in step. `:paste` after a load answers with an `include` line rather than the file's thirty: the file is on disk, it is already the block, and reprinting it scrolled the pane you were looking at -- which is how I noticed. Both chains are built beside the live ones and swapped in together, so a file that goes wrong half way leaves the pane as it was rather than wearing the half that parsed. Each compiled expression is matched to the chain whose shader points at it before either is installed; freeing a program the other chain still uses is the one bug here that would not appear until the next repaint. Verified: nine checks in `tests/test_shader_repl.py` -- a preset by bare name, a file with both rects going to both chains, the three ways to be wrong (no such file, no `shaders { }` block, no argument), what `:paste` says afterwards, and tab completion. Then all 45 shipped presets loaded by name in one session: none refused.

sl0ppty: three ways back from a painted pane

2026-08-16T13:05:02Z

printf '\033]5577;1;shader;\033\\' # from the program sl0ppty cmd '{"cmd":"clear-shaders","id":0}' # from outside it bind "z" "clear-shaders" # from the keyboard `app_clear_pane_shaders` empties both of a pane's chains and says whether there was anything there, which is what lets a key answer "shaders cleared" or "no shaders on this pane" instead of maybe having done something. In-band it is not a new verb: naming no rect means all of them. `shader;` sits under `shader;chrome;` and `shader;content;` as the degenerate case of "which rect", so a program puts a pane back in one exchange and cannot leave it half done. `contrib/shader-repl`'s `:both` now uses that rather than two. **None of the three is gated on `in_band_shaders`.** A chain outlives the setting that allowed it -- paint a pane, then turn the setting off, and the paint is still there, because a chain belongs to the pane and not to the file (there is a test that reloads with it off and clears anyway). A way out that the setting can take away is not a way out. The operator path matters for the same reason: the program that made a pane unreadable is not always in a state to put it back. They clear what the *pane* set. The config's chains and the session's own dimming are not this pane's doing and are derived every frame anyway. The action is bound to nothing, like `scroll-up`: it is in the palette, which is what the palette is for, and the docs say to bind it if you leave the setting on. Which is where a second bug turned up -- the palette truncates a label at 26 characters, so "undo this pane's own shaders" read as "undo this pane's own shade" on screen. Renamed to fit, and `tests/test_palette.py` now checks every label against the column, since nothing failed for that: it just looked like a typo in front of someone.

sl0ppty: a pane can set its own shaders

2026-08-15T23:06:42Z

printf '\033]5577;1;shader;chrome;tint color="#ff5fd7" amount="abs(t / 8 % 510 - 255)"\033\\' The field after `shader` is which rect -- `content` or `chrome` -- and the rest of the payload is a chain in exactly the syntax a `shaders { }` block uses, taken verbatim so that `;` can go on separating entries. Empty text clears that chain. The session answers on the program's stdin, `shader-reply;ok` or `shader-reply;error;bad amount for tint: ...`, because a prototyping loop that gets no answer cannot tell a typo from a build without the feature. `contrib/shader-repl` is the prompt this exists for: type a chain, watch the pane, and `:paste` prints what you have as a config block. Both ends are the same parser, so what you arrive at is what you can keep -- verified by pasting `:paste`'s output into a file, linting it, and checking the frame comes out the same colour. **D13 said this was impossible on purpose, and the reasoning stands**: a program that can restyle the session it happens to be running in is a hazard, and `cat hostile.txt` should not dim your panes. But *impossible* was the wrong shape for it -- editing a file, saving, looking and guessing again is slow enough that shaders go unwritten. So it takes `in_band_shaders true`, one line of consent, and it is scoped to the pane that asked: its own two chains, never its neighbour's, never what the config said about anyone else. There is a test for the neighbour. Each chain owns the programs its expressions compiled to, and is swapped in whole, so a chain that turns out not to read leaves the pane looking like it did rather than half-restyled. Measured: 1,800 replacements of an animated chain, resident size flat after the first pass. Also here, because it is the same paint order: the chrome chain now sits between the config's and policy's, exactly where the content chain does. Dead code out -- `app_shade_add`/`app_shade_clear`/`app_shade_count` had no callers and their comment claimed the opposite of what this commit does.