slosh.git/src/main.c, branch docs-new

slosh: refuse to attach to the session this pane is inside

2026-08-22T16:30:19Z

A new client displaces the current display, so `slosh` typed into a pane of "main" displaced the very client showing that pane -- you watched your own session detach, from inside it. SLOSH_SESSION names the pane's own session; that one name is refused with the way out spelled in the message. Any other name is deliberate nesting, and cmd/ls are untouched: they are how a program in a pane is supposed to reach its own session.

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: 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: double-click a word to select it

2026-08-17T11:53:57Z

`pane_select_word()` was written and never wired to anything: no declaration, no caller, no way to reach it. This is the rest of it -- the gesture, the setting, and the tests. **The word is defined by what it stops at, not by what it is made of.** Anything that is not blank and not a listed separator belongs to a word, so CJK, accented letters and emoji need no table and come out whole; whitespace always separates, listed or not, because a double-click that selected the line would be a different gesture arrived at by surprise. Wide glyphs continue the run they are in rather than each being their own word -- otherwise every CJK character is a word. `word_separators` defaults to `"'`()[]{}<>;,|`, and what it leaves *out* is the decision: `/ . - _ : = @ # % ? & + ~ $` stay inside words, so a path, a dotted name, a snake_case identifier, a key=value pair, a URL and `src/app.c:1234` are each one thing you double-clicked to copy whole. `:` is the difference between copying an error location and copying half of one, which is why kitty keeps it too. The gesture reuses what selecting already has: the press starts a selection at the cell -- which anchors a drag out of the double-click -- then widens it to the word, and the release path that already copies a drag copies this. So the word *is* the copy, in the one place that rule lives, and the highlight is the copied span rather than an approximation of it. Tracked per cell as well as per pane, so clicking two different words quickly selects the second rather than everything between them. A program that asked for the mouse still keeps its clicks, with shift as the escape hatch, exactly as the drag has it. **One thing this needed on the way: quoted values were dumped unescaped.** The default separator set opens with a quote, and `cb_add(&b, "key \"%s\"\n", ...)` wrote it raw -- so `--dump-config` produced a file that no longer parsed, breaking the property the dump exists for. The escaping loop already existed inside `cb_chord`, for the same reason and with the reasoning written down; it is now `cb_qval`/`cb_qstr` and every string setting goes through it: the marks, `shell`, `editor`, `shader_dir`, `project_roots`, `project_layout`. Latent for all of those, load-bearing for this one. **And `--dump-config` does not do what four comments and the docs said it did.** It calls `config_dump_defaults()`: every setting with its *default*, never the value your config gives it. The function name was the honest one. Corrected in `docs/config.md`, `config/config.kdl`, `main.c`, `config.c`, `app.c` and the test's own docstring, rather than changing what the flag does -- starting a config from it is the documented use, and `--check` is what reads yours. There is no way to ask for the effective config; that is a gap, not a lie, and it can be a flag when somebody wants it. Verified: 22 checks in `tests/test_clipboard.py`. An error location, an identifier stopping at a bracket, a URL, a word inside quotes and a run of CJK; the highlight being exactly as wide as the copy; a separator, a blank cell and a single click each leaving the clipboard alone; two clicks on different cells not being a double; two slow clicks not being one; the separator set honoured from a config, including a quote and a backslash carried through KDL escaping; a word in a scrolled pane coming from the row on screen; and a mouse-tracking program keeping its double-clicks until shift takes them back. Three of those failed first because the test asked for the answer twice -- a second `worded()` call is a second pair of clicks -- and one because it mapped string indices to columns without counting wide glyphs as two.

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: sl0ppty --check

2026-08-15T22:25:44Z

A config linter, on the CLI: $ sl0ppty --check # what a session would read $ sl0ppty --check themes/mine.kdl # or a file you have not installed config.kdl:101: bad prefix: ctrl+nosuchkey themes/mine.kdl:7: unknown shader: bloom ~/.config/sl0ppty/config.kdl: 2 problems $ echo $? 1 A mode rather than a script, because the only checker that cannot drift from what a session does is the loader a session uses. The single difference is how many problems each reports: a session has one status line and shows the first, and a linter that stopped at the first mistake would make you run it once per mistake. Exit 1 when it has anything to say, so it drops into an editor's compile step or a pre-commit hook with no glue. A clean run prints what it read -- the files, including everything `include`d, the prefix it ended up with, how many bindings -- because a config that was never opened and a config with nothing wrong otherwise look identical, and "it printed nothing" is not evidence. An optional path so it can lint a theme before you install it, and $SL0PPTY_CONFIG is honoured when there is none, so it checks the same file the session will. tests/test_check.py covers the contract: exit status both ways, every problem reported rather than the first, file and line on each, an included file naming itself, a file that will not parse saying nothing applied, a missing file being a problem rather than a crash, and the one that would have caught the bug in the commit before this -- a config written by `--dump-config` lints clean.

sl0ppty: decode the PNGs programs actually send

2026-08-15T17:14:59Z

Kitty graphics were green in the suite and a real program still drew nothing. libghostty-vt ships no image codec: built as a library it sets its `sys.decode_png` hook to null, and a null hook rejects every `f=100` transmission outright -- no image stored, so no placement exists, so the re-emission layer this project is mostly *about* is never reached. The program gets no error and no picture. Raw RGB worked throughout, which is why it looked done: every test here sent raw pixels, because that is what is easy to write in a test. It is the same lesson the last kitty graphics bug taught -- write the test the way a program actually behaves -- and a program with a picture on disk has a PNG. Found because ida-tui's startup logo never appeared, and its detection probe answers `OK` first, so it fails silently rather than falling back to its block art. PNG is the whole of the gap and cannot grow: the protocol has exactly three formats (`f=24`, `f=32`, `f=100`), the first two are raw pixels lib-vt already handles, and `decode_png` is the only codec hook it has. Decoding only, never encoding. The decoder is the stb_image lib-vt already vendors and we already commit -- upstream compiles that same header with the same `STBI_ONLY_PNG` for this same purpose, it is just not in the `-Demit-lib-vt` build. So nothing new is pulled in; a file we already ship is finally compiled. src/png.c is the hook, a header pre-check and a copy: dimensions are read before decoding because the buffer we return is allocated through lib-vt's limited allocator but stb's own working allocation is plain malloc and answers to nothing. Tests cover a PNG placed at the size it asked for (RGB and RGBA sources, both normalised to RGBA), the client being handed `f=32` rather than the png it was given, and a malformed png placing nothing without taking the pane with it. They fail on the previous binary.

sl0ppty: watch the config directory even when it is not there yet

2026-08-15T14:27:50Z

You were right. The watch is on the *directory* -- editors write a new file and rename it over the old one, so watching the file stops working the first time you save -- but a directory that does not exist cannot be watched at all. inotify_add_watch failed, the session gave up on watching for good, and writing a config later did nothing until a restart. Which is exactly the state a fresh machine is in, and exactly the state C-a e leaves you in. sl0ppty creates its own config directory at startup now, so there is always something to watch and a file appearing later is picked up. Tested from a home directory with no .config at all. Answering the other half of the question -- which settings actually reload -- turned up one that never worked at all: `shell`. main.c read $SHELL directly and nobody read the config's value, so the setting parsed, rendered in --dump-config, and did nothing. It is resolved per pane now, which fixes it and makes it live: edit it, save, and the next pane you open uses it. Everything else measured rather than assumed, and it is nearly everything: colours, geometry, the status bar and line, frame marks, shader chains and their states, and the keys including the leader itself. The two exceptions are about *when* a value is read, not reluctance -- `shell` at pane creation, and shader plugins which load on reload but never unload. Both are now written down where someone would look. One test needed rescuing from itself: it asserted the new leader worked by splitting, in panes that were by then too narrow to split. A test that fails on geometry while claiming to be about the prefix is worse than no test; it opens a tab instead.

sl0ppty: render the config instead of shipping a copy of it

2026-08-15T14:22:27Z

`C-a e` on a machine with no config opened an empty buffer, which tells you nothing about what you can set. The obvious fix -- embed config/config.kdl and write it out -- trades one problem for a worse one: a checked-in copy of the defaults is a second source of truth, and it drifts. Ours already had. Four theme colours existed in the code and not in that file, and nothing said so. So the file is generated. `sl0ppty --dump-config` renders every setting with the value it currently holds -- geometry, behaviour, all 48 theme colours, the state shader chains, and every binding including the leader-less ones -- and `C-a e` seeds a missing config with exactly that, creating the directories on the way (a fresh container has no ~/.config either). config/config.kdl stays, and is now explicitly the *prose*: what a setting is for, what it cost to get right, which ones are opinions. Values are generated, essays are written, and the file says so at the top. Three things keep the two honest: - the theme colours became one file-scope table that the parser and the renderer both walk. 48 names that used to exist in one place and be typed again in another now exist once. - the dump must parse back to itself byte-for-byte. That is what caught `bind \ split-cols` rendering unquoted -- valid-looking output that would not have survived being read back. - a test scans config.c for `kdl_child(root, "...")`, which is the parser's own vocabulary, and fails if a key is missing from the dump. Add a knob, forget to render it, and the suite tells you rather than a user. It never overwrites a config that exists: fopen(..., "wx") loses the race rather than an edit, and there is a test for that too, because it is the one thing here that must never go wrong.