slosh.git/tests, branch docs-new

graphics: a frame the client never got must be said again

2026-08-29T19:31:41Z

A pane image is re-emitted to the client as decoded RGBA, which for one screenshot is ~4MB of base64 in a single indivisible message -- and conn_send silently dropped anything that would overflow the 4MB outbox, while push_graphics ignored the refusal and the model advanced anyway. Everything stateful in that dropped frame was lost for good: the image was marked sent (so its placements drew nothing, forever), and the deletions rode out with it (so a placement the client had was never revoked). Reported as screenshots in a recovered pi transcript parked at a fixed spot on the screen, immune to scrolling and pane swaps -- those were placements whose deletion left with a dropped frame. The 1000x800 one could never be delivered at all: its transmission alone was bigger than the cap. So the frame is now transactional. Deletions queue and are repeated every flush until gfx_commit() confirms the client heard them; transmissions recorded in a frame are unwound by an undelivered commit so they are sent again. A flush nobody commits counts as undelivered at the next gfx_begin(), which is what the `graphics` control command is: bytes rendered for a CLI, not the client. The server reports the verdict and keeps the paint pending until it lands. The outbox cap now bounds the backlog rather than backlog-plus-message, so one big transmission on a drained queue always fits -- and that surfaced a second way to lose: a queued image legitimately holds the backlog over the cap until the client swallows it, and push_frame read that as a dead client and closed the connection. The session auto-detached every time a screenshot crossed the wire. A full outbox is a client that is *behind*, not gone: push_frame now marks the screen for a full repaint (the dropped diff means the client's cells are unknown) and retries as POLLOUT drains the queue; a client that truly left still shows up as a write error there. The headless suite pins the owed-until-committed contract; the new tests/live_graphics.py drives the real socket with a bigger-than-the-cap image and a reader that stalls, and would have caught both bugs: the flood must not detach, the transmission must arrive whole, and a placement scrolled away must be deleted -- then come back on scroll without a second copy of the pixels.

path: unit tests for the two spellings

2026-08-28T13:10:24Z

The functions the last two commits fixed are only interesting on the platform the suite does not run on, which is how they came to be wrong in the first place. So the Windows cases are asserted under #ifdef and the POSIX ones assert the opposite: that a drive letter is an ordinary name here, that a backslash is an ordinary character, that neither rule leaked across. That second half is the one worth having. Both fixes are guarded, and a guard is exactly the kind of thing a later edit removes without meaning to -- `\` splitting a POSIX path would invent a directory out of a file called `a\b`, and nothing else in the suite would notice. Pure functions, so it joins the C unit tests rather than driving a session. Run on the Windows box as well, cross-compiled: 28 checks there, 20 here, the difference being the cases each platform has.

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.

pty: open the slave before the fork, so a pane's size reaches it

2026-08-27T14:31:56Z

On Darwin a pty master has no line discipline until its slave has been opened: every TIOCSWINSZ on the master until then fails with ENOTTY and the size is dropped without a word. A pane is born 1x1 and told how big it really is by the layout an instant after the fork -- and with the child doing the open(), that message raced the child and usually lost. Nothing ever sent it again, so the program in the pane spent its whole life believing it had one row and one column. `C-a e` hit it every time, because the editor's pane is always brand new: nvim drew its screen into two rows in the corner of a 94x15 pane. The old code knew half of this -- the child set the winsize on the slave it had just opened, which is what kept a fresh pane from being 0x0 -- but that only fixed the *spawn* size. Every resize after it still went to a master that might not have a slave yet. So open the slave here, before the fork, and let the child inherit it. The fork copies the fd table, so the slave is open from the child's first instruction and every resize the parent sends afterwards lands; BSD's forkpty() does the same thing for the same reason. The winsize is set on that slave before the fork, which orders it ahead of anything the parent sends later, and the child no longer sets it at all: by the time the child ran, the size it was spawned with could already be stale, and writing it back would undo the very resize this is about. test_pty_size.py asks the pane's own program what size it thinks it is -- for the first pane, for a pane from a split, and after a resize -- and compares it to the pane. It printed "1 1" against a 74x18 pane before this. live_m0.py asked `tput cols`, which needs a terminfo entry for xterm-ghostty and therefore fails on most macs for a reason that has nothing to do with resizing. `stty size` asks the tty itself, which is the thing under test.

slosh(5): the file formats get their manpage; slosh(1) learns shaders

2026-08-27T13:27:51Z

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.

a manpage: slosh(1), installed, shipped, and held to the source

2026-08-27T13:17:57Z

The distributables were a bare binary and a directory of Markdown, which is fine until somebody types 'man slosh' -- the unix-traditional place to ask. docs/slosh.1 is hand-written man(7), pure ASCII roff, no toolchain: the synopsis, the options, the session commands, the default keys, the mouse (including the new drag-past-an-edge scrolling), where the configuration lives, what SLOSH_* means in a pane's environment, files, exit status. The prose docs stay the long form; the page says so and points at them. 'make install' puts it under PREFIX/share/man/man1 (and uninstall takes it away), the release tarballs carry it beside the LICENSE -- a tarball is what a packager starts from -- and the Homebrew formula installs it when the commit it is building has one, guarded because the formula must be able to build commits older than the page. Prose about a program drifts unless something holds them together, so test_docs.py holds the page to the source the way it already holds the site to docs/nav: every option main.c's parser compares against and every word command must appear in the page, every SLOSH_* variable the code reads or sets must be documented, the roff must be pure ASCII (it travels through implementations that never heard of preconv), and where groff exists the page must lint clean at CHECKSTYLE=3 with -ww. Adding a flag without documenting it is now a failing test, which is the only kind of documentation policy that survives contact with a deadline.

test_splash: 'landed' is the row in its final form

2026-08-27T13:17:48Z

The h-centered check raced the assembly it was measuring. landed_row() answered as soon as one occurrence of the opening run had a block glyph at its start -- but the logo's first line contains that run three times, assembly is staggered, and under a parallel suite's load the middle section can finish whole checks before the leftmost. The test then measured a middle occurrence's x (24) and called the logo off-centre. The row is 'landed' when all three occurrences are present -- its final form -- and the first block glyph is still required to sit where the match begins, so a particle passing to the left keeps us waiting rather than shifting the answer.

selection: drag past an edge scrolls the viewport under it

2026-08-27T13:09:02Z

Text taller than the viewport was not selectable in one gesture: the drag stopped dead at the pane's border. Two faults, one visible and one waiting. The visible one: DRAG_SELECT motion subtracted the content origin in uint16_t, so a pointer above or left of the pane underflowed, the grid lookup failed, and the selection froze. The waiting one: the anchor was a pair of *viewport* coordinates re-resolved on every extend, so the moment anything scrolled mid-drag the anchor would have drifted with the viewport, re-anchoring to whatever slid under the press. The anchor is now a tracked grid ref -- the thing lib-vt documents as being for 'long-lived anchors such as selections' -- so it follows its cell across scrolling, pruning and reflow, and only the near end of the selection moves. If a program flooding output prunes the anchored row out of scrollback entirely, the selection keeps what it had; there is no cell left to anchor a new answer to. Motion clamps into the content rect (a pointer past an edge is pointing at the nearest cell), and holding past the top or bottom edge scrolls on a clock rather than on motion, because a resting pointer sends no events and 'keep going' is exactly what resting it there means. app_tick() does the step, app_next_deadline_ms() wakes the poll loop for it -- the same mechanism toasts and hover guides already use -- and both front ends call the tick, so the behaviour exists under the server and the headless harness alike. Rows per step is how far past the edge the pointer sits: one row past creeps, further hurries, so the hand already dragging is also the throttle. The metronome is select_scroll_ms, a knob so the test can configure the clock down instead of sleeping. The test drags to one row above the pane and simply holds: the viewport walks to the top of scrollback (clamping makes the endpoint exact), the copy starts at a line that was never on screen with the press, and still ends at the pressed row -- that last check is the tracked anchor's.

tests: the greeting is not what the reattach test is about

2026-08-26T14:48:17Z

"reattaching repaints the whole screen" greps the client's byte stream for the text a pane was holding, and failed about half the time. The splash assembles from particles scattered over the entire screen, so for the first few hundred milliseconds of an attach any cell can be holding a fragment of the logo. The full repaint that a reattach triggers goes out during exactly that window, so it can carry │marker-alp▄a with a particle where the "h" should be. What restores that cell when the greeting ends is a one-cell diff, cursor-addressed, so the string is never contiguous in the stream again and the substring check fails. Nothing about slosh is wrong here -- the model has the text throughout, and `snapshot text` shows it -- so the fix is to stop asking this file to assert about the bytes of an animation it is not testing. The session under test gets a config with splash_ms 0. The greeting has test_splash. 5/5 where it was roughly half.

macos: the kernel still knows, it just spells /proc differently

2026-08-26T14:11:42Z

Portability fixes contributed by our macOS developer, applied with one hardening tweak (below). Darwin has no /proc, so everything that read one gets the native answer: live_cwd via proc_pidinfo(PROC_PIDVNODEPATHINFO), the foreground command via sysctl(KERN_PROCARGS2) parsed back into the NUL-separated shape /proc//cmdline gives, and SLOSH_BIN via _NSGetExecutablePath plus realpath. The pty gets its winsize set on the slave after opening it, because Darwin attaches no line discipline to the master until then and the earlier TIOCSWINSZ was silently dropped -- a pane born 0x0. The shader repl binds tab in libedit's own words, since macOS ships Python's readline as a libedit wrapper that accepts GNU syntax in silence. Two finds are cross-platform bugs: a toast wider than the screen minus the gap computed a negative x that uint16_t made ~65533, drawing the longest messages -- the ones most worth reading -- off screen; now the middle is elided (a path's tail is the half you needed) and x clamps. And a pane label was 128 bytes, which a Homebrew interpreter's full path exceeds before its arguments even start; dump-layout wrote the truncation down and a restore ran it, so it is 1024 now. Saving a layout learned cwd_as_named: the kernel answers with the physical path, and on macOS /tmp is a symlink to /private/tmp, so a layout that said cwd="/tmp" stopped round-tripping through a save. If realpath(named) is where the pane still is, the named spelling wins. Tests follow: realpath'd tmpdirs, the scroll test reads the shell's first prompt instead of spelling out bash 5.3, and wrapped pane text is joined before matching a long path. One tweak on top of the contribution: the elision needs five columns for a head, the dots and a tail -- below that `avail - 3` goes negative, and negative as size_t is a pointer into the weeds; a terminal that narrow gets a plain clip.