summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/docs/design.typ
Commit message (Collapse)AuthorAge
* Building gathers the platforms, options, tests, release gates and how the ↵Gabriel Schneider29 hours
| | | | | | core, threads, detached sessions and 9P fit, from the old design notes checked against the code Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]>
* Zig files go to zls as a child process through the protocol client, as every ↵Gabriel Schneider29 hours
| | | | | | | | other language does: the in-process ZLS backend goes lsp_zls.zig (1,522 lines), the zls dependency, build.zig's zls wiring and the import graph it baked into the options only for it, and main.zig's reference go. lsp_client's table gains a zls row (PARDES_LSP_ZIG overrides it); Hover, Rename, Diagnostics, WsSymbols, Lspinfo and gd answer through it (checked with lspprobe and the snapshots against zls 0.16.1-dev). What changes for a user: zls must be on PATH; a completion's rows are zls's candidates at the cursor, where the linked analyser gave each one's declaration; document symbols carry no signature. The Zig snapshots (lsp, lspcomplete, lspcompletemoved, lspdebug, lsprelpath) run the real zls now: lspdebug reads the client's explain and report, lsprelpath spells gr's rows where it spelled a completion's, and their goldens are recorded again (stable over three runs). Lspinfo still opens with its backend line. The ReleaseFast tty binary is 105.35 MB to 96.28 MB, the Debug one 296.5 MB to 245.9 MB. docs/lsp.md, web.md, design.typ and the README say so. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]>
* Terminal.zig is terminal.zig: a file of functions and no fields takes a ↵Gabriel Schneider29 hours
| | | | | | | | namespace's lowercase name The last of the deferred renames, now that the tty and theme agents have landed: panes.terminal at its importers, the alias lines in Text.zig and File.zig and panes.zig's own uses following. dump.zig's Terminal struct, a dump record, is not this. The served sources list and docs/design.typ name the new file. test/perf.zig's references change, so the three perf baselines take its new harness id with their numbers as recorded. No behaviour changes. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]>
* tag_layer.zig folds into Layer.zig, whose TagHit its two functions work onGabriel Schneider29 hours
| | | | | | Two functions (sameCell, columnAt) on Layer.TagHit, 32 lines with their imports, used by edit.zig, mouse.zig and look.zig: they sit with the type now, called Layer.sameCell and Layer.columnAt. docs/design.typ names Layer.zig in its place. No behaviour changes. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]>
* Mini.zig is mini.zig: a file of functions and no fields takes a namespace's ↵Gabriel Schneider29 hours
| | | | | | | | lowercase name The naming the split agreed on, deferred until now; panes.mini is its name at its importers. File.zig keeps its alias line (const Mini = panes.mini) so the file another agent is working in changes by that line alone. The served sources list and docs/design.typ name the new file. No behaviour changes; test/perf.zig's two references change, and since the perf harness is keyed by its own text, its three baselines are recorded again (under other agents' builds, so a little slower). Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]>
* ThemeSel is Themes and FontSel is Fonts; the old words still work in init ↵Gabriel Schneider29 hours
| | | | | | | | | | | | files and dumps The user asked for the plainer words. Every use is renamed: the builtins, leader paths, /commands, the docs and tutor, tests, and the themesel golden, re-recorded. An init file's ThemeSel or FontSel runs the new word and says `ThemeSel: renamed to Themes`, as ColumnTags is said; a dump naming an output pane by the old word restores it. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]>
* design.typ no longer says ColumnTags hides the column tagGabriel Schneider29 hours
| | | | | | | | | The empty-columns line removed the ColumnTags setting: a column's tag is always shown. design.typ was the one document still describing it; ui-review.md and test/column_tags.py never named the setting and already assume the tag is there. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]>
*-. Trial merge: 9P + helix + renderGabriel Schneider29 hours
|\ \
| | * Ripple and Glitch are gone; Crt staysGabriel Schneider29 hours
| |/ |/| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The user tried them live and wants them removed entirely: the builtins, their levels, config keys and leader paths (tR, tg), their slots in the built-in chain, their shaders (source and prebuilt), EffectCode paths, and on macOS their scene flags (pardes.h), the Metal kernel's coordinate warps and the Swift pointer mapping that mirrored them. Docs say so (decision 8 in docs/render-pipeline.md); config.md documents Crt's levels, Shader and ShaderAnimation instead. Shared files touched: macos.zig (flags). Not touched: pardes.zig, Messages.zig, mouse.zig, gui.zig, detached/*.
| * $ keeps the selections a shell command exits 0 on, and line end is glGabriel Schneider29 hours
|/ | | | | | | | | | | | | $ was a second key for line end, which helix never meant: in helix it is shell_keep_pipe. It now arms the pipe prompt with a $ marker, runs the command once per range with that range's text on stdin, and keeps the ranges it exits 0 on; the primary stays if kept, else the last kept range takes over, and keeping none changes nothing. The runner's answer is all or nothing, so the command runs in a subshell whose status is echoed as its output. Line end stays on helix's own gl and End; the snapshots, tutor and docs that pressed $ for it press gl. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]>
* Let the keyboard reach a tag's path, read-onlyGabriel Schneider29 hours
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | The tag's computed path, dirty marker and page were out of the keyboard's reach: its cursor lived in the text after them. It now lives in the tag as shown, as in acme where the name is ordinary text at the start of the tag, so `0` goes to the line's start and motions select and yank the path. The path stays read-only: an edit that would change it is refused and leaves the cursor where it was, and typing into a file's path drafts a new name as a click on it does. Sync moves the tag's positions when the prefix changes length, so a rename or the dirty marker still never moves the cursor off the text after it. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]>
* File the tag code into tagline.zig and draw tags beside bodiesGabriel Schneider29 hours
| | | | | | | | | | | With tags reduced to Texts, what is left of them is the computed prefix, the default and saved tails, entering and leaving a tag and the headers: that goes to tagline.zig, as acme keeps the tag half of a window in wind.c. Tag and header drawing moves next to body drawing in body_layer.zig, and the tag hit helpers go to tag_layer.zig with the Hit they read, where sameCell now also tells the lines of a taller tag apart. The docs describe the tag as a Text. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]>
* Point docs and comments at the files code moved toGabriel Schneider29 hours
| | | | | | | | | | | | | Documentation only, no code change: README's reading order and layout, docs/design.typ's paragraph on where pane kinds and editor parts live, docs/helix-keys.md's code map (normalInput and the executors now in normal.zig and edit.zig, insertTab in edit.zig), docs/open-questions.md (execute and ttyForDir in exec.zig), and the comments that named pardes.zig for fold, Cell, takesCommandLine and runBuiltin (tools/gen_themes.zig, themes/helix.zig, detached/wire.zig, host_io.zig, lsp_zls.zig). docs/design.pdf is a retained fixture and is not regenerated. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]>
* Turn ligatures off with a Ligatures setting, in the shell that shapes textGabriel Schneider29 hours
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The SDL shell shapes words with HarfBuzz, so a font's `->` and `!=` draw as ligatures, and there was no way to have the plain glyphs back short of changing font. `Ligatures` is a toggle, on by default; off, no cell goes to the shaper and every cell draws its own glyph, exactly as a font without ligatures does. It exists only where it means something. A new `ligatures` capability, true for the gui shell alone, gates it like Font and WindowOpacity are gated: it is not a builtin elsewhere, has no leader path, and Config does not list it, rather than print a row the TTY could never change. macOS draws CoreText ligatures of its own, but nothing there reads the setting, so it stays off there. The table check that kept every toggle unconditional now lets the ligatures toggle, and only it, carry a capability, and requires that it carry `ligatures`; every other setting's rule is as it was. The gui keeps the setting beside its text caches, which were resolved under it: when the core's value changes, the per-codepoint cells (which record whether a cell is shaped) and the shaped words are dropped, and the frame the toggle asked for draws every cell again. The atlas keeps its glyphs: plain ones draw either way, and a ligature's strip is reused when it comes back. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
* Shape text with HarfBuzz, so a font's programming ligatures draw across ↵Gabriel Schneider29 hours
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | their cells The SDL shell rasterized every cell by its own codepoint, so a font's `->`, `!=` or `<=` ligature never appeared. Text is now shaped with HarfBuzz 11.0.0, built from source like FreeType: a lazy build.zig.zon dependency (the tarball Ghostty pins) compiled only for the gui shell, its FreeType integration linked against the freetype package, so the binary carries no system HarfBuzz or FreeType and a tty build never compiles it. Shaping turns on only the font's ligature features (liga, calt, clig, rlig, rclt); composition, local forms and fractions stay off, so a cell draws either its nominal glyph, as it always did, or part of a ligature. A glyph no lookup of those features covers cannot change, so its cell is resolved alone, and that resolution is cached by codepoint: in a font without ligatures (Adwaita Mono) no cell is ever shaped, and the pipeline draws pixel for pixel as before. A cell whose glyph a ligature could replace is shaped with its word: the cells between spaces that share a decoration and a role. A word ends either side of the cursor, block or bar, so the cell being edited shows its own character (Ghostty's rule), and inside f|i, f|l and s|t, whose typographic ligatures do not belong on a grid (Ghostty again). Colours never end a word: a ligature spans a syntax colour change or a selection edge. A codepoint the primary font lacks shapes in the fallback face that has it. Taglines are not shaped: they are drawn at two pitches, and a strip would not line up in one. HarfBuzz only chooses glyphs; the grid places them. A substituted glyph whose ink reaches over neighbouring cells that draw nothing of their own (the spacer glyphs of Fira Code-style fonts such as Maple Mono, or the cells a merged ligature cluster swallowed) claims them: it is rasterized once as a strip that many cells wide, and each cell samples its own slice, so selection, the cursor and per-cell colours work unchanged. Anything the grid cannot place (several glyphs in one cell, a positioned mark) keeps its nominal glyphs. A frame must not pay for this. A shaped word's atlas slots are cached by its text (checked against the stored text, not just its hash), so a frame costs one lookup per word and a compare for the rest of the word being walked. The atlas is keyed by (face, glyph, role, decoration, lead, span), packed into 64 bits so a lookup hashes one word; ASCII glyph ids are a table, and a face's HarfBuzz state is made when it is first asked about a glyph. Measured with the latency trace, whose F line now also carries the submit time (CPU = submit - present entry), in 10 interleaved rounds against main with an A/A pair, at 160x50 cells: with Adwaita Mono every scenario (idle, scrolling, typing, terminal output) is as fast or 1-3% faster, and the first frame and time to first paint are unchanged. With Maple Mono, ligatures cost the first frame about 0.8 ms (HarfBuzz setup and shaping the screen) and scrolling new text about 1-2%. With it the codepoint raster path is gone: grips look up their glyph and stay centered, since a grip is not text. ui_font_scale_for_height, an identity kept as a "size token", is removed (px is the size everywhere), ui_font_has_glyph becomes ui_font_glyph, and the space slot is simply the first, cleared cell of the atlas rather than a rasterized space. CellStyle.ul gets an explicit u3 tag so a decoration fits in the packed keys. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
* Plan 9 idiom for the control filesystem, and the regressions a624a56 leftGabriel Schneider29 hours
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The 9P tree stops being a command language wearing a filesystem. /new created a pane as a side effect of a *read*; it is now Tcreate in /pane, with Tremove to close, which cloud9's engine has always supported and the editor never declared: tree.zig now says `features = .{ .create = true, .remove = true }`. Eleven pane ctl verbs become files that can be read as well as written -- dot, limit, dirty, mark, scroll, look, exec -- leaving ctl with `get`, the one verb no file would say better. Root /ctl splits into a read-only /status and the /look and /exec files whose write IS the click. stat carries real sizes where it used to answer 0, and qid versions track a pane's revision, so a client can poll for change without re-reading the body. Commit a624a56 moved raw-tty keys to an early-return branch that knew only Ctrl-B and bare Escape, and in the same edit deleted the paste branch below it. That cost Shift-Escape (the unconditional way out of tty mode) and both paste chords: Ctrl-V and Ctrl-Shift-V reached the child as keystrokes, so an agent CLI running in a pane took Ctrl-V for its image-paste binding and answered "No image found in clipboard". Both are restored, with tests. Nested detection was not subtly broken but deleted: 60367d8 removed nested.zig's process-ancestry walk and left "am I inside pardes" derived from PARDES_FORWARD_LOOK, which read "0" both for --nested and for "the listener did not come up". PARDES_PID now answers that question on its own, checked with kill(pid, 0); PARDES_9P and PARDES_PANE answer how to reach it; the flag is gone. The posted-9P registry also self-heals now -- a session that aborts cannot unlink its own socket, so posting sweeps entries whose target refuses a connection, symlinks only and on a definite ECONNREFUSED only. Elsewhere: tty scrolling is sticky-bottom, following new output only from the last row, with typing and entering raw mode snapping back to live; the boot layouts are a Boot enum instead of a chain of ifs, and the bare tty startup (Boot.tty, which main.zig names) opens an empty text pane under the shell while tests keep Boot.tty_shell; builtins announce themselves on the message row under a Verbose setting that is on by default; Config prints each setting the way you would type it back, so WindowOpacity 70 rather than "WindowOpacity: 70%"; LocationsConfig opens its window only when called bare; every tagline puts the word that closes the thing last, and a column now outlives its panes -- closing the last one leaves an empty pane, and only Delcol, newly on the column tagline, takes the column away. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
* Fetch cloud9 from sourcehut, and correct the citations into the board toolchainGabriel Schneider29 hours
|
* Follow embedded PDF links through LookGabriel Schneider2026-09-15
|
* trunk: resume before the Reload experimentGabriel Schneider2026-09-15
| | | | Empty marker on the last pre-Reload change. Keep the Reload experiment on reload (3801914), its first change on reload-start (200a1fc), and the unfinished performance investigation on reload-perf-wip.
* Refactor panes and filesystem; replace FUSE with 9PGabriel Schneider2026-09-07
| | | | | | Consolidate pane, layout, memory and host code. Serve 9P by default over Unix sockets, with runtime mounts and optional TCP/QUIC transports. Remove FUSE and obsolete proof-of-concept examples. Fix highlighting and terminal-history performance, expand differential and stress-test infrastructure, sort navigation results while preserving the next occurrence, add syntax-colored Braille minimaps, remove SPC-k, and document 9P interaction as a repository skill.
* macos: one tagline rule for both hosts, a kqueue beside the inotify, and ↵Gabriel Schneider2026-09-01
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | effects that compile Three things this shell had its own copy of, and in each case the fix is that it stops having one. **The tagline band.** A pane tag draws at `gui_tagline_font_percent` of the body face and the band it sits on shrinks with it, while the grid row stays body-sized — so something has to decide where the shorter band sits in the taller row. This shell decided by centring, always, which is precisely the case `config.gui_topbar_pane_border_px` exists to prevent: the topbar's unused half-band meets the first pane tag's unused half-band and the window background shows through the seam. The strip is as wide as the bands are short — on a 20-pixel cell, 4 physical pixels at the default 82%, 10 at 50%, 14 at 30% — so it grew as the tagline face shrank and read as "the tagline is wrong on the mac" rather than as one missing rule. The rule is `pardes.taglineBandOffset` in the core now and both pixel hosts call it: row zero bottom-aligned, the first pane-tag row top-aligned, the two joined by `gui_topbar_pane_border_px` in the theme's scrollbar-track colour, every row between centred, and a `Tagbottom` band on the final row flush with the window edge — with the sub-cell strip beneath it painted in that band's own colour, because the core grid holds only whole cells and a window is any height it likes. `pardes_tagline_band_offset`, `pardes_topbar_pane_border_px` and `pardes_topbar_pane_border_rgb` carry it over the C ABI as PHYSICAL pixels: the host multiplies its points by the backing scale going in and divides coming out, which is the snapping `Metrics` already does for the cell, and is what keeps a one-pixel rule one pixel instead of a two-pixel smear. **The watch.** `file_watch.zig` was one mark/reconcile transaction over `inotify`, so the tty shell, the SDL window and the detached daemon all watched nothing off Linux: an edit made outside pardes never reached the pane, and a PDF replaced on disk kept rendering the old inode. It is the same transaction over two kernels now — `init`, `wait`, `stop`, `drain`, `markDir` and `unmarkDir` are still the whole of it, and the hosts wait on a kqueue and poll it exactly as they did the old descriptor. A macOS mark is TWO filters, because a kqueue directory filter reports its entries changing and never a write to a file already inside it: the parent mark follows rename-over saves, `markFile` catches in-place writes, and `remarkFile` re-arms the file filter once a rename has moved the inode. That is the same pair the AppKit host's DispatchSources already used for the same reason. Directory marks are deduplicated here by device and inode, because each `EVFILT_VNODE` filter needs a descriptor of its own and inotify did that deduplication itself; `stop` and `drain` wake through the one `EVFILT_USER` filter, since a kqueue cannot simply be read the way an inotify descriptor can. **The effects.** The three `crt.ci.metal` entry points are `extern "C" [[stitchable]]`. `CIKernel.kernels(withMetalString:)` compiles that source at runtime, looks for stitchable functions, and rejects the WHOLE source with "cannot find a valid stitchable Metal function in the source" when it finds none — so `ScenePostprocessor.init?` returned nil and every scene effect and panel transition silently degraded to the plain CoreText draw. The `effect_sources.zig` test pins the exact spelling of all three, and `draw-effect` in the e2e suite catches the degradation rather than the spelling. Beside them, the offscreen harness owes the core a PRESENTATION. Its window is borderless and never ordered front, so AppKit runs no display cycle and `pardes_frame_presented` — whose only caller is `draw(_:)` — never fired. The core holds pointer gestures inert while a layout mutation has not reached a backend, which for an unpresenting harness is the rest of the script: the first pane a script opened silently killed every later click, drag and Look. So `readFrame` presents what it just rendered, into a bitmap nobody reads. `PARDES_CHROME` also looks under `/Applications`, where a browser's executable lives inside an application bundle and never on `PATH`. The macOS goldens are regenerated; docs/macos.md, config.md, detached.md, web.md and the design PDF follow.
* detached: drop /dev/fuse from the poll set once the connection diesGabriel Schneider2026-08-27
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Review fixes to steps 1 and 2, found by an adversarial pass over the committed chain. One is a real bug and the rest are comments that were false. THE BUG. `waitInput` put the FUSE descriptor in the poll set whenever the mount existed, and the `.fuse` arm ignored every revent. Linux's `fuse_dev_poll` answers EPOLLERR once the connection is gone, and POSIX reports POLLERR whatever the events mask asked for -- so an external `fusermount3 -u`, a sysfs abort, or systemd taking /run/user/$UID away at final logout (exactly when a detached session is supposed to keep running) made poll(2) return instantly, forever. The daemon then spun the whole pump at 100% of a core for the rest of its life, and re-offered every parked slot to the core at that rate. Measured on the unfixed commit: 0 CPU ticks over 10 s idle, then 1000 ticks over the next 10 s after unmounting its own mount point. Measured after the fix: 0 ticks over 8 s in the same scenario, process alive and in state S. fuse.zig's own poll thread has carried the equivalent guard all along, which is why the desktop shells never showed this and the daemon did. THE COMMENTS, each checkable and each wrong: * `Source.fuse` said the drain is not done in `dispatch` to avoid re-entering the core. Both `pull_wait_input` and `push_poll_frame` are called from inside `pump`, so either re-enters. The real reason is that `dispatch` is mid-iteration over a SNAPSHOT of the descriptors, and one `push_spawn` replaces a pane's master under it. * `fuse.zig`'s new import said "no cycle". There is a cycle: fs_service imports fuse.zig back and still names `*Fs` in three signatures. * `Transport`'s rationale said tty.zig and gui.zig store one in a struct field. Neither does; all four call sites build it inline. * `deinit` justified its ordering against "as long as the harvest takes". `harvest` is waitpid(WNOHANG) and blocks for nothing. The real reason to go first is that aborting the connection wakes a parked reader while its own shell is still alive to run its exit path. * `harvest` claimed pane shells are the only children this process forks. Since step 1 it also forks `fusermount3`, three times over -- reaped by its own spawner, so the conclusion holds and the premise did not. * docs/detached.md, docs/lsp.md and docs/design.typ still said the daemon implements sixteen of twenty-one methods and mounts no /dev/fuse.
* An edited row keeps its colours, four copies of forkShell become one, and ↵Gabriel Schneider2026-08-27
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Esc stops recentring ## A terminal row's ANSI colours survive being edited The loudest colour bug this editor had: one keystroke anywhere in a coloured shell row turned EVERY column of it grey. `EditAnchors` anchored a buffer line only when it was BYTE-IDENTICAL to the shell row it stood over, so a single differing byte dropped the whole row's colour projection. Worst shape is invisible: append past the pane's right edge, where the text is clipped, and the row looks the same and only its colour goes. Anchoring is byte-level now. An edit leaves the row's own bytes at both ends, and being the same bytes they keep the same colours; only what was typed has no cell under it, so only that takes none. Live, on real `fastfetch`: a 32-column blue run split into 6 + 26 around one typed character. Three defects underneath it, all found by machinery rather than by reading: * A JOIN removes a buffer line while the buffer's covered span grows, so `lines == covered` and both aligned guesses — Nth line over the Nth covered row, and the same counted from the bottom — resolved to the SAME wrong row. Every untouched row below a join went plain. Anchoring is now a streaming monotone matching: one shell-row cursor that only ever moves forward, advanced once per buffer line, linear in the buffer where the version before it was quadratic. * An EMPTY line is not evidence. Splitting a row makes one, it equals every blank row in the span, and left free to look ahead it claimed the blank row below the last output and took every coloured row in between out of reach of the lines that owned them. * Reflow under a scrolled viewport. `PageList.getTopLeft(.viewport)` returns the viewport pin verbatim, x and all, while `PageList.pin` forces x to 0 — so after a reflow remapped a tracked pin into the middle of a row, the text pass dumped row 0 from that column while the colour pass paired the fragment with the row's FIRST cells. Row 0 wore its left half's colours until the pane snapped back to live output. `bodyText` dumps from column zero now, which is also what ghostty's own renderer draws. Also here: DECSCNM (reverse video) was silently dropped whenever `tty_filter` was off, because the raw path resolved a `.none` colour by role and never consulted the mode. The test that found the first two is the one worth keeping: random editing against an ABSOLUTE oracle — every row's own text names the colour it must have — because the differential oracle it replaced was blind by construction. It skipped the edited row, which is the row the user is complaining about. ## Esc returns to a pane without moving its view Esc in body normal mode runs `Last`, "the pane you were in before this one", and that went through `focusPaneLine`, which recentred a file on the target line unconditionally. So returning to a buffer repainted the whole screen to show a line that was already on it. `focusPaneLine` takes a landing now: `.center` for the three callers going somewhere you have not been (a look target, a path a pane already holds, `@pN:LINE:COL`), `.keep` for Esc. `.keep` leaves the view alone and lets `ensureCursorVisible` — which already existed and already scrolls by the minimum into the `scroll_off` band — be the only thing that may move anything. Not `line = 0`, which `focusPaneLine` already understands as "focus and touch nothing": a background pane's view can move while you are away, because the wheel scrolls the pane under the POINTER and a resize reveals no cursor, so the recorded cursor plus a minimal nudge is what actually gets you back. Ctrl-o and Ctrl-i keep centring, and the asymmetry is structural rather than arbitrary: `Last` only ever CROSSES panes, so the pane it lands on already holds the view you left it with, while `jumpBy` can land in the SAME pane, where a long in-file jump would arrive on the very top or bottom row with `scroll_off` lines of context on one side. Helix splits the same pair the same way — its jumplist centres, its buffer switch does not. One deliberate consequence: under `.keep` a PDF's page is not restored AT ALL, because a page reveal IS that pane's view and a reveal of the page you are already on still snaps `document_scroll_y` to that page's start, discarding where you had read to. When something moved the pane while you were away — the wheel again — Esc leaves it where the wheel left it, and Ctrl-o is how you reach the recorded page. ## host_io.zig: the machine-local half of a host, once `host.zig` is the seam. The part of the answer that is identical on every host with an operating system under it — fork a pane's shell, put bytes on a disk — was written FOUR times: in tty.zig, gui.zig, macos.zig and detached/server.zig. What those copies had in common says what they were for: all four were missing FD_CLOEXEC on the pty master, so in every shell pardes has shipped, a program in one pane could read another pane's terminal. One copy now, and the wire got smaller for it: `ServerMsg.spawn` is gone. A frontend never asked the server to fork anything — the server has an operating system under it and forks through `host_io` like every other host — and `decodeClient` lost the scratch buffer that message needed.
* tests: a capture is a delta and a click names its word, so a tagline edit ↵Gabriel Schneider2026-08-25
| | | | stops rewriting the suite
* builtins + config: Save reaches every pane holding text of its own, and ↵Gabriel Schneider2026-08-25
| | | | takes a path argument
* syntax + pdf_pane + file_pane: prose grammars paint, pdf Esc cancels, gj/gk ↵Gabriel Schneider2026-08-25
| | | | walk wrapped rows
* host: the core owns the event loop; every platform becomes a vtable of ↵Gabriel Schneider2026-08-25
| | | | optional methods
* term_pane + builtins: terminal pane work, builtins/config additions, snapshotsGabriel Schneider2026-08-18
|
* nested + pardes: snapshot updates and small behavior fixes across panesGabriel Schneider2026-08-18
|
* file_watch + builtins + config: richer watch semantics, new builtins, config ↵Gabriel Schneider2026-08-18
| | | | docs
* animation: core publishes transition records; gui evaluates via shaders, tty ↵Gabriel Schneider2026-08-18
| | | | over grid cells
* big slow change: prebuilt shaders (SPIR-V/Metal), core gui reflow, docs, web ↵Gabriel Schneider2026-08-18
| | | | + snapshot refresh
* look: richer path/range parsing, pdf rendering, corner-drag and stepgrain ↵Gabriel Schneider2026-08-15
| | | | snapshots
* shaders: -Dprebuilt-shaders, so a gui build needs no Vulkan SDKGabriel Schneider2026-08-12
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | glslc is the one build input that wants a tool a stock machine does not have, and it is also the input that changes least often: eight GLSL files that have outlived several rewrites of everything around them. Asking every machine that wants to run the SDL shell for shaderc is the wrong trade. The SPIR-V is now COMMITTED, under shaders/prebuilt/, and -Dprebuilt-shaders embeds that copy instead of shelling out. The default stays the honest one -- compile the shaders that are actually in the tree -- because the flag trades a dependency for a freshness problem: with it on, the .glsl sources are not build inputs at all, so editing one changes nothing. `zig build shaders` is the other half, and it is deliberately independent of -Dplatform: it recompiles every shader and writes the result back into the tracked directory, so whoever changes a shader refreshes the cache on a machine that has the compiler and commits the diff. `jj diff shaders/prebuilt` after it is the freshness check -- empty means the cache was already current. The shader list is also spelled once now (gui_shaders): the eight embeds, the eight glslc runs and the refresh step all read it, so adding a shader is a name there plus the @embedFile in gui.zig, not three edits in two places. Verified: -Dplatform=gui -Dprebuilt-shaders builds with glslc absent from PATH, and image-harness passes on that binary -- real SDL GPU pipelines built from the committed SPIR-V, 512 source pixels read back. The default gui build still runs the eight glslc steps; tty runs none. The committed bytes are identical to a fresh glslc run, and `zig build shaders` is idempotent.
* docs: the tutor taught three keystrokes wrong, and the rest had driftedGabriel Schneider2026-08-12
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The documentation had gone stale in the ordinary way -- claims that were true when they were written and that nothing since had been obliged to re-read. Some of them were load-bearing. THE TUTOR. It still said there is no multi-cursor, that NextColor cycles three themes, and that its practice blocks "are also run as unit tests (generated from this file by tutor_gen)" -- a tool that appears nowhere in the tree, and nothing anywhere parses a `# keys:` block. Left alone, that claim is what makes the next wrong block survive. Three of those blocks WERE wrong, and all three for one reason: since the helix motion model landed, w/e/f/t SELECT the range they cross, so `i` after one inserts at the SELECTION'S START. `w i Z esc` on "foo bar" gives "Zfoo bar", not the "foo Zbar" the file promised. They were written against a vim reading of the same keys. Every block in the file has now been run through `zig build hxdiff` against the real core and matches byte for byte, and the trap itself is written down in 3.3 rather than left to be rediscovered. The tutor gains a PART 4 for everything added since it was written -- PDF panes, the in-process ZLS backend, themes and fonts, the startup file -- and PART 3 gains counts (and which keys ignore one), f/F/t/T, the whole g table (bare `G` is a no-op; `ge` is the START of the last line), multiple cursors and the s/S regex pair, `m`, `]`/`[`, `|`, insert mode, and all fifty leader paths. THE REST. design.typ's line table claimed 7,626 lines against a real 38,048, and its rows did not sum to its own total; its Event/Effect boundary contract -- the part a shell author writes against -- named four variants that do not exist and omitted fourteen that do. lsp.md's probe count. config.md's theme-name rules, which as written could not reach a zed theme at all. helix-keys.md's Skipped section, holding five families that have since landed. macos.md's menu bar, undocumented, along with sixteen other claims. web.md on what the browser build can actually do. SOURCE COMMENTS that had rotted alongside them: `tag_normal` is a space, not the `•` its own comment describes; Wrap is ON by default, not off; a FontSel row is SELECTED by n and RUN by Tab, not run by n; the SPC paths in lsp.zig lost their `l` group prefix when the language group moved; and the differential suites are 481 and 561 cases, not 360 and 440. TWO THINGS FOUND BY DOCUMENTING THEM, both left standing and written down rather than papered over. Typing `[^\n]` at an s/S prompt panics: the live preview compiles every prefix, and `[^\` indexes an empty slice in mvzr's parseCharSet. Both the tutor and a waiver recommended that pattern as the workaround for `.` matching a newline; they now say what it costs and what would make it sayable. And `Exec` is a builtin, so an `Exec` line in the startup config types that command into a shell before the first frame -- the tutor said nothing in that file is ever sent to one. Nine adversarial reviews over two rounds, each with the hxdiff harness to execute what it doubted. The second round exists because the first round's fixes needed checking too, and it caught three regressions of my own -- one of them a probe count I had "corrected" away from the truth. Verified: unit-test, snap 87/87, hxdiff 481/0, hxparity 561/0, mupdf-check. docs/design.pdf regenerated. The tutor's first seventeen lines are byte- identical, which is what tutor.golden pins.
* clipboard, n/N and the tty prompt: three things that were half-wiredGabriel Schneider2026-08-12
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Three changes that all turned out to be the same shape -- a feature that worked in one direction, or for one pane kind, and quietly did not in the others. CLIPBOARD. Every register write emitted set_clipboard, so deleting one character threw away whatever the desktop was holding; multi-cursor yank took the join's early return and emitted nothing at all, so the same key reached the clipboard on one cursor and not on two. Nothing could READ the clipboard: the SDL shell had no SDL_GetClipboardText anywhere in it, and the tty shell never asked for OSC 52, so `p` from another application was dead in both. Now it is helix's split. y/d/c/p/P/R and the acme chords are the DEFAULT REGISTER and nothing else; the system clipboard is five words on helix's own letters -- SPC y, SPC Y, SPC p, SPC P, SPC R -- spelled as builtins so they land in Help and are executable like every other verb. The one exception is the tag `y` chord, which still mirrors out because a tag is always insert, so SPC cannot be pressed there, and copying the path out is the whole point of the chord. Reading is a new read_clipboard effect answered by an ordinary Event.paste, so the round trip is honest about being one: SDL and NSPasteboard answer inside the same drain, the browser answers a promise, and a terminal answers over OSC 52 or -- far more often -- refuses. A refused read is a paste that does not happen, and the request dies at the next keystroke rather than landing minutes late in whatever pane is focused by then. The tty shell also enables BRACKETED PASTE now and coalesces paste_start..paste_end into one event. Before this a paste arrived as a flood of individual key presses: plausible in insert mode, and in normal mode every pasted character ran as a command. n/N. They stepped the armed results buffer and immediately Looked each row, so you could not walk past a hit without opening it. They are a MOTION now: select the next look-able text, open nothing, and let Enter decide. What they step is the largest whitespace-delimited run look.resolve can act on (look.lookableSpan, wrapper punctuation peeled), over a RING of panes -- every pane that has performed a look, most recent first, then the output buffers that have not, newest first, and only if both are empty the pane in front of you. N is the exact inverse of n, computed rather than remembered: both directions ask the same question about the same spans and compare against the column the walk parks on, so x presses one way and x back land exactly where you started, pane boundaries and the ring's seam included. A ring rather than a list with two ends because a shell's cursor sits at the prompt, below everything it has printed, so a walk that could not come round would have nowhere to go on the very first press -- which is the case n/N were written for. One motion everywhere, no pane-kind or buffer-kind special case. The only thing a buffer may change is the GRAIN of what a step selects, and it does it with one flag rather than a branch: output_pane.Traits.commands (renamed from `executes`, which named one reader's behaviour rather than the fact) makes a row select WHOLE, because a ThemeSel line is a word to run and has no path inside it to pick out. `]d`/`[d` are not n/N -- they are helix's diagnostic motions, their job is to ARRIVE, and they still reach searchStep. THE TTY PROMPT. Leaving raw tty blanked the prompt row, and the command you had typed at that prompt shares the row, so it went too -- a shell out of tty read as output only. OSC 133 marks the row CELL by cell, so the two are separable: config.tty_blank = .prompt cuts the prompt's own columns and leaves the command, left-hugged at column 0 in line with the output under it rather than in a bay of blanks. .prompt_and_input is the old behaviour, kept. Because the row is now something you can put a cursor in, enterTty adds the hidden prompt width back before asking ghostty to walk the shell's own cursor to it -- the modal column on a cut row is short by exactly that much. Verified: unit-test 186/186 (nine new), snap 87/87 (new ttyprompt.snap), hxdiff 481 and hxparity 561 with 0 mismatches, tty and gui both build. And against the real binaries rather than the harness: in a pty, SPC y emits OSC 52 carrying exactly the selection while plain y emits nothing, SPC p issues the read and pastes the reply, and a bracketed paste of "dd..." inserts text instead of deleting two lines. In a real SDL window, SPC y then SPC p round trips through the system clipboard while the default register holds different text. Setting tty_blank back to .prompt_and_input reproduces all 86 old goldens byte for byte.
* Better text renderingGabriel Schneider2026-08-10
|
* Esc alternates between the last two panes; Toggleterm is goneGabriel Schneider2026-08-10
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Esc ran Toggleterm, which hopped between the newest DOC and the newest TERMINAL. That distinction never earned its keep. It made Esc unpredictable — which of three panes you landed on depended on their kinds, not on where you had been — and it could not alternate between two files at all, which is the case you hit most. Editing two files, Esc did nothing. The replacement already existed. Last (SPC j j) is "the pane you were in before this one, whichever it was": it walks the jump stack for the newest entry naming a different pane and restores its line and column. So Esc, and Shift-Esc in tty, now run Last, and Toggleterm is deleted rather than renamed — a third implementation of "go to the other pane" was the thing to avoid. SPC w t goes with it; the w group is the four directional moves, and the jump group already had SPC j j. Held down, Esc alternates. Two files, a file and its shell, a file and a +Search — all the same, because Last has no notion of kind to get wrong. This depends on the swap in the same series: Last reads the stack backwards, and until hopping stopped appending, the pane you came from could fall off it. windownav.snap needed only its keys and prose changed — its golden did not move at all, which is the useful evidence here: for the one scenario the old builtin handled well, Last produces an identical focus sequence. Coverage for what it did not handle is new: a unit test opens a second FILE by looking its name and asserts Esc alternates between two panes of the SAME kind, which is the case that used to be a no-op. Docs follow: tutor.txt, docs/helix-keys.md, docs/design.typ, and the builtin index goldens, which are now one row shorter. 75/75 snapshots, both unit suites, and the macOS ABI build all pass.
* show New in every pane tag and enforce builtin-first Exec fallbackGabriel Schneider2026-08-10
|
* prioritize useful topbar commands and put Kill lastGabriel Schneider2026-08-10
|
* add New builtin for an empty temporary file in the calling columnGabriel Schneider2026-08-10
|
* normal Esc toggles document/terminal focusGabriel Schneider2026-08-10
|
* add vanilla DOM web backendGabriel Schneider2026-08-10
|
* every helix and zed theme on the machine, not a curated nineGabriel Schneider2026-08-01
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 228 in the ring: 3 pardes ships plus all 214 helix runtime themes and all 11 zed variants across its three families. No exclusions. inherits is what this cost. 76 themes need it, so the reader is two passes now, and the merge is WHOLE-KEY rather than field-wise because helix merges the theme body at depth 1 — the three *_transparent themes clear their parent's background with an empty table, and a field-wise merge would leave it painted. I had that wrong until I read helix-view/src/theme.rs. At 214 files the generator meets themes that are SPARSE rather than broken, and the old fatal-on-anything-missing would have rejected them. Every fallback is helix's own rule: no background at all means wear the terminal's, so bg and fg go null (13 themes, correctly); the twelve RGB fields that cannot be null fall back to ghostty's default palette entries 7 and 0, which is exactly what a pardes terminal already paints an unstyled ANSI index as. fatal is kept for what genuinely cannot be read. Three real bugs surfaced only at scale: #ccc shorthand doubles the nibble (helix's rule, 58 colours), a quoted inline-table key silently dropped a selection colour, and four themes name a cursor background EQUAL to the page because they are about to reverse that cell — taking it painted an invisible move box. 0 degenerate themes out of 225 now: no fg==bg, no syntax colour on its own background, no invisible box. Collisions get an unconditional rule rather than a clever one: a zed variant is always <name>_zed, because both projects ship gruvbox, ayu and one, and a conditional tag would move a name when the other source changes. A comptime assert holds it. Cost: no-op build 0.257 -> 0.276s, a pardes.zig change 46.8 -> 47.5s, binary +0.98%. The generator does 217 sources in 54ms. NextColor stays and is no longer a way to REACH a theme — but the browse got better, not worse: the generated half sorts by name, so its neighbours are that theme's own family. theme.golden's fourth click moved from ayu_dark to acid, which sorting 225 names does; themesel gained a tail capture proving row 228 renders.
* themes: one file each, generated from helix and zed, picked by stepping a listGabriel Schneider2026-08-01
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Each theme is a .zig file of pure data and nothing enumerates them by hand — fold() walks the container's declarations, so a theme is a file and that is the whole registration. Field by field rather than a wholesale coercion, which makes a missing field a compile error that names it. tools/gen_themes.zig reads helix .toml and zed .json out of vendor/themes and emits one .zig each; build.zig reads that directory, so adding a theme is dropping a file in. Output goes to the build cache rather than the tree, so zig owns the freshness check and a deleted source cannot leave a stale theme behind. Vendored, not read from the genizah: the build stays offline. A source it cannot map is a hard error naming the file and the key, never a silently black-on-black theme. ThemeSel is the clever half. Traits gained an `executes` column, so n/N over that buffer hands the whole line to Exec instead of the leading word to Look — both arms the ordinary builtin, so a stepped row does exactly what the matching mouse button on it would. Stepping the list previews each theme live. The trait is a pane property, not an output-pane branch, so any pane whose lines are commands can opt in. Goldens: leader gains SPC t t; theme's fourth NextColor no longer wraps to helix because the ring is fifteen long. New: themesel.
* focus history is a stack of locations, and the Jumplist is that same stackGabriel Schneider2026-08-01
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | One container, not two: focus_hist (a stack of pane ids rebuilt every sync) is now jumps[] + a current pointer, and the +Jumps buffer is a RENDERING of that array — nothing copies it, nothing shadows it. prevFocus, Toggleterm, Look's directory order, Back/Forward, Last and Jumplist all walk the one list. A pane id is reused, so a location that only remembered an id would retarget after a respawn: panes now carry a monotonic serial and an entry whose slot holds a different serial is dead. trackJump compacts those out and fixes the pointer in the same pass. The push rule lives in ONE place and says: a location is worth remembering when you cannot see it any more — a different pane, or more than a bodyful of rows away in the same one. So hjkl never grows the list and 100G, a search hit and a goto-definition do. Ctrl-o/Ctrl-i walk it, SPC j j toggles the last two, SPC j l lists them. Ctrl-i IS Tab on a legacy host, where the binding simply never fires and Tab-executes is untouched; kitty reports them apart. SPC j o/i work anywhere. Two goldens moved, both the SPC ? Help listing gaining four rows.
* an output pane is not a document: +Search/+Help split below the pane that ↵Gabriel Schneider2026-08-01
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | asked, never into a column of their own placeDoc classified any file pane as a doc, so a +Search opened from a lone shell took layoutInsertColumn(0) - a whole new leftmost column, shoving every existing column sideways - and an open results list was then eligible as the split parent for a real file, stacking documents under the list. An output buffer has no file behind it and no Save; it is the result list belonging to the pane that asked for it. Now it is that on both sides of the rule: it splits below from_id whatever kind of pane that is (a source that died falls back to stackDocLeft, the same last resort a full column bar uses), and it is skipped when a real doc hunts for its split parent, so a file opened from a search row joins the docs instead of the results. Real docs are untouched: fsearch/rsearch/look-file/tutor/lookpanes all pass unchanged. psearch is the proof - its results snap was two columns (the shell pushed to x=70, its gutter run at 70-71) and is now one 140-wide column with the +Search stacked below at the same x origin.
* look resolves against every open pane's directory: clicked pane first, then ↵Gabriel Schneider2026-08-01
| | | | most-recently-focused, search only when all fail
* helix theme, now the default: near-black page, chrome one grey-ramp step off itGabriel Schneider2026-08-01
| | | | | | | | Colors lifted from the user's own helix theme (~/.config/helix/themes/pardes.toml, pinned against a real hx render through a pty). Theme gains box/box_dim so a restrained theme can turn the accent down; the hardcoded gray.* overlay greys were the dark theme's own fields spelled twice and are gone. The old default is still one NextColor away.
* trim the taglines: image renderer toggles and Colors/Crt become leader-onlyGabriel Schneider2026-08-01
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The image tag spelled out `Petscii <C64|Term> Ascii` and actOnSelection matched those words by hand before the builtin dispatch. They are three real Builtins now (SPC t p/l/a), so the by-word matching is gone, the tag is a plain `img <path> Del`, and with nothing live left in it the image early-returns in curTail, enterTagEdit and the tag-click guard go too — an image tag edits like every other pane's. Colors and Crt leave the topbar for SPC t c / SPC t r: set-once display switches should not spend width in a bar you read every frame. NextColor stays, it is the one you cycle repeatedly. Both remain full builtins. The snap scripts that clicked those words now press the leader instead, and images.snap finally exercises the palette and ascii toggles for real: its old clicks at x=57 landed on the neighbouring shell's tag, so that toggle had never been covered. The test PPM grew to 512x512 with LCG noise so the ASCII bitmaps actually win cells and dropping them visibly changes the art.