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* 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.
* host: the core owns the event loop; every platform becomes a vtable of ↵Gabriel Schneider2026-08-25
| | | | optional methods
* animation: six character-motion panel transitions, composed in the core so ↵Gabriel Schneider2026-08-25
| | | | backends agree
* file_watch + builtins + config: richer watch semantics, new builtins, config ↵Gabriel Schneider2026-08-18
| | | | docs
* big slow change: prebuilt shaders (SPIR-V/Metal), core gui reflow, docs, web ↵Gabriel Schneider2026-08-18
| | | | + snapshot refresh
* 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.
* add vanilla DOM web backendGabriel Schneider2026-08-10