`_onSessionTerminal` drops an incoming frame once the app-owned render queues
already hold 128KB. That is the right call — the alternative is an unbounded
backlog — but a hole in a TUI byte stream is a desynced cursor, and a desynced
cursor is muffled text (#464). The drop was only half of it.
The recovery was a fire-and-forget timer: it nulled its own handle and then
called `_onSessionNeedsRefresh()`, which opens with four early returns. Two of
them — a buffer load already in flight, a refresh already owning this session —
are MOST likely to be true during exactly the output burst that caused the
drop. So the recovery was skipped precisely when it was needed, with nothing
left to retry it, and the dropped bytes were never replayed.
`_onSessionNeedsRefresh` reports whether it actually repainted now, and
`_scheduleDroppedOutputRecovery` re-arms while it has not. Bounded by
`DROP_RECOVERY_MAX_ATTEMPTS`, because every reason the refresh can be skipped is
transient contention that clears in seconds and a permanently failing refresh
must not become a loop against the API; giving up at the cap leaves exactly what
the old code left, so the floor is no worse than before. The same 2s debounce
still collapses a burst of drops into one attempt.
This is the principle Ark0N established reviewing #431 for the WebSocket
output-gap marker — only a repaint that actually happened settles the recovery —
applied to the one recovery path that still trusted a timer having fired.
The retry decision is a pure function in constants.js so the gate can reach it,
and the scheduler itself is driven from app.js under a fake clock. The retry
case and the no-retry case only pin the fix AS A PAIR: either alone passes
against something wrong, one against the old fire-and-forget timer and the other
against retrying forever. Checked by reverting app.js to the old shape, where
three of the twelve fail.
Two harness details that would otherwise have made the tests lie. The vm context
baked in the real `setTimeout`, so `vi.useFakeTimers()` could not reach the
scheduler and every case reported zero calls; it delegates lazily now. And
app.js reached `CodemanDroppedOutput` as a bare global, which resolves in a
browser but not in the vm — worth fixing beyond the test, because that call sits
inside a timer where a ReferenceError is swallowed and would take the recovery
with it. It reads through `window.` like terminal-ui.js does with its own
constants.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
