Live terminal events are queued while a buffer load runs, and the load discards
that queue when it ends. That is right when the loaded buffer is the server's
accumulated byte history. The route appends to that history right up to the
moment it serializes the response, so a queued event already appears in it and
replaying it would duplicate output, most visibly Ink's cursor-up redraws.
A tmux pane capture is a photograph, current only as of the instant
`capture-pane` ran. Output printed afterwards was queued and then dropped, and
nothing scheduled a re-fetch to recover it: `_onSessionNeedsRefresh` is wired
only to the 128KB overflow path. The CLI's next partial redraw then landed on a
frame the terminal never received.
How much went missing depended on which capture the route served. A `?full=1`
load returns the capture alone, with no history in front of it, so it lost
everything from the capture to the end of the chunked write. A `?tail=` load
returns history, a clear, and then the capture, and the route reads that history
after the capture, so it lost everything from the response to the end of that
write. The chunked write dominates either way. An agent CLI hides the loss on
its next full redraw; a shell session does not, because its output is linear and
nothing repaints it.
Queue entries now carry their arrival time, and `_finishBufferLoad` takes a
`since` cutoff, so a capture load replays exactly the tail that arrived after
the response headers. The earlier events stay dropped, because a payload that
carries history does hold those.
All four paths that fetch a terminal buffer and write it now decide this the
same way, through one `_bufferLoadFinishOpts` helper, so they cannot drift
apart: `selectSession`, `_onSessionNeedsRefresh`, `_onSessionClearTerminal` and
`_maybeRefetchFullHistory`. The second of those is the one that stings. It
exists to restore output the client already dropped once under backpressure, and
it was dropping more output while performing that recovery. The cache-hit write
inside `selectSession` stays on discard deliberately: it runs before the fetch,
so its queue holds only events the capture that follows already contains.
Two further things had to change for that tail to still exist when the load
ends, and a browser test is what found both. `chunkedTerminalWrite` is what ends
the load for every non-empty buffer, so the flush policy travels to its own
finish calls; the call in `selectSession` runs only when the write was skipped.
`_beginBufferLoad` no longer empties the queue when one load re-enters it, which
it does on every write, because that reset discarded the whole fetch window
before anything could replay it.
The response already distinguishes the sources. `source` reads `mux-visible` or
`mux-full-history` for a capture and `history` for the byte stream.
Follows #395, #396 and #397, which fixed the ways the replayed frame itself
could disagree with the terminal.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
