A dual review (Codex CLI and Claude's code-reviewer, same diff, same brief)
found the trust boundary weaker than the comments around it claimed. Eleven
findings, all applied.
The two blockers were both about who can write the row the label is read from.
Claude's window covered two rows, and the second one is the status line, whose
command a session running with permissions bypassed can write into its own
`.claude/settings.json` — so an agent could print `· 1 monitor ·` onto a row of
its own and silence its own idle alert. The default window is one row now, which
is the footer and nothing else, and the constant says why. Separately, the label
reached `data-tab-meta-sig` unescaped while the row is installed with innerHTML,
which is an injection sink for any config-supplied pattern whose capture group is
permissive; it goes through escapeHtml() like every other untrusted string in
that file.
The Codex entry could not be fixed the same way, and now says so. Its row is
third from the bottom only while a terminal runs; with none running that slot
holds the last row of the transcript, so matching the complete row (with the
`/stop to close` tail, window narrowed to three) raises the bar without closing
it. What contains it is `hooks: 'none'`: no hook event from a codex session
reaches notePrompt(), so a forged label costs a wrong badge and cannot quiet an
alert. The registry comment, `docs/cli-registry.md` and the test all state that
rather than claiming a guarantee the code does not have.
Also from the review: the TUI header badge no longer counts an acknowledged
item, which was the same gate the classifier fix already went through and was
wrong for human acknowledgement too; the TUI approval card reads the quiet
reason and drops to a new `info` tone instead of asking for a reply; the badge
carries an aria-label, because the phone it was built for has no hover target;
the schema refuses `watchingLines` without a `watchingLine`; and the pattern and
its window are resolved together rather than one memoized and one not.
Documentation moved with it. The mechanism now lives in
`docs/architecture-invariants.md` with CLAUDE.md keeping the rule and a pointer,
`docs/wiki/Notifications-And-Approvals.md` tells users why a session stopped
buzzing, and both that page and the changeset name the limitation neither did
before: a question asked in plain prose is not a dialog, so it is silenced along
with the false alarms while background work runs.
Verified live again after the narrowing, on an isolated beta: a Claude session
reported `1 monitor` and took its idle prompt acknowledged, and a Codex session
reported `1 background terminal` against the full-row anchor.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Four faults, all reported at once, and three of them were mine from the last
two commits.
THE HINT VANISHED. Two independent causes. First, a leaked F1 binding: an
attach whose TUI was killed leaves `F1 -> detach-client` in tmux's root table,
and the claim treated "already bound" as someone else's key, so every later
attach fell back to advertising the tmux chord — the bar stopped saying F1
while F1 still worked. A key already bound to `detach-client` now counts as
ours. Second, width: tmux truncates a status line that overflows and drops the
RIGHT-aligned segment, which is the hint. The strip now gets a budget measured
from the terminal's width minus the hint, and it drops tabs from the far end
until it fits. ⚠️ Measured on VISIBLE columns, not format bytes: `#[reverse]`
costs zero columns, and counting it made a strip that "fitted" still truncate
the hint at 80, 100, 120 and 176 columns on a real terminal.
ALT+N DID NOT SWITCH. On the dashboard, a bare digit meant jump AND ATTACH, and
a terminal sends Alt+N as ESC then N: when those land in separate reads —
routine over SSH — the chord decodes as Escape plus a bare digit, so "switch to
tab 2" threw the user into tab 2's pane. A digit now SELECTS, matching what
Alt+N means in the web UI; Enter is how you go in. Inside a pane the keys never
reached the TUI at all, since tmux owns the terminal, so the attach now binds
Alt+1..9 in tmux's root table to `switch-client` — the strip is usable rather
than decorative. ⚠️ The bar is applied to every session the strip can reach,
each highlighting its own tab: with it on the attached session only, switching
landed the user in a pane with no strip and no way out on screen.
⚠️ The leaked-state sweep was missing `status-position`, so it removed the
marker and left the position behind — and with no marker the leftover no longer
matched, making it permanently unsweepable. Found by diffing every session's
options after a detach.
Three separate "why are there boxes" reports, and I fixed them one glyph at a
time instead of as a class, so the next one was always waiting. Grouping the
tester's terminal by unicode block made the rule obvious:
RENDERS Latin-1 (·), Box Drawing (─ │), Block Elements (█ ▛ ▐),
Geometric Shapes (○ ▶), General Punctuation (…), Arrows
TOFU Miscellaneous Technical (⏎ U+23CE, ⏵ U+23F5), the sparse end
of Dingbats (❯ U+276F)
That is an ordinary font, not a broken one, so it is the profile to design
against. The working spinner moves off Dingbats and Math Operators onto
quadrant blocks (▖▘▝▗) — the same block as the `▛█▐` art claude itself draws,
which that font renders fine — and the blocked marker moves off `⚠`
(Misc Symbols, emoji presentation on many terminals) onto `▲`, the block that
already gives us `▶` and `○`.
The preview fold gains claude's own spinner dingbats (✢ ✳ ∗ ✻ ✽ ✴ → `*`) and
`⚠` → `!`. Its animated status line is exactly where a reader looks, so tofu
there is the most visible kind there is.
A test now enforces this as a CLASS: no glyph in the unicode set may come from
Misc Technical, Misc Symbols or Dingbats, with U+2714 the single documented
exception because it was observed rendering on the very font that failed the
others. Verified by scanning a live frame driven with the tester's exact
environment: zero glyphs from any of the three blocks.
Killing demanded the session's NAME typed out in full. That is the right
ceremony for dropping a production database and the wrong one for closing a
pane you are looking at; the beta tester's verdict was "thats stupid, just make
me type Y to confirm". `x` then `y` is already two deliberate keystrokes on a
row the user selected, and the conversation lives in its transcript, which a
kill does not touch.
Everything that is not `y` CANCELS rather than being ignored, so a stray key
closes the dialog instead of leaving a destructive prompt armed and waiting for
whatever gets typed next. Enter cancels too: it is the key most likely to be
hit by reflex, and this is the one dialog that destroys something.
⚠️ Found while verifying the new dialog: it did not name the session. The label
was computed as `row.session.name ?? id.slice(0, 8)`, and `??` falls back only
on null or undefined, so every session the server left with an EMPTY name — all
of them, until the TUI started naming its own — sailed through and the box read
"Kill ?". A destructive prompt that cannot say what it will destroy is worse
than no prompt, and it is now a single keystroke. The caller passes the same
label the LIST shows, so the dialog names the row in front of the user.
The typed-name machinery goes with it: TuiConfirmState.typed, setConfirmInput(),
confirmAccepts() and the 'typing'/'reject' steps are all removed rather than
left as unreachable branches.
Two reports from the same beta screenshot.
Starting a session left the user on the dashboard next to the row they had just
asked for, which reads as the create having silently failed. Starting a session
is a request to WORK in it, so the terminal now goes there as soon as the pane
exists, and the CLI booting is worth watching. If the pane is slow the notice
says so and the row is left selected, exactly as the resume path does.
The footer's `↵` was drawing as an empty box: `⏎` (U+23CE) has poor font
coverage, on the same terminal that renders `·`, `─`, `│`, `○`, `▶` and `✔`
perfectly. It is now U+21B5, from the Arrows block every monospace font ships.
`✋` (U+270B) was worse than a coverage problem: it is East Asian WIDE, so the
renderer, which addresses cells by column, was reserving two cells for it. The
golden frames had the age column shifted a space left to match, which is how
long that had been wrong. It is now `!`, and the frames align correctly.
A test walks the whole unicode glyph set and fails on any entry wider than one
cell, so a glyph that shifts the layout cannot be added again. The comment on
the table spells out both bars a glyph has to clear, because the tier check
answers neither: it asks whether the LOCALE is UTF-8, which says nothing about
whether a font has the glyph or how wide it draws.
Two more from the same beta round, both reported as "basic things are broken".
Attaching to a DEAD pane trapped the user. Codeman sets `remain-on-exit on`, so
a session whose agent has exited does not disappear: the row looks ordinary,
the server still reports it idle, and Enter handed the terminal to a pane that
reads no input. With the detach chord also wrong at the time, that was a hard
freeze with no way out. Enter now probes `#{pane_dead}` first and refuses with
an Error card naming the session and what to do instead. The probe fails OPEN,
so it can never block an attach to a live pane. ⚠️ It also has to paint: the
keypress that reaches attachToSession() has already painted by the time an
awaited probe resolves, so message() alone left the refusal invisible and Enter
looked inert, which is the bug it was added to fix.
A session started from the TUI came out unnamed, because startSession() sent no
sessionName and rowLabel() then fell back to the transcript's first line. A
brand-new session has no prompt to be named after, so the list showed a
perfectly healthy session called "Login interrupted" — the CLI's startup
output, reading like a failure report. Sessions the TUI starts are now named
`w<n>-<case>` like the web UI's, and rowLabel() prefers the case directory over
a scraped prompt for any row with a mux name, since a LIVE pane is identified
by where it runs while a history row genuinely is its prompt.
The fake API server grows the routes the dashboard now calls (terminal tail,
input, approvals answer, search, away digest, plan usage on status), and the
new cases assert on what the server RECEIVED rather than on the frame: the
prompt arrives as one line ending in a carriage return, and the answers as
the exact action and option digit.
Also covered: the tail refreshing in place, the search overlay selecting a
live session, the digest rendering, one bell for an item announced twice,
and the 409 path reported as "no longer on screen".
The plan-usage chip is punctuated with the glyph tier's separator, so an
ASCII terminal no longer gets a stray middle dot in the header.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The preview pane now leads with the pending dialog when the selected session
has one: the question, the options with their digits, and the keys that
answer them, red for a dialog and yellow for a waiting prompt. The card is
capped at half the pane, because the tail is why the pane exists.
Around it: a header badge counting prompts that need a human, a preview
title that sacrifices the path rather than the state word, the footer
becoming the composer line while one is open (with the cell the terminal
cursor belongs in, so it can be shown there and hidden everywhere else), and
the search and digest panels as overlays with a stable width.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
One absolutely-addressed line per row, each closed with an erase-to-end, so
nothing scrolls and a repaint cannot leave the previous frame's tail behind.
The caller wraps the result in synchronized-output brackets; that is an IO
decision and stays out of the renderer.
Color is passed in rather than detected. chalk's detection is right for the
one-shot CLI but would make a frame non-deterministic, so the palette is raw
SGR in the same semantic roles cli-style uses, and `color: false` emits nothing
but the cursor addressing, the session's own colors in the preview included.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
