The area drawing rode beside the stats in a third of the width, which squeezed the
shape and left no cell for a label on any pin. It is a block of its own now, between
the stat lanes and the route graph — page-wide up to a cap, a fixed eight rows, north
up, the shape against the left edge under the left-aligned stats — and every hop's pin
carries its first hash byte, placed the way the map places a name (beside the pin,
clear of the drawn lines where it can, dropped rather than overprinting), so a pin and
the graph node under it match by eye. The star stays bare: it already says who that is.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The reader is in a record — reading its stats, scrolling the route, arming a trace from
it — so it fills the frame like the browser under it and Esc reads back. It used to
float as a 62-column card, which read as a question over the list rather than as the
page it is. RecordDialog is RecordScreen, full-frame, and the reading width it asked for
as a dialog goes with the name.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The third lead-in picker kept pushed as a hub, and the one the ledger said would stay:
a contact list under the trace screen, so Esc out of a trace landed on the list — two
places where the trace is the whole visit. It is a question, and asks like the other
two: the contact list floats over the menu as a one-shot (run_dialog, public now; the
list stays a full-screen place everywhere else), the trace screen opens over the menu,
and Esc from it lands there. The typed fallback floats the same way instead of filling
the frame.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A bare SelectScreen floats by default, and the browser was full-frame from the menu
only because nothing sat under it; opened from a trace, over the still-pushed trace
screen, the same page came up as a content-sized box. It is a place, not a question,
and declares so like the contact list does.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The menu is popped while a tool runs, so a lead-in question — the TX optimize link, the
node to manage, the password that follows it — had a blank base pushed under it to draw
as a box at all. A dialog is smaller than the frame, and what shows around it should be
the page it was reached from: the root the menu already declares for ^W is now the base
_floated pushes on an empty stack, and the reconnect dialog draws over it too, so the
menu loop stops forgetting its root on the way out. A session with no root declared
keeps the blank fallback.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two flows were rebuilt on it today and nothing had it written down — the stack is for
places, a popup informs, confirms or asks and is then gone, and a question draws as a
box even as the only frame on the stack. The entry-chain rule gains its list form,
run_wizard, one popup turning its page.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The same shape TX optimize just lost, with one popup instead of two: the node list was
kept pushed as a hub under the password prompt and the admin page, so Esc from the page
landed on the list it was picked from — two places where there is one. A popup asks and
is gone: the pick is now a floating one-shot (session.select gains text's floating
flag, so a lead-in question draws as a box even as the only frame on the stack), the
admin page opens over the main menu, and a refused login re-asks the question with the
same node highlighted. admin_node_visit is deleted; nothing keeps a popup pushed now.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The menu is popped while a tool runs, so a floating screen that is the only frame on the
stack was painted as the full-frame background — the TX optimize link dialog opened as
a page and only its sub-prompts looked like popups. The blank base _run_dialog_screen
puts under a one-shot dialog is now one context manager, and stay(dialog=True) puts the
same base under a popup's whole visit, which is what run_wizard asks for.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two pickers stacked one over the other, each kept pushed under the sweep as a hub, read
as two places to be — and a popup is not a place: it asks, confirms or informs, then it
is gone. The node to tune and the node to measure at are now one floating list that turns
its page ("… · step 1 of 2"): Esc on the second step turns back to the first with the
picked node still highlighted, Esc on the first leaves, and the box is popped before the
sweep screen opens, so Esc from the sweep lands on the main menu.
menus.run_wizard is the dialog form of run_steps — the same stack semantics drawn in one
box — and SelectScreen.turn_page is what it turns on: the opposite claim from
replace_items, since a page turned is a new question and neither the typed filter nor the
highlight rides along. A step with nothing to list (the typed hex prefix when the tuned
node is the only contact) runs as an awaitable floated over the box's last page.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
TX delay, direct TX delay and RX delay show, stage and send at one place instead
of two. Device config's RX delay had no rounding at all, so SettingSpec gains
the same decimals field the remote catalog carries, applied on parse and display.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The log misleads read raw: a count hides its span (204 identical records that
were three seconds), a failed CLI run is logged twice, the suite's runs from
before 59f10f9 sit in the real file, and the runs table keeps UTC while the
log keeps local time. logscan.py groups tracebacks, warnings and the DEBUG
failures that lost their stack, each with first and last; folds the CLI's
reports onto the run they repeat; hides fixture and other-database runs and
says how many; and joins the runs table by run id. SKILL.md is the method:
pin the question, fetch the log (this machine, the PicoCalc, an attachment),
summary then around/run/show, the reading traps, and checking HEAD before
calling a finding live.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A packet's via field names the repeaters that forwarded it and neither the
node that sent it nor the one that heard it, yet its ribbon opened and closed
square, the mark that says the route began and ended there. PathLine takes
from_origin / to_destination: a cleared end opens on the notch or closes on
the point, and arrow mode spells it with a bare leading or trailing arrow.
The packet viewer's via chain and the TX sweep's composed relays draw both
ends open. Under the chain, the "reception describes..." note gives way to
the hop count atom the node page and trace scenarios already carry.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Pick location on map gathered its surrounding nodes before opening, and that
meant reading the contact list from the radio whenever the session hadn't
cached it. A companion refusing that read (ERR_CODE_BAD_STATE, which the log
shows all session) held the picker closed through every retry, twenty-odd
seconds, only to open with no contacts anyway. Our own position waited the
same way after Device config dropped its cached self-info.
The picker now opens on what is already in hand: cached contacts and
self-info (DeviceState.peek_contacts / peek_self_info) and our own history,
via gather_markers(wait=False). Whatever the cache lacked is fetched behind
the open map and joins it through MapScreen.set_markers when the radio
answers. The read is never cancelled, so a fetch another screen shares
survives the picker closing. The Map tool and the node page keep waiting,
unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
v1.15 matches get keys by prefix, so a key it lacks falls into a shorter
sibling's branch: get radio.fem.rxgain answers with the get radio line, and
gps on a board without its receiver answers "Can't find GPS". Neither is an
error string and neither parses, and an unparseable reply left the cache
alone, so those rows stayed on ?, which says never asked. Any reply that
can't be the setting's value now marks it n/a; only no reply keeps ?.
The fold itself rode along in 564ac0e; this adds the regression test, the
catalog's note on prefix-shadowed replies, and reflows a docstring line.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Device config folded latitude and longitude into one Location row behind a
Pick / Type / Clear dialog. It now lists them as two rows, as repeater admin
always did. Above them, on both pages, a "Pick location on map…" row opens
the map picker and stages both coordinates at once. The map opens on the
position as staged, or as the device (or node) last reported it. It opens on
the mesh where there is no fix (0, 0 or unread), via map_screen.coords_or_none.
On repeater admin a picked coordinate is stored the way a CLI read would spell
it, so picking the spot the node already holds unstages rather than queueing a
no-op set. Typing a pair and the Clear button went with the dialog. Each
coordinate is typed on its own row now, and 0 in both still means no fix.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The Device actions menu entry is gone: clock sync, backup/restore, the identity
key, reboot and factory reset are an Actions section on the Device config page,
which now takes the repeater admin page's shape. It is full-screen, titled with
the node's name and a staged count, and Apply sends in place, one value at a
time; a value the device refuses stays staged with its reason. Read settings
re-reads the device, and unread and blank values read ? and empty.
The settings were checked against the companion firmware (MyMesh.cpp). New:
client repeat, the radio command's trailing byte. Every radio edit now restates
it, because the firmware reads a missing byte as off and a retune silently
stopped a relaying companion. Also new: the auto-add hop limit, read off the raw
frame the library half-parses, and a row for each custom variable the device
reports. The firmware's own bounds now apply: a PIN of 0 or six digits,
path-hash modes 0-2, telemetry deny / by contact / allow all, 150-2500 MHz,
7-500 kHz, and TX power from -9 dBm.
Neither editor page slides its rows sideways any more. The Actions rows pin a
head block, which on its own turned on horizontal scrolling for repeater admin's
whole list and slid its setting labels out of view. SelectScreen(hscroll=False)
now holds against the rows, and both pages use it, so long rows end at the edge
the way Device config's always did.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The editor floated as a content-sized box over the picker it was opened from,
spending the frame's width on a backdrop while the reader worked through a
whole node's catalog. It now fills the frame like the local Device config
editor it mirrors; the picker, value prompts, confirms and progress dialogs
still float. The gallery gains a repeater_admin case at both platforms.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The terminal draws some icons in one cell (↻ ⌨ 🗑 ✓ ✗ ⚠) and most emoji in two, so
a row written icon-plus-space started its words a column left of its siblings. The
fix kept landing one screen at a time. menus.align_icons now pads every icon in a
list out to the widest one, and menu_rows applies it itself, so a list built there
cannot misalign.
Hand-built lists are brought along: the courier outbox and entry actions, the
watchtower actions and rule popover, the record card's actions, the main menu's
Quit row and the device splash's action rows. The repeater admin's regression
test, dropped by a concurrent rewrite of its file, is restored.
tests/test_icon_alignment.py sweeps every gallery screen on both platforms and
fails, naming the rows and their start cells, when a list's icon-led rows start
their words in different cells.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The catalog was written from convention, and the firmware disagreed: the delays
are floats (0.5 showed as 0 and typing it back was refused), bw/sf/cr are not
keys at all (the radio is one `get radio` / `set radio f,bw,sf,cr`), the guest
password is readable, and path.hash.mode and twenty-odd others were missing.
It is now transcribed from CommonCLI.cpp, with a test pinning the key list.
Read settings asks each question once and leaves every row answered: a value,
`empty`, or `n/a` where the node's firmware lacks the setting; reads that got
no reply are listed. ^R (F3 Read) re-reads the highlighted row alone. The value
lane drops its age stamp. Delays round to two places.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
↻ and ⌨ draw one cell among two-cell siblings, so the rows' icon-plus-space
labels started Read settings and Command line a column left of the rows
under them. The Actions list now measures its icon column once and pads
every mark out to it, like channels and the node page.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three passes over what landed yesterday.
The hidden-count line stops standing in the list. With devices still
listed the footer already names ⇧H on every row, so the line was a row
of the box spent saying it twice; it stays only for a list hiding has
emptied, where there is no footer atom to read it off and "no
companion devices detected" would be a lie about a machine with a
radio plugged into it.
Hiding now leaves the highlight where the row was - the next device
down, or the one above at the end, never rolling round to the top - so
a run of adapters clears with a run of presses instead of the cursor
jumping back to the remembered default after each one.
And Esc says bye here rather than quit: the splash is the door, and
the reader leaving it has not started anything to quit out of.
One consequence, on the console: the splash border is 47 cells and the
sentence now sheds the hide key too when it must. Between the two
shortcuts the survivor is the way back - ⇧H only appears once
something is hidden, which is exactly when a reader needs to be told
how to undo it, and by then they have found h.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The charger cuts out at full, the pack settles back to 99, the charger
restarts - and the companion reports that flip every poll for as long
as the thing is plugged in. The gauge is pinned to the header's right
edge and the pulse takes whatever is left, so the fourth cell 100%
needed came off the sparkline and redrew the whole activity history at
a new scale, twice a minute, on a device sitting still.
A full pack reads `100` now, with no sign: three cells, exactly as the
`99%` it keeps flipping back to. It is the one reading whose `%` can
be inferred - a bare 100 beside a full block is a percentage without
being told - and the sign goes on doing its work at every charge that
could be mistaken for something else.
Only that pair is answered, deliberately. The other width change in
the range, 9 to 10, is a boundary a discharging pack crosses once and
never comes back over: one repaint, no jitter, nothing to fix.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The chevron is the ribbon's continuation cue: it is what a wrapped line
closes with to say the path runs on past the edge, and it is the same
shape as every seam between two hops. So the last chip of a finished
route wearing one read as a route cut off mid-walk. Where the font has
the rounded caps nothing changed - they close the lozenge and always
did. Where it hasn't, the widget already squared the *opening* off and
documented that it squares both; only the close never followed. It now
appends nothing at all and the last chip's own pad is the edge.
The cell that frees up goes back to the route. `_measure` used to
report one closing figure for every line, which was true while the
close was always a point; it reports two now - what a line the path
runs on past closes with, and what the line that *ends* it closes with
- so a wrapped path measures its own last line honestly instead of
holding a cell back for a glyph that is no longer drawn. The one caller
that flows a leg of a route rather than a whole one says so, because
its final line is a continuation and still pays the point.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A machine with a debug probe, a programmer and a USB adapter soldered
into it shows all three on every start, in front of the one radio the
user actually came for. h drops the highlighted device from the list
and remembers it in the device registry; ⇧H brings every hidden one
back. Both keys are named in the footer only where they would act -
h on a device row, ⇧H only while something is hidden - which is the
rule Del remove already followed.
Hiding is a listing choice and nothing else: a hidden device is still
remembered, still resolvable by --port, and shows itself again the
moment it is connected to. A row that is simply gone would let the
list misrepresent the machine, so a muted line says how many are
hidden and which key returns them - and that line is also where ⇧H
survives on a console whose splash border is 47 cells.
The mechanics are shared rather than local: a non-filterable list can
declare bare-key shortcuts (a filtering one cannot - every letter
there belongs to the query) and name them per highlighted row, and a
chromeless splash whose hint outgrows its box now drops atoms in front
of Esc rather than being cut off at the end, where Esc is.
Two things the narrow console showed while this was being fitted: the
splash header was a hand-built string that wrapped at 53 columns, and
the DEVICE lane sized itself to the longest name - which for a USB
adapter is its forty-character product string, pushing HARDWARE off
the edge entirely. The header goes through column_header, and the name
lane now yields to keep HARDWARE on screen. What is left of a long
model string scrolls: ←→ read the highlighted row's tail to its end,
with the lanes in front of it pinned.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
`🛣` and `🕸` sit outside Emoji_Presentation, so Rich and wcwidth both
measure them at one cell where the other five marks measure two — and
they are right, which is why the width machinery must keep leaving them
alone. But the Trophy case wrote `f"{icon} {title}"`, so those two
headings started their titles a column left of their siblings, and on a
terminal that paints the road wider than it advances the single space
after it was overpainted and the gap looked closed.
The marks now pad out to the widest of the seven, so every heading — and
every row of the delete picker — starts its title in one column. It is
the rule menus.icon_lane already writes down for a command row's icon
column, and deliberately not that function: a command row drops its icon
where the platform draws no icon lane, and a board's mark is part of its
name on both platforms. So the lane measures what theme.glyph will
actually draw here and the marks stay.
Measured rather than written down, which is what makes it survive the
PicoCalc's substitution map still being open: `👣` is the one discipline
mark that has no console-font glyph today and folds to two cells, so the
lane there is two as well. Give it a one-cell substitution later and all
seven headings tighten by a cell with nothing else moving.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The channel is still there and that is still its page, so the new name
and key are read back into the title, the summary and the rows and the
reader stays put. Only a clear closes it now, which is the one case
where what the page was about is gone. It used to close on both,
because the slot it was holding was a snapshot the rename made stale.
Two other things a slow action left open. The standard Public channel
has one well-known key, so a second copy is a duplicate row rather
than a channel - the menu drops the row once a slot holds it, but the
row dispatches by sentinel, so a press already on its way while the
first write ran added it twice. It is refused where it runs now.
And a reorder is a sequence of writes with no transaction under it, so
a link that drops partway leaves the slots between the two orders. It
says so, at once, because the re-read that follows means the reader is
about to be looking straight at the half-applied layout.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
It was never in the dual-platform gallery, which is why none of this
was caught. Adding it first, then fixing what it showed.
The column header was a hand-built f-string with a five-cell indent
and no idea of the render width: at 53 columns it ran to 54 and
wrapped, costing a content row out of twenty-six and drawing the
pinned landmark twice, and its indent assumed a two-cell channel glyph
where the console draws one. It goes through column_header now, which
measures the glyph and sheds ACTIVITY before it wraps.
The command rows hand-padded their icons, so the one-cell marks (↕ ✎
🗑) started their labels a column left of the two-cell ones - the
Organize row had a two-space hack and a four-line comment about
exactly this. They share a measured icon lane now, and the clear row
tints its mark rather than its words.
The empty message count was ·, which in that same row is also the
status-atom separator and what the console folds 🔕 to: a muted
channel with no messages drew it twice, two cells apart, meaning
different things. It is ○, the app's empty mark.
Also: the detail title was a 42-cell parenthesised blob that filled
the PicoCalc's whole title bar, leaving nowhere to say Esc leaves - it
is "Channel — name", with the openness and hash now leading a
vital-signs line that sheds atoms rather than wrapping. The manager
says "Enter open", which is what its rows do. The slot count chains
with · rather than an em dash. And the four Add rows are replaced by
one empty state when there is no free slot to add into, instead of all
four dead-ending in the same refusal.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The slot probe stops for two very different reasons and returned the
same short list either way. Off the end of the configured slots it is
the truth; a read that simply failed leaves whatever it had, and that
was cached for the session - an empty one reading exactly like a
device with no channels, a truncated one making the next free slot
look free with a channel sitting in it, which the add flows then wrote
straight over. The two endings raise different things, so the probe
now says whether it finished, an unfinished one is answered but not
kept, and every add confirms the slot is empty before anything is
written to it.
The chat service's slot map was also walking the radio itself, and
unbounded - it skipped empty slots all the way to the 64-slot cap, so
on firmware that never rejects an index every edit paid 64 round-trips
before the screen could redraw, on top of the manager's own re-read.
It now builds from the probe the manager was making anyway.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three things, all the same story - the manager was silent while it
worked and talkative once the work was already visible.
The acknowledgement goes. It reported changes the reader had just
watched land in the list in front of them, after the screen showing
them had closed. The count stays in summary, for the run log.
Every device action now reports while it runs, under the modal busy
card: write_channel draws its own (it is the one boundary every
mutation crosses), a reorder draws one card for the batch and retitles
it per move, and the re-read that follows a change draws one rather
than three. Modal is the point - the list underneath stays armed the
whole time it waits, so keys tapped during a slow write were landing
in its filter and coming back as a list showing nothing.
And "a write happened" moves off the change count onto the cache the
write drops. A write that landed and then raised - a QR view unwound
with ^W, a link lost mid-reorder - never reached changes += 1, so the
stale slot list and the chat service's slot map outlived a layout that
had already moved. write_channel now invalidates as it writes, which
the four CLI subcommands were never doing at all, and the manager
compares the epoch across a round.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The overlay could not report a hub's own slow work: it paints only on
an empty stack, so over a screen kept up with stay() it draws nothing,
and it is not a screen at all, so it takes no keys either. A visited
hub stays armed the whole time it waits, which means every press
during a slow device write still reaches it - letters into its live
filter, Esc resolving a round nobody is waiting for yet, handed back
the instant the work lands.
BusyDialog is BusyScreen drawn as a box over what it interrupts:
modal, so the press dies on the card instead. Nesting keeps the
outermost one, so a batch of writes is one wait rather than a box per
write, and its caption can change to say which step it is on.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every action banked a "created X" note that only surfaced once the
manager closed - by which time the refreshed list had already shown
the result. Worse, the notes accumulated: at three changes in one
visit the outcome outgrew the acknowledgement popup's line budget and
came back as the full-frame result window instead, so the same visit
reported itself two different ways depending on how much had been done
in it. The visit now acknowledges once, in the summary the tool
already returned. An error is the exception and is shown when it
happens.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The chat picker's conversation lane was a flat 22 cells, and every cell
of it past the longest name in the list was padding in front of a short
one — taken straight out of the last-message preview, which is the only
run on the row with something to say. On the PicoCalc's 53 columns that
left the message 12 cells: enough for a sender's name and a colon.
It is measured now, against the names the list actually holds, floored
at the header word and capped at the shape of a repeater-style name.
The preview keeps what it saves: 31 cells to 37 on a 72-column
terminal, 12 to 18 on the console.
What the cap costs is the tail of a long name, so the row gained the way
to read past its own edge that every other lane-and-run list in the app
already had: ←→ slide the message under the pinned columns, one row at a
time (Choice.hscroll_from). The preview had to stop pre-truncating
itself at 40 cells to make that worth pressing — a cut made before the
terminal's own leaves nothing to reveal.
The marker lane was measured too, and was wrong. A contact's dot was
padded to "a channel's double-cell glyph", which the channel glyph is on
regular and is not in the console font: on the PicoCalc every channel
row sat a cell to the left of every direct row, header over neither. It
now pads to what the glyph reports.
The footer had to give a cell back for the scroll atom, since it can
coincide with the delete atom on any thread with history — the same
arithmetic the purge preview does in its own comment. Enter opens a
screen here, so its verb is `open` rather than the default `select`,
which pays for most of it; `Del delete history` spends the rest on an
object the highlighted row is already naming.
The picker joins the gallery, which is what would have caught the marker
lane.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
prompt_toolkit picks the colour depth per output class, and its two classes
disagree: Windows10_Output returns TRUE_COLOR outright, Vt100_Output returns
DEPTH_8_BIT for every TERM but linux. Nothing ever passed color_depth, so the
same build drawing the same theme was 24-bit on Windows and quantized to the
216-colour cube on macOS and Linux — silently, which is why it went unnoticed:
the app looks fine, just flatter.
It costs exactly what this palette is made of. The seven heat.* steps and the
per-node hue wheel are close pastels chosen to be told apart; snapped to the
cube, neighbours collide and an identity stops being distinguishable by hue.
COLORTERM is not consulted by prompt_toolkit at all — only its own
PROMPT_TOOLKIT_COLOR_DEPTH is — so a terminal announcing truecolor the
conventional way was still handed 256.
The resolver only ever raises the verdict. A terminal that cannot be shown to
do better returns None and keeps precisely the depth it had, so a host this has
never heard of cannot be made worse by it: guessing 24-bit at a terminal
without it costs not a duller palette but the colour entirely. A 16-slot
console is never promoted — the theme addresses its palette by index, and RGB
has nowhere to land there.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The command line was rebuilt around the fact that it has two readers.
`--json` is the machine contract and now covers all 49 subcommands
instead of two; the plain face is free to be read by a person, which is
what it was always for.
The changelog entry had been written for the intermediate design — it
promised quoted names and absolute timestamps, both of which the finished
work deliberately reverses — so it describes what shipped instead.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
`4` promises a caller that the node answered and a retry is worth
trying. An unknown admin node, an unknown courier contact and an `--at`
that is not a clock time are all decided before a word goes over the
air, so a caller retrying on `4` would retransmit nothing, forever.
`tx-optimize` had already answered the identical question the identical
way for a missing password; these had not caught up.
A refused admin login stays `4`. The node was reached and answered no,
the password may simply have changed, and that is exactly the case a
retry exists for — the line is whether anything was transmitted, not
whether the command worked.
The manual documented the old behaviour and called the inconsistency
out; it now documents the rule instead.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
docs/cli.md led with "the CLI is meant to be read by awk" and made every rule
follow from it. That promise moved to --json, so the manual now opens on the
split — the plain face for a person at a prompt, the JSON face for a program —
and documents both per command: what each prints, and what shape and fields come
back. Every sample is captured from a real --mock run in a throwaway
MESHTERM_HOME, not written.
Three sections that were missing:
- Where MeshTerm keeps its state. --db moves the database and nothing else;
the outbox, the caches, the stored passwords and the remembered device stay
in the config directory. $MESHTERM_HOME is what actually isolates a run and
was documented nowhere.
- About the examples. They come from the simulator, which opens a fresh radio
per invocation, never fills PKTS, and invents hop names on a device-routed
trace. And --mock records into the real history unless given its own home.
- When it goes wrong. The exit scheme was explained and never once shown.
Corrected: quoting is gone from listings, times are ages with --absolute behind
the cli_time_format preference, routes take arrows where paths keep commas,
contacts gained HASH and LOCATION, preferences regained DESCRIPTION, ack and
closing messages now reach stderr rather than being dropped, and the written
pages wrap. Exit 3 now covers a --port that will not open, and the usage class
covers a missing --yes, a bad --sort or --category, an unknown --profile and a
bad courier id. The awk -F'"' recipe split on quotes that no longer exist, so
the recipes go through jq; the cron entry flooded the mesh every 30 minutes,
six times tighter than the cadence picker's own floor, and is now
config advert-cadence with an absolute path for what still belongs in cron.
README: chat is not interactive, trace-path is its own command, and the exit
table is prose plus a link instead of a third copy to keep in sync.
about.md: everything-in-the-TUI-is-in-the-CLI was never true — the map,
dashboard, live feed, watchtower and mesh walk have no command — so it says
nearly, names them, and points at the JSON the claim is now worth making about.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
`_run_live` pushes the picker itself, so the Enter could not be queued
before the call — it was sent blind and lost about one full-suite run in
six, on a machine busy enough to change the timing. `_screen_at` exists
for exactly this and says so in its docstring: wait until the stack is
the depth the flow reached, then press.
Fifteen consecutive runs of the test, and three of the whole suite.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
`meshterm contacts --json` is what a person types, and it failed with a
bare usage error: Click binds an option to whatever command declares it,
so a global on the callback is a parse error one word later. For an
output format that is the wrong way round — `-o json` goes after the verb
in every tool that has one, and --json is the first thing anyone reaches
for. The group's own options are now lifted to the front before Click
parses, so both orders mean the same run. `--` stops the lifting and
--help is never lifted, since `contacts --help` must stay the contacts
help rather than quietly becoming the program's.
And a column headed AGE held `2026-09-08T04:18:25-04:00` under
--absolute. Every other time column already names the fact — HEARD,
RECORDED, FINISHED — which stays true whichever form the run asked for;
only chat's named the form. `when()` now says so where the header is
declared.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
repeater-admin on a node that never answered, channels share on an empty slot:
the bare form prints the value, and there is no value. A lone `-` there is a
line of output where the exit status is the whole report — and 5 already means
"ran fine, found nothing", which is the branch a script is waiting on.
The document keeps the shape either way, with null where the answer would have
been, because a consumer branching on it still needs the key.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A never-heard node has no instant to print, so the timestamp language dropped
"never" back to the plain absent token and a contacts listing under --absolute
could no longer tell "we have not heard from it" from "this row has no heard
time". The absent word survives the switch; only the form of a real time changes.
Also drops a dead guard in the preferences writer.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The section described a command line "read by awk", which was the premise that
changed: the plain face is read by a person and --json is read by the program.
It stated the quoting, the absolute times and the comma-joined path line as
rules, and all three now say the opposite.
What replaces it is the seam first — a tool states, a renderer draws, the
boundary picks — then each face with the rules an implementer follows and the
reason behind each one, then the exit statuses, with the two classifications
that were wrong somewhere stated out loud: nothing transmitted is not a device
failure, and a rendering flag never moves the status.
docs/cli.md is untouched and now stale in three places: the --json row still
says only two commands honour it, --absolute is undocumented, and every console
sample carries quoted names and ISO timestamps.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A block that renders to nothing still counted toward the separator, so
`config restore --dry-run` opened with a blank line it did not have — the plan
is a listing under an outcome that says everything it has to say in the exit
status. The separator now counts what was drawn.
And the device inventory declared `port` and `address` in its rows and never in
its columns, so both fell out of the document: a caller had to parse the target
for a colon to find out which transport it was holding.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Five small things the seam left standing, each one a rule applied a step too
far or a question asked of the wrong flag.
ack and a tool's closing message go to stderr instead of being dropped. The
reason they were dropped was sound as far as it went — an acknowledgement is not
the answer, and `meshterm contacts > f` must catch only the answer — but stdout
is not the only stream. Someone watching a five-minute `config restore` gets the
setting-by-setting ✓ back, and the redirect still catches nothing extra.
tx-optimize asked --json whether it could prompt. That is a question about
output format, and it answered this one wrong in both directions: with the flag
a piped run failed cleanly, without it a scheduled run on a terminal sat waiting
for a password nobody was going to type. It now asks stdin — and asks it
properly on Windows, where NUL is a character device that isatty() calls a
terminal and getpass then reads the console directly and blocks forever. A
missing password is a usage error, since nothing was transmitted.
courier send on an id nobody has raised a device failure, which told a scheduled
sender to retry a typo. It is a bad argument: the outbox is a local file.
--mock alongside --port/--ble/--tcp used to let --mock win silently, so a
scheduled `--port COM7 --mock info` reported on a simulator while reading as
though it had reached the radio.
And stderr stops folding at 80 columns off a terminal, which is what made
`grep 'not already connected' errors.log` come back empty — the sentence was
there, with a newline through the middle of it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Forty-nine leaf commands now state a Report instead of printing one, so --json
works on all of them at once rather than on the two that grew a branch for it.
The two hand-rolled JSON paths are gone: devices no longer builds a payload dict
of its own, and its empty scan exits 5 like the plain path always did rather than
0 — a rendering flag has no business moving the report.
The plain face changes premise along with it. It used to be a serialisation
format a person could squint at, and several of its rules existed only to make
splitting safe. Splitting is the machine face's job now, so:
- Names are bare. Alignment is the delimiter; the escaping under the quoting
stays, because nothing else stops a name a node broadcast from ending its own
record.
- Times are ages. "Heard recently?" is the question a contacts listing is opened
to ask, and an ISO instant makes the reader do arithmetic to answer it.
--absolute puts the instants back; an appointment, the device clock and a live
capture's own column were never ages and still aren't.
- A route takes arrows and a path keeps its commas. The lexicon has always split
these and the output never did, so a route line looked pasteable into --path,
which it is not.
- The listings gain what was cut for parser hygiene: contacts gets the HASH
--path takes and a LOCATION the model has always carried, preferences gets the
DESCRIPTION already written in its registry, and the two live streams get
pinned lanes — which is what let them have columns at all, and with them the
last call site for the quoting.
- The four written pages wrap at 72 instead of printing 600-cell paragraphs. It
is the one exception to "no wrapping", and the rule's own reason says why: a
paragraph has no fields to land under the wrong headings.
info keeps its keys and gains a gloss on the four readings nobody can hold in
their head (93784 (1d 2h)); it is the one key/value block with no set behind it,
so there is no round trip to protect. config show is untouched, deliberately.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
