The review pass found the CLI breaking its own written rules.
A node broadcasts its own name, so every name the CLI prints is remote
data — and Rich read `[...]` in it as a style tag. A node called
`[bold]Loud` printed as `Loud`, silently no longer the string that
identifies it; a node called `[/]Bob` raised MarkupError and took the
command down. The log handler then failed the same way while reporting
it, replacing the diagnostic with a traceback about the diagnostic. No
log line and no scripted line is ever marked up, so all three consoles
now say so.
`right=` never right-aligned anything. Rich's `Text.wrap` returns early
on `overflow="ignore"`, above the justify step, so asking for one threw
the other away — every numeric lane in the CLI was left-aligned while
CLAUDE.md, script.py's own docstring and the manual all said otherwise.
"crop" refuses to elide just as firmly and still aligns.
`config show` printed an empty string as `""` and `config set` read
those two characters literally, so feeding a dump back in replaced every
empty setting with a pair of quote marks — and the next dump looked
identical, so nothing ever said so. It also masked an *unreported* PIN
behind six bullets, telling the reader the radio was PIN-locked when it
was not: `conceal` already declined to mask the menu's absence token and
had simply never been shown the CLI's.
`meshterm about` drew the `---` above its colophon as a rule sized to
the console, which on a 16384-cell console is one 48KB line in a 4KB
page. A rule is a frame; the scripted copy drops it with the QR.
The contract fixture set only `--db`, which moves the history and
nothing else — so the suite read whatever was in the developer's own
~/.meshterm. That is how `[/]Bob`, planted by hand on one machine, could
crash the suite there and pass everywhere else. $MESHTERM_HOME moves the
whole directory.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
docs/cli.md documents every command and option, what each one prints, and
what it returns -- with the output conventions and the exit-status table
up front, since those are the two things a script is written against.
Every command, option and flag in it was checked against the running app;
the sample output is captured from the simulator rather than typed out.
Writing it turned up two places the CLI still did the thing the last
commit was about. A destructive command refused for want of --yes printed
its refusal in red on *stdout* and exited 1: a colour and a sentence that
is not the command's answer, in whatever was reading the command's answer.
A missing confirmation is a bad invocation, so it now goes through the
parser like any other -- nothing on stdout, the reason on stderr, exit 2.
The README keeps its cookbook and its summary of the conventions, and
points at the manual for the rest.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The CLI had grown the menu's manners -- colour, boxes, section headings,
glyph columns, a closing check mark -- and every one of them is in the way
of the thing it is actually for. It now prints like a standard Unix
utility: plain text, no escape sequences at all, no frames, one record per
line, and nothing wrapped, so a long line runs off the right instead of
folding its fields onto a second one.
meshterm/ui/script.py is the whole vocabulary. Listings are an uppercase
header and space-aligned records; key/value blocks are sysctl's shape, and
a `get` prints the bare value alone. Names are quoted wherever they share a
line, because a name can hold a space or a comma and a bare one is not a
field. A route reads "Origin" (3d),"Relay" (f2),"Us" (a1) -- the hash
outside the quotes, our own node a hop like any other rather than a star,
since the hash is what carries the identity that colour carries on screen.
Times are absolute local ISO-8601 and "-" is the one token for absent.
The return value is now half the report: 0 ok, 1 failure, 2 usage, 3 no
device, 4 the device was reached and the operation failed, 5 nothing to
report. That last one is the point -- a command that ran fine and found
nothing prints nothing and says so in $?, so a script never has to count
output lines to tell an empty mesh from a full one. Errors and progress
moved to stderr, and an expected failure no longer arrives as a traceback.
Two things lose their scripted face rather than get a degraded one. The map
is a picture whose nodes are told apart by colour: monochrome it would be
unreadable, coloured it could not be piped anywhere useful, and the nodes
themselves are still in `contacts`. The QR codes are a second rendering of
a link the output already prints.
ui.ack joins ui.note to draw the line the change needed: a note is output,
an acknowledgement is reassurance a person wants and a script must filter
out, so the menu prints it and the CLI drops it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Jean-Pierre MartineauandClaude Opus 5