Five flows asked two or more things in a row as a straight run of awaits, so Esc
anywhere in one abandoned the lot. Mistype the second half of a 32-hex channel
key and the name you typed first went with it; back out of the courier's
schedule and the message you had just written was gone.
menus.run_steps runs a chain as the stack it is. Each step is awaited with the
answers gathered so far — the same list every time, so a step can label itself
with an earlier answer and offer its own previous answer as its default when it
is come back to — and returns None to step back. None from the first step ends
the flow; there is nothing behind it.
Converted: joining a channel by key and editing one (name then key), the custom
firmware variable (name then value), and the courier's queue flow (recipient,
message, schedule). The courier's recipient list now stays pushed for the whole
flow, so stepping back from the message lands on the row it was being written
to, and the schedule's "At a time…" prompt steps back to its own rungs rather
than out of the queueing.
A step signals "back" with None, which is what _pick_schedule returns for the
real answer "when it's next heard" — so _schedule_step swaps the two, carrying
that answer as its own WHEN_HEARD sentinel.
A trailing Cancel/verb confirm is left alone: its left button says Cancel and
means "don't do this", which is a decision rather than a step. That line is now
in CLAUDE.md with the rule.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Six lists rebuilt themselves as a whole new screen every round, because their
content is data: an editor's rows carry a staged `current → new` value, its
title counts what is staged, the outbox loses the message it just sent, the
watchtower's log rewrites the row you acknowledged. Each approximated the cost
with `default=cursor`, which recovers only the cursor, and only while the row it
names still exists — the typed filter went every time.
SelectScreen.replace_items swaps the rows (and optionally the title) in place
instead. The place is kept by value, so the highlight lands back on its row
wherever that row moved to, and falls back to the same position in the list when
the row is gone entirely — which is what you want after deleting the row you
were sitting on. The filter rides along.
So the config editor, device actions, the channel manager, the courier outbox,
the watchtower and the repeater-admin editor all hold one screen for the whole
visit now, refreshed after each action. The courier's ticker is started once for
the visit rather than per round, and folds a flow's effect in immediately rather
than waiting up to a second for the next tick.
The admin node picker gains a `stay` form. Repeater admin used to draw a second,
identical SelectScreen as a static backdrop so the password prompt had something
behind it, then drop the list before the session; the real list stays up through
both now — so cancelling the password lands back on the node list rather than
bowing out of the flow, and leaving a node's admin session lands there too.
Administering two repeaters in a row is an Esc and a pick.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The app-wide Back row existed because it duplicated Esc — two of its call
sites said as much in a comment. On both platforms Esc is a labelled key
and every footer hint names it, so the row bought nothing for the blank
separator and line it took out of every screen; on the PicoCalc's 26 rows
that is a row in thirteen.
back_rows() is gone, and with it the four hand-drawn copies: ReorderScreen's
clean-state row, the live feed's pinned foot stop (the cursor now clamps on
the oldest packet), node detail's tail action, and the action-list rows on
the trace and TX-sweep screens.
Kept, because there leaving is a choice rather than an exit — the same rule
that keeps a dialog's Cancel button: exit_rows()' staged pair, where Apply
has no key of its own and ✗ Back names what the other way out costs;
ReorderScreen's dirty-state pair; the two Quit rows, which initiate the
app's terminal action behind a confirm; and the new-record dialog's Close,
which is its default, so dropping it would let a reflex Enter navigate.
With no Back row there is no Back value: the six spellings callers used to
test three at a time (_BACK, "__back__", _CANCEL, two tuple shapes, bare
None) collapse to `is CANCEL` / `is None`. The gallery now asserts the
absence of an exit row on every screen, on both platforms.
Resolves findings E and §10 of docs/survey-navigation.md. Finding D — Esc
peeling a filter on three screens and leaving on two — still stands, and is
now the only thing left telling a user what Esc does.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two rows renamed, and the rename carried into the screens they open —
the config editor's table title and its staged-count header, the support
page's own title (it comes from the tool, so it followed on its own).
"Support this project" never said which project; the menu is MeshTerm's
and the section above it is already About MeshTerm, so the name is the
useful half of that phrase. "Device configuration" was the longest label
in the list and set the width of the whole name column: at 19 cells
instead of 23, every description now gets 51 and the widest row is 68.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every repaint re-rasterized every row and re-ran every layout; every
screen open re-scanned the whole history. Now work is done once per
change instead of once per frame:
Render pipeline — a content-keyed ANSI cache in render_to_ansi (every
Text/str row app-wide), memoized corner glow, and panel-wrap memos for
the base frame and stacked dialogs, all dropped on a platform switch or
emoji recalibration. Idle-frame compose falls 5-100x per screen
(contacts 5.6->0.1 ms, record card 8.5->0.07 ms, trace 7.6->0.6 ms).
Repository — an observed_at index turns every since-window query into a
range walk (recent_observations 7.5->1 ms); heard_nodes and first_seen
aggregate in one streaming pass by ISO-string comparison instead of
hydrating dataclasses and sorting; node_names groups in SQL (NOT
INDEXED past a slow planner choice).
Per packet — livefeed no longer repaints on events that drew nothing,
the channel list's stats TTL rises above the tick so the repository is
not queried per frame, watch-store alerts batch through the throttled
flush instead of a full-state disk write per new node, and the header's
360-bucket histogram/flags tuples are memoized per minute and packet.
Per open — the resolvers, topology canonical()/display_name(), and
Yen's route search memoize over their frozen inputs; timemachine, chat,
and livefeed drop duplicate queries; the config editor, device actions,
info, advert, and tx-optimize reuse the devstate session cache instead
of re-asking the radio.
Per frame, per screen — dashboard folds five window scans into one
digest; walk caches everything derived from its frozen graph (the
onward-count quadratic included); packet viewer, record dialog, trophy
rows, trace stats/log, and the node-detail route fan memoize on their
frozen inputs, invalidated by revision counters where the input can
move.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The channel share and the contact card built the identical renderable —
intro, code, URL — by hand, one copy each. share_popup in ui/qr.py is
now the single spelling; callers bring their own intro and URL builder
(housekeeping H-001).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two things a grouped list has to keep in view while it scrolls, and neither one
was staying: the lane names that read every row, and the heading that says which
group a row belongs to.
The lanes come first. A column header means the same thing in every section, so
it is not a section landmark at all — it pins for the *whole* list, above any
heading, once it scrolls off (`Separator(pinned=True)`). It is drawn outside the
body slice, so it stays exactly one row: too wide for the terminal it ellipsizes
rather than wrapping and stealing a second reserved row from the content. And it
can now size itself — a Separator title may be a callable taking the render
width — so `column_header`/`Lane` lay each label over its own lane and hand back
the shorter form (DESCRIPTION → DESC) only for the lanes that actually overrun,
from the right, where the trailing lane is the only one with a cell to give.
`lane_header` is that header for `lane_row`'s lanes, shared by the two editors so
they head identical lanes identically.
The headings were the other half, and they were pinning the wrong row. Every
non-pinned separator was a candidate, and the rule takes the last one at or above
the scroll — so what pinned was whatever muted line sat lowest under the heading.
In the Trophy case that meant a discipline's *description* stuck to the top and
the heading itself never did; at the foot of any list, the blank spacer above
Back pinned a blank row. So heading-ness is explicit now (`Separator.heading`,
conferred by `section_heading`, which is why every hand-rolled `── … ──` in the
app — the main menu's categories, the chat picker's Channels/Direct, Trace path's
candidate and ranked lists — now goes through it, and why three lanes headers
that genuinely *are* their block's only landmark say so).
A landmark is also no longer one line but a block: a heading plus the separators
written immediately under it, before the section's first row. Prose written there
is the section's preamble — the Trophy case's "what this discipline scores" — and
it belongs overhead with the heading rather than scrolling away from the rows it
explains. The block hands its rows over one at a time as they leave, so the
heading pins while its description is still the top content row and the two pin
together once both are gone: what is overhead always continues seamlessly into
the body. It never takes more than half the viewport, giving rows up from the
end, so the row that says *which* section this is is the last one dropped.
The frame settles the scroll against however many rows come back rather than
assuming one, and re-asks after sliding the window at the bottom — a heading
among the dropped lines would otherwise vanish instead of pinning.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Braille (one dot per module) would not scan, and the quadrant mosaic
reads worse on screen than the plain half-block form. The original
qr_text render scans and stays.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
One braille dot per module drew smallest but starves the scanner of
ink (each dot carries its white surround), and phones would not read
it. Quadrant mosaics keep every dark module a solid quarter-cell —
the same ink geometry that made the half-block form scannable — at
half its width: 27x27 cells for a contact URL instead of 53x27.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A braille cell packs a 2x4 block of modules, so the code draws at half
the width and a quarter of the height of the half-block form (27x14 vs
53x27 for a contact URL) — small enough for the 40-column PicoCalc
panel. Simulated-camera decode tests pass with dot fills down to 50%,
since a phone's blur merges the dots into blobs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The advert menu's own-node contact card generalises into
show_contact_card (QR code over the raw meshcore://contact/add link,
in one floating view); the Info tab gains a 📱 Share contact row that
pops it for the page's node. Offered only when the full 32-byte key is
known — a prefix-only heard node has nothing scannable to encode.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The "Nodes" menu was a contacts roster mislabeled — it lists the device's
contacts (get_contacts), which upstream meshcore calls "contact" too. Rename
throughout, no CLI alias:
- tools/nodes.py -> tools/contacts.py (ContactsTool, `meshterm contacts`)
- ui/nodes_screen.py -> ui/contacts_screen.py (ContactsScreen/open_contacts)
- ui/nodelist.py -> ui/contactlist.py (ContactListScreen/ContactRow)
- widgets: NodesSort->ContactsSort, nodes_table->contacts_table
Courier's recipient is a contact you address, so its prose and CLI arg
(`courier queue CONTACT ...`) follow; persisted node_key/node_name stay.
The reception/hardware layer keeps "node" — HeardNode, heard_nodes(),
observations.node, trace_hops.node, map/atlas participants, node types, admin
targets, and the Time Machine's reception picker (its "Nodes" heading stands).
CLAUDE.md's lexicon is rewritten to the refined definitions: node = any mesh
radio; contact = a node your device knows (discovered or added).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The key hints now follow one sentence shape across every screen:
navigation keys first, action keys next, Esc last — the quit dialog and
TX apply dialog had Esc leading. The Esc verb is now systematic: "Esc
back" leaves a screen, "Esc close" dismisses a read-only floating view
(result windows and the share/key popups switch over), "Esc cancel"
abandons a prompt, "Esc keep" leaves a value picker unchanged. Bare
hints fill in their missing verbs ("↑↓ move", the map's and composer's
naked "Esc"), the confirm prompt says "Enter select" like its button
siblings, and key notation unifies on the compact forms the app already
half-used: ^R/^End for Ctrl chords (chat's "Ctrl-R" included) and ⌫ for
backspace (the map/atlas "Bksp").
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every screen and dialog title now follows the same three rules. Titles
are sentence-cased ("Trace — YUL-Poly", "Dashboard — mesh overview",
"Nodes"), never bare lowercase ("trace · x", "nodes", "command line ·
x", "path width", "admin login" and a dozen siblings). An em dash
introduces a title's subject or qualifier while middle dots stay for
chained status atoms ("Map · z12 · 34 nodes · 2 km across"), so the two
separators mean different things instead of being used at random. And
no title carries an emoji — the icon belongs to the menu row; a
content-sized floating dialog whose title emoji the terminal draws a
cell narrower than Rich measures leaves the border short (the bug the
Send advert popup already documented), so the Watchtower, Courier,
Time machine, identity-key, reboot, sync, restore, location, factory
reset, and advert dialogs all drop theirs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every select list now builds its closing furniture through one module,
so the conventions hold by construction instead of by copy-paste:
* Back is THE exit word — bare, no arrow, no icon — with exactly one
blank separator above it (back_rows). Courier and Watchtower lose
their "← Back"; the rules popover's "← Close" becomes Back too.
* The staged-changes exit pair (✓ Apply … / ✗ Back — discard) moves to
exit_rows, shared by the config editor and repeater admin, along with
changes_phrase and one confirm_discard dialog (apply/send verb
parametrised).
* Label + description rows share menu_rows (cell-padded lanes): Device
actions, channel detail, repeater actions, and — converted from the
inline "label — description" style — Send advert, Identity key, and
the channel manager's Add-a-channel section, whose rows now read as
two aligned lanes with the trailing … that marks "opens a prompt".
* Grouped-list headings share section_heading (── Label ── in accent):
Watchtower, Courier, the Time Machine picker, and the admin picker
(which also drops the stray 🔑 inside its heading).
* Status marks normalize to ✓/✗ (U+2713/17): Watchtower's ✔ and the
✖ on Cancel-this-message / Stop-watching become err-tinted ✗ rows.
* fit_cells replaces the four private _fit copies (channels, dashboard,
time machine, chat picker) and measures display cells, so a wide
glyph in a name can't skew a lane; empty-state notes drop their
parentheses ("no channels configured yet", "no matches").
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A follow-up interactive-polish pass over the charts, the menu popups, and the
Time Machine.
Charts (braillechart)
- axis_chart now notches ┬ x-axis ticks under a continuous chart's labels too, the
same grammar the columnar day charts use — one axis grammar everywhere. The
dashboard activity chart and the node-history Volume/SNR/Rhythm charts pick this
up through the shared widget; single-line sparklines are untouched.
Time Machine (mesh page)
- Empty days show as zero bars instead of being skipped, so the day charts read as
real calendar time (a fortnight with two dead days no longer fuses to twelve
adjacent bars). Never invents days from before recording began.
- The rhythm chart shares the day charts' y-axis gutter, so its left edge lines up
with them; its own narrower width is unchanged. Its whole-window peak is folded
into the shared gutter sizing (a slice can top a single day's total).
Packet viewer
- Holds a minimum body height so paging between a short packet and a tall one no
longer resizes the dialog out from under the reader.
Menu popups
- Floating dialogs force a full frame rewrite as they're torn down, scrubbing any
double-width glyph a terminal painted a cell past where the differential renderer
tracks it — the "stray characters in a dialog's wake".
- Send advert: reworded a choice, and the fixed list is non-filterable (a stray key
can't narrow/resize it); a select's default footer now only mentions type-to-filter
when it actually filters.
- Watchtower Rules: a blank separator sits above the Close item.
Menu
- The Mesh atlas tool icon is a single-codepoint 🌐 instead of a VS16 🕸️: the
emoji-width calibration strips VS16 on terminals that render it narrow, which
measured the old icon a cell short and drifted that row's help text right.
630 tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two rounds of interactive-polish fixes across the dashboard, Time Machine,
chat, and the menu popups.
Dashboard
- Feed name lane names what a row actually is: a channel message's parsed
sender, or a relayed packet's payload class (channel text / trace / …),
instead of a bare "?" or a redundant "ch N". The class is persisted so
history-seeded rows carry it too (observations.payload_typename, schema v10).
- PgUp/PgDn walk the feed selection so the highlight travels with the view.
Packet viewer
- Takes a live source and re-locates the viewed packet by identity, so packets
arriving after it opens become reachable; the n/total title stays current.
- Decrypts overheard channel text straight from stored history (crypto fields
persisted: chan_hash/cipher_mac/crypted, schema v9).
Time Machine
- Day charts label their bars with column ticks: each date sits under its own
bar with a ┬ notch, shortens (month only on the first tick and on rollover),
and thins to fit. axis_chart grows an optional ticks path for columnar charts.
- Node history charts render through the shared axis_chart widget; the mesh
Rhythm is 96 fifteen-minute slices at 4x width, "now/newest" hints dropped.
Chat
- The byte counter pins to the right edge of the input's last line, so it stays
bottom-right when the compose wraps instead of trailing the cursor.
Menu popups
- The per-node Rules popover gets an explicit Close row.
- The Send advert popup drops the emoji from its floating title (a terminal that
paints it narrow left the content-sized dialog's border short, bleeding the
backdrop through); the menu row keeps its icon.
625 tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The main-menu advert entry ran the same flow as Device actions but
replaced the screen instead of floating over it. Tools can now declare
popup = True to run while the menu stays pushed — their prompts and
result draw as modal dialogs over it, the quit-dialog pattern — and
the advert tool does, so both doors into the flow looked and felt the
same. With the popup one keystroke away there was no reason to keep
the second door: the Device actions row is gone, leaving that screen
to the box-level operations (clock, backup, key, reboot, reset).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
MeshTerm now announces the connected node by itself: a zero-hop advert
every 1/2/3/4 hours (default hourly) and a flood advert every
3/6/12/24/48/168 hours (default daily), each switchable off. The
cadences are staged and applied from a new Background adverts section
in the device-configuration editor, and persist per device (keyed by
public key) in adverts.json alongside the last-sent mark for each type
— so the countdown survives restarts, and a manual send from any
advert flow resets the same clock the scheduler reads.
The scheduler stays transmission-shy: at most one advert per 30 s pass
(a flood due together with a direct waits a pass), and a never-sent
device is armed to count from now rather than advertised immediately.
It holds no device subscription — each pass just skips when nothing is
connected — so reconnects need no special handling, and scripted CLI
runs never start it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The editor menu already lays every setting out in the same
setting / value / description lanes as the table it opened, so the
Review section duplicated the screen it sat on. config_table itself
stays: the config CLI subcommand and Device info still render it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Announcing the node is the everyday operation in the Device actions
bucket, but it sat two screens deep and out of reach of the main menu's
type-to-filter. Give it a top-level entry (order 10, right after Device
actions; Device info shifts to 11) via a new menu-only tool that reuses
the existing advert flow through a standalone send_advert() entry point.
Only SELF_INFO is read on open — the advert op and contact card never
need the full snapshot — so it stays snappy over Bluetooth. The row
inside Device actions stays, and scripting remains under `config
advert` / `config share`, so no new CLI subcommand.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
New staged settings: contact auto-add bitmask, default flood scope
(hashtag-normalized, 31-byte slot), and the two TX delay factors the
library always zeroed (write-only on hardware, so unknown values fall
back to 0 exactly as before). TX power is now capped by the board's
reported max_tx_power instead of a hardcoded 22, with the prompt hint
and validation sharing one effective_maximum.
Device actions gain Sync clock (drift shown before writing host time;
also a config sync-clock CLI command), and Device info now leads with
a live Status panel: role, model/firmware, battery, storage, clock
drift, uptime, and radio/packet statistics — every read best-effort so
older firmware still renders.
The simulator models all of it, including a seeded clock drift.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Dialog footer hints take the border's hue one shade darker (hint.*
theme styles), mirroring the brighter title tinting.
- Dialogs get a blank breathing row above and below the body whenever
it doesn't cost visible content.
- The chat conversation picker gains column headers over its lanes.
- The map screen titles itself "Map", matching its menu item.
- The config editor lays settings out in aligned SETTING / VALUE /
DESCRIPTION columns under a header line, and with changes staged the
Apply and Back rows sit together below the blank separator.
- Device actions move out of the config editor into their own screen
behind a new menu-only device-actions tool (CLI equivalents stay
under the config group).
- Type-to-filter keeps section headers (and column headers) in place,
and section jumps now work over the filtered rows too.
- The main menu aligns tool names and muted descriptions into two
columns, headerless.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Enforce one voice across every screen: column and section headers are
UPPERCASE, menu items are Capitalized buttons, and short descriptions
drop their trailing period (with real ellipses instead of "...").
Tools gain a display `title` separate from their kebab-case CLI name,
so a menu item now reads exactly like the screen it opens ("Device
configuration" opens Device configuration) and result windows inherit
the same name. Every sub-screen backs out via a "Back" row below a
blank separator (the config editor was missing both; its Close is now
Back, spelling out the discard when changes are staged), while the main
menu and device picker keep "Quit". Panel and dialog titles now wear a
brighter tint of their border colour via new title.* theme styles.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Rework the device-configuration screen from a flat list with an
advert-laden "danger zone" into one grouped menu whose every prompt is
a real floating modal popup over a persistent backdrop, matching the
quit dialog. The main menu now stays pushed on the session stack for
the whole editor session, so sub-prompts float over it rather than
replacing the screen.
Settings are staged and applied together (with a dirty-cancel
confirmation); device actions — adverts, reboot, backup/restore,
identity key, factory reset — run immediately behind their own
dialogs. Adverts get a dedicated menu (zero-hop, flood, or share this
node as a QR/URI contact card). Destructive actions gate behind a new
TypedConfirmDialog that requires typing RESET / IMPORT. Reboot hands
off to the reconnect dialog and waits for the companion to return.
Location can be set by pointing at the full-screen map (new
LocationPickScreen) or by typing coordinates.
Make every dialog consistent: a short title in the border, the
instruction as an in-body prompt, and a width sized to its content
instead of a fixed wide cap. TextScreen/SelectScreen/AutocompleteScreen
gain an optional in-body prompt, and those plus ConfirmScreen gain a
dialog_width; the prompt is threaded through the surface and session.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Give the device-config table the same frameless SIMPLE_HEAD look as the
nodes list: left-justified accent title, muted header rule, no borders.
Indent each setting under its section heading, drop the redundant
(key) suffixes, and tighten the descriptions (no trailing periods).
Collapse the adv_loc_policy labels to off/on so the value cell no longer
duplicates the description.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Rename the package directory, imports, brand strings, env-var prefixes,
console-script entry point, and the config/data dir (~/.config/meshterm).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
