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>
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>
The CLI said what it found by printing it: run() called ctx.ui.show(<a table>)
and handed back a ToolResult carrying only bookkeeping. By the time the boundary
saw that result the contacts had gone down the pipe already rendered, and there
was nothing left to offer a second format — which is exactly why --json reached
two commands out of twenty and stopped, each one growing an `if ctx.json_output:`
branch above the rendering that restated the whole answer in a dialect nobody
else could reuse.
exit_code has always worked the other way round: the tool states it, the boundary
turns it into a process status, and no tool calls sys.exit. The answer now travels
the same way. A tool states a Report; a renderer turns it into bytes; --json picks
the renderer.
ui/report.py holds the model — a Listing of records or a set of Facts, whose rows
carry the typed value and whose columns carry both projections of it. ui/fields.py
is the shared shapes, one constructor per concept, so every listing that mentions
a node speaks the same five-key object by construction rather than by review.
ui/renderers.py is the two faces: aligned text for a person, and the bare document
for a program — an array for a listing, an object for a set of facts, no envelope,
because the report a caller needs is still $?.
Nothing is migrated yet: report defaults to None and every command renders exactly
as it did. The script vocabulary the plain face will need lands alongside — ages,
durations, locations, the arrow-drawn route, the comma-joined spec, pinned lanes
for a live stream, and a wrap for the written pages — with the quoting still in
place until its callers move off it.
Also here, because the field library needs it: cli_time_format, the preference that
says whether the command line prints ages or timestamps, with --absolute as its
per-run override rather than a second switch beside it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Jean-Pierre MartineauandClaude Opus 5