A report that opens with "it crashed" costs three round trips before
anyone knows which MeshTerm, on which OS, in which terminal, talking to
which radio. The person who hit the bug is the one least able to answer:
half of it is resolved at boot and shown on no screen -- whether icons
draw, whether powerline separators do, which platform flavour resolved and
why. Diagnostics states all of it at once, as a page under This app and as
meshterm diagnostics.
The page is a bare frame, and that is mechanical rather than aesthetic.
The one thing it is for is getting its text out of the terminal and into
an issue, and a terminal is selected by dragging: a border is characters
on the same lines as the content, so every line of a line-wise selection
arrives with a box-drawing glyph welded to each end. A header and a footer
hint arrive as text that looks like part of the report to whoever reads
the paste. So the page draws its rows and nothing besides, the frame the
share screen already uses for the same kind of reason.
Nothing in the block is private, and that has to be a property rather than
a habit, because the whole premise is that it gets pasted in public by
somebody who did not read it. No pairing PIN, no admin password, no
channel secret, no private key, no position, no contact's name or key. The
mesh arrives as aggregate -- a row count per table and the span the
observations cover -- which is the half that explains a bug without naming
anyone the reporter talks to. Two tests hold the line from opposite sides:
one plants real secrets in the stores that hold them and asserts none came
out, and one refuses the key *names* such a field would take, so a value
the suite cannot plant is still caught by what it would arrive as.
The radio is asked and never required. A report about a companion that
will not connect is exactly the report most worth filing, so the failure
becomes connected=no with the radio's own words in error, and every other
fact still arrives.
Table counts come off sqlite_master rather than a list written down here,
so a table added later starts being reported the day it lands; the
interesting count is always the table nobody expected to be full. Only
overridden preferences are listed -- the defaults are in the source and
identical for everyone.
Both faces share one projection of a facts block, so the page cannot drift
from what the command prints: a field added to the report reaches both
without anyone remembering to. Only the layout differs, in one respect --
the scripted face crops a value too wide for its lane, which is right for
a record somebody will split on whitespace and wrong for a page whose
whole job is to be complete, so a long value hangs under its own block
instead. A path also gains the lane constructor it never had; the machine
face had always spelled one correctly and the plain face could not render
one at all.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Apache-2.0 does not require per-file headers, but a file lifted out of the tree carried no marking at all. One comment line, first (or right after a shebang), on every .py under meshterm/, tests/, packaging/ and scripts/, plus the extensionless SPI bridge; tests/test_spdx.py keeps a new file from landing without one.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <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>
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