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>
Jean-Pierre MartineauandClaude Opus 5
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