The menu asks "What would you like to do?" and its five sections each
name a doing. "What is this thing, and who made it" is not one, and had
nowhere to go — so it gets the sixth section, the one that names a
subject, sorted last where a reader who has run out of things to do finds
it. Three pages, in the order a stranger asks:
About MeshTerm what this is, where it came from, its terms
About the author the person behind it, on the mesh and off it
Support this project what keeps it going, and the ways to help
Every page is scaffolding: the headings are the settled part, and each
section carries one lowercase muted "placeholder — …" line where its
prose will go. That is the app's own empty-state voice, so an unwritten
page reads as deliberately unwritten rather than as a screen that failed
to load, and filling one in means replacing its placeholder — the screen,
the menu rows and the CLI faces all follow unchanged. What is not a
placeholder is the version, the author and the copyright span: they come
from the package itself, so the About page can never describe a build it
isn't running inside.
The pages act on nothing — no radio, no database, no device — so each
opens straight to its screen with no prompt first, and each keeps a CLI
face (meshterm about / about-author / support) printing the same page to
a shell.
Two new icons, both funnelled for the console: 📖 read/about becomes ¶,
the page-of-prose mark, and 💰 support/donate becomes $.
ScrollScreen earns a derived footer hint on the way through. A read-only
body has only two keys to name, the pager and Esc, so passing "↑↓ PgUp/
PgDn scroll · Esc close" at every call site was both repetition and a lie
on a body that fits — the standing rule is that a footer never advertises
a key that would do nothing. Left unset, it now names the pager only
while the content actually overflows, and takes its Esc verb from the
surface: a floating view closes, a full screen goes back. Every existing
caller passes its hint explicitly and is untouched.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Jean-Pierre MartineauandClaude Opus 5
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