Jean-Pierre MartineauandClaude Opus 5
55797a5bc6
It had grown to 580 lines, and most of what a newcomer scrolled past was reference material: the five feature tables, the CLI cookbook with both output faces and the exit statuses, the configuration reference, and the package layout. None of that is what somebody reads while deciding whether to install this. It is 375 lines now and it does onboarding and install -- what MeshTerm is, the screenshots, how to get it running, a quick start, and how the project is run. The rest moved under docs/ behind a new docs/README.md index, which GitHub renders when you browse to the folder. The index also lists the two code surveys, which the README's own table never did. The prose moved by extracting line ranges rather than retyping, so anything that did not need rewording is byte-identical. All 255 relative links across the 13 markdown files resolve, anchors included. Two changes are not relocations. "## Development" is deleted rather than moved, because CONTRIBUTING.md already carried every command in it plus the blame-ignore config and the 72-column gallery gate. And the Windows console section is summarised in Install with the full explanation in docs/terminals.md, since a Windows user meeting empty boxes cannot afford to miss it. Licensing stays where it was. Acknowledgements, the map and font credits, the dependency table and the licence are all still in the README, which is where a redistributor looks and where SignPath Foundation will look for its credit. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Terminals, icons, and the Windows console
Why MeshTerm looks right in some terminals and draws empty boxes in others, what it does about it on Windows, and how to turn all of that off.
MeshTerm is drawn with emoji icons, braille charts and powerline path chips. Whether you see them is up to your terminal, not really your font: a modern terminal, asked for a character its font doesn't have, quietly borrows it from another font on the machine. That's why the app looks right in Windows Terminal, in VS Code's terminal, and on macOS and Linux — usually with a font that contains almost none of it.
The classic Windows console — the black cmd.exe window you get from a double-click —
doesn't borrow. It draws what its one font holds and empty boxes for everything else, and
no font fixes the icons there: the only two fonts on a Windows machine with emoji in them
are proportional, and a console won't take a proportional font.
So when MeshTerm lands in that console it just moves to Windows Terminal — it says so, and opens there. Nothing is installed and nothing is changed; it's one window instead of another, and it's the whole app exactly as the screenshots show it. Windows Terminal is already on every Windows 11 machine and is a free install on Windows 10.
Where there's no Windows Terminal to move to, MeshTerm offers the next best thing instead — the charts and marks, without the icons. It ships Cascadia Mono PL, Microsoft's own console font and one of the very few monospace faces that carries braille at all, and will install it just for you: no administrator rights, nothing downloaded. If you already have Cascadia it simply switches to it.
Preferences → Display → Console setup turns all of this off if you'd rather stay put.
Where MeshTerm keeps its state, and how to point a trial run somewhere else, is in Configuring MeshTerm.