MeshTerm/CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

Notable changes to MeshTerm, newest first.

The format follows Keep a Changelog, and the version numbers follow Semantic Versioning — with the caveat SemVer itself makes for a leading zero: while the major version is 0, a minor bump is allowed to change behaviour, not just add to it.

Unreleased

0.3.7 — 2026-09-19

Added

• A setting you use on a node's command line becomes a row on that node's page. Third-party builds carry knobs the catalog has never heard of, and MeshTerm cannot know which firmware a repeater runs without asking — and every question is a paced round trip, so probing for a fork's keys would spend a sweep on every node to benefit a few. Nothing is probed speculatively and the catalog does not grow. Instead a get or set you ran, which that node answered, earns a row under Extra on that node's page: the round trip was one you were spending anyway, and no other node's page changes. Only the reader removes a discovered row — a later read that comes back empty takes it to n/a rather than deleting the evidence that it exists.

• The Windows binary is signed by SignPath Foundation, who issue certificates free to open-source projects, so it no longer arrives as an unknown publisher.

Fixed

• MeshTerm finds your companion on a Mac. Every Mac permanently presents two virtual serial ports — /dev/cu.Bluetooth-Incoming-Port and /dev/cu.debug-console — that carry no USB vendor id, and they were counted as candidates. A Mac with exactly one real board attached therefore saw three devices and refused to choose, so automatic detection could never fire there and every Mac user met "Multiple companion devices detected" on a first run, naming two ports that are not companions as the ones to pick between. Which device is plausible was already known, and already printed in that listing; it now decides with it. A lone unrecognised adapter still connects, and several implausible ports no longer claim to be companions.

• A PIN-protected Bluetooth companion connects on the first attempt on macOS, instead of reporting an error and working when you selected it again. CoreBluetooth has no pairing API: a peripheral pairs implicitly when something touches a characteristic that requires encryption, which is exactly what the companion's firmware demands — so the refusal MeshTerm was treating as a verdict is in fact macOS starting to pair, and its Passkey dialog goes up as the attempt unwinds. The connection now waits for that dialog to be answered, bounded so a dismissed one still fails. Elsewhere a rejection keeps meaning what it always did.

• The map draws its ground again on the macOS and Linux downloads. A standalone build can have no certificate store to consult — the default one names a path baked into the interpreter's own build, which need not exist on a machine that never installed that Python — so every tile fetch failed TLS verification. Because a refused fetch is indistinguishable from empty terrain, the map drew nodes over blank ground and said nothing about why; Windows hid it for so long because it reads the operating system's certificate store. The fetch now falls back to the CA bundle the OS ships. Verification is never weakened: with no bundle to be found it still verifies, and still fails.

• The splash wordmark draws in its own colours on macOS. The art spells brightness the way DOS did, with bold lifting a colour into the bright bank — true on a DOS console and on the PicoCalc, false on macOS Terminal, where bold asks for a heavier typeface and leaves the colour alone. The mark came out muted and its dithered gradients faded toward the wrong end. Brightness is now emitted as the colour it means, which cannot be mistaken for a font weight. Nothing about the art changed, and no cell moved.

• The device list shows the device. The startup splash sized its PORT / ADDRESS column to the longest target and gave the name whatever was left, which held while a Bluetooth address was a 17-character MAC. macOS reports no MAC at all but a 36-character per-machine UUID, and that squeezed the DEVICE column down to the width of its own heading. The name is now sized first and shown in full; the address takes what is left and ellipsizes from the front, keeping the end that tells two targets apart.

Changed

• The macOS download note leads with curl. The flag that makes Gatekeeper refuse an unsigned binary is set by the browser that downloaded it, not by macOS, so fetching it with curl sidesteps the dialog entirely — and for a program whose users are already at a terminal, that is the normal way to install it. The old advice was also going stale: Sequoia removed the right-click → Open bypass, and since Catalina a quarantined binary started from Terminal gets the same block rather than escaping it.

0.3.6 — 2026-09-17

Added

• A contact can be locked. Lock contact on a contact's page keeps it from ever being archived: the archive sweep counts it protected, and the page hides Archive until you unlock it. Locked contacts show a padlock ahead of their node type icon in the Contacts list — 🔒, or the console font's own padlock on the PicoCalc. The lock is kept by MeshTerm, not the radio, and reading the device never clears it.

• Set clock on connect. A new preference in the Device group sets the radio's clock from this computer's every time MeshTerm connects to it — at launch, when you connect later, and after a reconnect, since a dropped link is exactly when a board with no real-time clock may have rebooted and lost the time. It is off by default, runs in the background, and records the drift it corrected only in the log. Scripted commands never write the clock.

• Two installation manuals, one per handheld. docs/picocalc.md takes a stock ClockworkPi PicoCalc from a shopping list to a Linux handheld running MeshTerm with a LoRa radio soldered inside — the Lyra swap, writing Calculinux, the setup script, building and flashing the XIAO firmware (the patch it still needs, explained hunk by hunk), the wiring, and the Lyra setup. docs/uconsole.md installs the SPI bridge on a uConsole with the AIO LoRa board and connects MeshTerm to it. Both are step-by-step in plain language and self-contained, each ending on its own list of what has only been proven on one bench; docs/hardware.md shrinks to the page that says which manual is yours, and the README's new Documentation table points at all of it.

• A basemap doctor for a map that stays blank. Every failure on the map's one network path is logged below the default log level, so tiles that never arrive leave a blank ground and no explanation. scripts/basemap-doctor.py, run on the machine with the problem, reports the Python MeshTerm runs under, its certificate store, the tile source, and the terminal's colour depth, then fetches a real tile and names the cause with its fix: a Python with an empty certificate store (a python.org install on macOS, until Install Certificates.command is run), the network in between, or a terminal at 256 colours, where the basemap's greens and blues collide.

Changed

• Purge contacts is Archive contacts, because archiving is what it does: every contact it takes off the device stays in MeshTerm and can be restored. The row, its screens, its confirm button, and its progress bar all say Archive, and the row wears the 💾 that archiving one contact already wore, not the red 🗑 a deletion gets.

• The archive preview shows the evidence, one kind to a column. Its rows led on a percentile and followed it with the reasons a contact ranked low, three columns under one header, so a message count, an age, and a hop count traded places from row to row. Each column now holds one measurement all the way down: HEARD and PKTS first, drawn as the Contacts list draws them, then the MSGS and HOPS the sweep adds. The percentile is gone, since the list's order already is the ranking. Every contact leads with its node type icon, as in the Contacts list, and ←→ scrolls the columns under a name that stays put. Archiving a single contact from its page names it the same way in the confirm.

• scripts/ is sorted by handheld. The PicoCalc's Calculinux bring-up, its two console-font builds, the GPL-2.0 text that belongs beside the 6×8 one, and the xiao-radio/ firmware kit all live under scripts/picocalc/; the SPI bridge is scripts/uconsole/meshterm-spi-bridge. The index of what every file does and which machine runs it is a section of docs/hardware.md now, beside the table that says which manual is yours, and the folder's own README keeps only a pointer to each handheld's folder and the basemap doctor. Every path in the manuals, the notices, the tests, and the scripts' own headers follows.

• The 6×12 console-font script carries its size in its name, calculinux-console-font-6x12.sh, like its 6×8 sibling always did. Same script, every reference updated.

• A tool that fails says so in an amber ⚠ popup, which wraps a long explanation instead of opening the full-screen result window for it.

• The About page opens on a new description of what MeshTerm is and what it plugs into.

Fixed

• Reading a big contact table no longer times out. The library under MeshTerm gave a whole contacts read one five-second deadline, so a companion holding a few hundred contacts failed every read with "no event received", however healthy the radio. The wait is now for the gap between records — each record restarts it, and the read takes as long as the table does — so a timeout means the companion really stopped answering. An error reply meant for some other command no longer ends the read either.

• An emoji no longer knocks a row out of line. Terminals disagree about how wide they draw an emoji, and a contact's name arrives off the air carrying whatever its owner typed, so one emoji in a name could shift every column after it, and the screen's right border, by a cell. Every glyph that may be drawn as an emoji now gets two cells, and each is drawn at the column MeshTerm measured for it — in lists, in dialogs, and on the screens behind them — so one drawn narrow leaves a blank beside it rather than moving anything else, and a repaint no longer leaves a stale letter standing next to it. A name cut to fit its column is cut between glyphs, never through one, and a newline or an escape in a name no longer ends its row early. MESHTERM_COLUMN_SNAP=0 turns the placement off.

• Hops in near-identical colours stay separate chips. Where a path is drawn as coloured chips, two neighbours of the same colour cut a wedge of bare background out of the route, and two of nearly the same colour were joined by a chevron nobody could see. Both are now divided by a thin chevron in a shade of the first chip's own colour, so the route runs on unbroken and the join still shows. "Nearly the same" is measured the way the eye sees colour, in OKLab, rather than as a hue gap, which judged the greens and the cyans very differently.

• Walking back up a scrolled list no longer lets the highlight ride off the top of its box.

0.3.5 — 2026-09-14

Added

• A release now rebuilds meshterm.net from the tag, so the site carries the version it links to.

Changed

• The purge preview counts in columns. The target ladder used to describe each rung in a phrase — "keeps 45 · archives 12" — so comparing two rungs meant finding the numbers inside two sentences. Keeps and archives are right-aligned columns now under a pinned TARGET / KEEPS / ARCHIVES header, one lane measured across both sections so the numbers run straight down the ladder; a rung that archives nothing shows a muted 0. The reasons a contact ranks low sit in three lanes of their own under one header, instead of running on from wherever the previous reason ended.

• The PayPal link on the Support page, and in the repository's funding file, is PayPal's own donate address rather than a shortener redirect, so a reader can see where it goes.

Fixed

• A name with a skin tone or a cut-off joiner no longer pulls its row out of line. Two real contact names showed it: one carries a skin-tone modifier, which one width table counted as two cells and the terminal draws as none, so the row reserved four cells for a two-cell glyph; the other is a flag sequence cut at the name's byte limit just past its joiner, which swallowed the padding space after it and left the name a cell short. A modifier now measures zero, and a joiner joins only a pictograph. The purge preview, the Contacts list and the chat picker all pad names through that one measurement.

0.3.4 — 2026-09-13

Fixed

• The macOS installers build again. 0.3.3's release never published: both macOS legs stopped at the new third-party notices step, which refuses to bundle a dependency whose wheel carries no licence text — and on macOS bleak's Bluetooth backend pulls in two such wheels, pyobjc-core and pyobjc-framework-libdispatch. Their MIT text is vendored beside pyserial's and pywinrt's now, verified against the wheels themselves, and a test checks every vendored path on every platform so a gap that only one runner can hit is caught here first. The 0.3.3 tag stands with no release behind it; this is the same code with its installers.

0.3.3 — 2026-09-13

Added

• meshterm --version answers, and under --mock the devices command lists the simulator as the one device and scans nothing — it used to walk the serial ports and switch the Bluetooth radio on, on the first command a stranger without a radio would try.

• docs/hardware.md is the one manual for putting MeshTerm on a PicoCalc or a uConsole: the Calculinux bring-up, the console font, the XIAO UART radio from parts to a verified link, the SPI bridge, and a closing list of what has only ever been proven on one bench. The two script READMEs are short indexes pointing at it.

• The standalone installers carry their own licences now. Each one-file build bundles LICENSE, NOTICE and a generated THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt — every MIT/BSD/PSF dependency's own licence text, gathered at build time from what that build actually installed — at the root of the archive, and the same three files ride beside the downloads on the GitHub release page.

• The map credits OpenStreetMap in its own bottom-right corner. The full-screen map is arrived at with © OpenMapTiles · Data from OpenStreetMap there — the corner a paper map puts it in — and the first pan, zoom, reframe or find keystroke collapses it to © OpenStreetMap, which is a complete credit in its own right, so nothing is ever taken back. It costs no chrome at all: no title atom, no footer character, no body row. On a desktop terminal it is set into the panel's bottom border rule, right-justified, the way a title sits in the top one, so the drawing keeps every cell it had; on the PicoCalc, whose frame has no bottom rule to set anything into, it rides the right end of the map's own last row, where a pan can move the ground out from under it. The node page's location preview carries the short form throughout, being a picture rather than a place. The licence and its URL live where they can be read — the About page, which also now names OpenMapTiles, as OpenFreeMap asks and neither the page nor the README did.

• Every Python file names its licence with an SPDX identifier on its first line (second, after a shebang), and tests/test_spdx.py keeps a new file from landing without one. Apache-2.0 does not require per-file headers, but a file lifted out of the tree carried no marking at all.

• The XIAO firmware patch carries MeshCore's MIT notice beside it as scripts/xiao-radio/LICENSE.MeshCore, and the console-font scripts state that the shared generator block is offered under GPL-2.0-only as well as Apache-2.0, which is what lets the GPL-2.0-only 6×8 script run it.

• The SPI radio bridge runs on openhop_core. The library the uConsole's software node runs on was renamed from pymc_core in 2026, and the current meshcore-uconsole package depends on the new name. meshterm-spi-bridge now drives either runtime, preferring the newer, and two of its three compatibility shims stand down under it — openhop_core accepts long ACK payloads and pushes completed trace replies itself; only the raw RX-log push is still the bridge's. On a bookworm uConsole, where the trixie package cannot run, the bridge takes a venv of its own with openhop-core[hardware] and still uses the GUI's identity, so it stays the same node. Verified on the device: radio up, 159 contacts restored, info and contacts answered over TCP.

• The PicoCalc picks its console font, and MeshTerm hands the console back. A Console font row under Display on the Preferences page offers 6x12 (53x26) — the font the device boots in — and 6x8 (53x40), fourteen more rows of the same glyph inventory in a shorter cell. Picking one is the preview: the console loads it there and then, and the page repaints at the new height (the kernel raises SIGWINCH on a font change), so the choice is looked at before it is kept. Apply keeps it; leaving and discarding puts the saved font back. The 6×8 base has no Cyrillic, so a node named in Cyrillic draws as boxes on it.

  A virtual terminal has one font for the whole console, so switching MeshTerm's switches the shell's. It saves whatever font was loaded before the first paint and reloads it on the way out — from the session's teardown and from an atexit hook, so quitting, an unwind and a crash all leave the console as they found it. Off the handheld, off a real VT, or with no setfont, none of it happens and the log says which. The row is drawn on the PicoCalc only, while the value round-trips through preferences.toml everywhere.

  The 6×8 font's build moved into scripts/calculinux-console-font-6x8.sh, on its own because its base bitmap is the Linux kernel's font_6x8 and therefore GPL-2.0 — marked as such, with the licence beside it, and reading the donor, alias and keeper tables out of the 6×12 script rather than keeping a second copy of them. Running the 6×12 script still builds both.

Changed

• Preferences are kept in preferences.toml. The same file as before — only what you have changed, grouped and commented the way the Preferences page reads — in the format config.toml and the device-config backups already use, so every file you edit by hand speaks one syntax and MeshTerm no longer needs PyYAML. A preferences.yaml from an earlier build is not read: set those preferences again, or copy the lines across as key = value with text in quotes. A line TOML refuses costs only that line, and a word left unquoted (log_level = DEBUG) is still understood.

• A trophy case record is a page, not a card floating over the list. It fills the frame like the browser under it and takes the node page's shape: a header line that reads as a sentence — the discipline's mark, its standing and its score — over three tabs. Info is the record's stats, identity first, with the page's actions at its foot; Route is the walk two ways, the route graph and the route line, where Enter traces the path on show; Area is the ground the walk covered, drawn across the whole stage with every pin labelled by its hash byte so a pin and the graph node under it match by eye. Tab and Shift+Tab switch, F3 on the PicoCalc. The trophy case itself fills the frame whichever way it is opened, from the menu or from a trace.

• A QR code is white on black, and when it is the answer it is the whole screen. A camera reads contrast, and light-on-dark is what a scanner expects of a screen, so every code MeshTerm draws is pure white on pure black on both themes. A channel's share link and a contact card are no longer a titled popup with an instruction over the code: they are a bare frame with nothing on it but the code and the URL it encodes, and Esc leaves.

• A question is a popup, and it is gone before the page it asked for opens. The trace target, the repeater admin's node and the TX optimize link used to stay pushed as full screens under the page they led to, so Esc out of a trace or an admin page landed back on the list it was picked from — two places where there is one. Each now floats over the main menu, is popped before its page opens, and Esc from the page lands on the menu. The TX optimize link is one box that turns its page (… · step 1 of 2): Esc on the second step turns back with the picked node still highlighted. A refused admin login re-asks with the same node highlighted.

• The three delay settings — TX delay, direct TX delay and RX delay — show, stage and send at one decimal on both the repeater admin and Device config pages; Device config's RX delay had no rounding at all.

• The source distribution ships the package, its tests and the manual, not the repository: the Claude skills, the GitHub config, the PyInstaller spec and the device scripts are out of it.

Fixed

• A share code's bottom-left finder was one cell skewed, so a camera could not lock on. Rich's centre justify strips a row's trailing spaces before padding it, so a code row whose right edge was light modules landed a column off its neighbours. A code is now moved across a line one way only, the same indent in front of every row.

0.3.2 — 2026-09-11

Added

• Device config holds every setting the companion firmware has, and the device actions with them. Clock sync, backup and restore, the identity key, reboot and factory reset were a menu entry of their own; they are an Actions section on the Device config page now, and the page takes the repeater admin page's shape — full-screen, titled with the node's name and a staged count, with Apply sending in place one value at a time and leaving a value the device refused staged beside its reason.

  The settings were checked against the firmware itself rather than the library that talks to it. New are client repeat, the auto-add hop limit and a row for each custom variable the device reports, and the firmware's own bounds apply: a PIN of 0 or six digits, path-hash modes 0–2, 150–2500 MHz, 7–500 kHz, TX power from −9 dBm.

• Both editor pages pick a location on the map. A "Pick location on map…" row sits above separate latitude and longitude rows, opens the map on the position as staged — or as the device last reported it — and stages both coordinates at once. Device config's single Location row and its Pick / Type / Clear dialog are gone.

Changed

• Repeater admin speaks the firmware's own CLI, every setting of it. The catalog had been written from convention, and the firmware disagreed: the delays are floats (0.5 showed as 0, and typing it back was refused), bandwidth, spreading factor and coding rate are one radio setting rather than three keys, the guest password is readable, and path.hash.mode and twenty-odd others were missing. It is transcribed from the firmware source now. Read settings leaves every row answered — a value, empty, or n/a where the node's firmware lacks the setting — and ^R (F3 on the PicoCalc) re-reads the highlighted row alone.

• Repeater admin fills the frame like Device config, instead of floating over the node picker it was opened from.

• A packet's relay chain is drawn as the middle of a route. The via field names the repeaters that forwarded a frame and neither the node that sent it nor the one that heard it, yet its ribbon opened and closed square — the mark for the route began and ended here. Both ends wear the chevron now, as the TX sweep's composed relays do, and arrow mode says the same with a leading and a trailing →. Under the chain, the note about which node the reception described gives way to the hop count.

Fixed

• Retuning a companion's radio switched off its relaying. The firmware reads the radio command's trailing client-repeat byte as off when it is missing, and nothing sent it. Every radio edit restates it now.

• The location picker opens at once. It waited on the radio for the contact list first, and a busy companion held it shut for twenty-odd seconds only to open with no contacts anyway; it opens on what is cached now and adds the rest when the radio answers.

• A repeater setting its firmware lacks reads n/a, rather than the ? that says it was never asked.

• Every icon-led list starts its labels in the same cell. Some icons draw one cell wide and most emoji two, so a row led by ↻, ⌨ or 🗑 started its words a column early; each list pads its icons out to the widest one now.

• Neither editor page slides its rows sideways any more — a long row ends at the edge.

0.3.1 — 2026-09-09

Added

• Devices you never want to connect to can be hidden from the splash. A machine with a debug probe, a programmer and a USB adapter soldered into it listed all three on every start, in front of the one radio you came for. h drops the highlighted device and remembers it, ⇧H brings every hidden one back, and both keys are named in the footer only where they would act.

  Hiding is a listing choice and nothing else — a hidden device is still remembered, still resolvable by --port, and shows itself again the moment it is connected to. The highlight stays where the row was rather than jumping back to the remembered default, so a run of adapters clears with a run of presses.

Changed

• The chat picker's conversation lane is measured against the names the list actually holds, instead of a flat 22 cells. Every cell past the longest name was padding in front of a short one, taken straight out of the last-message preview — the only run on the row with something to say, and on the PicoCalc's 53 columns it left the message 12 cells. 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 ←→ now slides the message under the pinned columns to read one past its own edge.

• Channels shows the wait instead of announcing the result. Every action banked a "created X" note that surfaced only once the manager closed — by which time the refreshed list had already shown the result — and the notes accumulated: at three changes in one visit the outcome outgrew the acknowledgement popup and came back as the full-frame result window instead, so the same visit reported itself two different ways depending on how much had been done in it. Every device action now reports while it runs, under a modal busy card, and the count stays in the run log.

• Renaming a channel no longer closes the page it renamed. The channel is still there and that is still its page, so the new name and key are read back into the title and the rows, and the reader stays put. Only clearing it closes it, which is the one case where what the page was about is gone.

• Esc on the device splash says bye rather than quit — the splash is the door, and nothing has been started there to quit out of.

Fixed

• macOS and Linux were drawing the whole app in 256 colours. prompt_toolkit picks the colour depth per output class, and its two classes disagree: the Windows one returns truecolor outright, the VT100 one returns 8-bit for every TERM but linux. Nothing ever passed a depth, so the same build drawing the same theme was 24-bit on Windows and quantized to the 216-colour cube everywhere else — silently, which is why it went unnoticed. The app looked fine, just flatter.

  It costs exactly what this palette is made of. The seven heat steps and the per-node hue wheel are close pastels chosen to be told apart; snapped to the cube, neighbours collide and an identity stops being distinguishable by hue. COLORTERM is not consulted by prompt_toolkit at all, so a terminal announcing truecolor the conventional way was still handed 256.

  The resolver only ever raises the verdict. A terminal that cannot be shown to do better keeps precisely the depth it had, because guessing 24-bit at a terminal without it costs not a duller palette but the colour entirely. A 16-slot console is never promoted — the theme addresses its palette by index, and RGB has nowhere to land there.

• Adding a channel could write straight over one that was already there. The free-slot probe stops for two very different reasons and returned the same short list either way: off the end of the configured slots it is the truth, but a read that simply failed left whatever it had — and that was cached for the session, an empty one reading exactly like a device with no channels, a truncated one making the next free slot look free with a channel sitting in it. The probe now says whether it finished, an unfinished one is answered but not kept, and every add confirms the slot is empty before anything is written to it.

• Keys tapped during a slow channel write were landing in the filter of the list underneath, which then came back showing nothing. The busy card is modal, so the press dies on the card instead.

• Channels at 53 columns. The column header was a hand-built string with no idea of the render width: it ran to 54 cells and wrapped, costing a content row out of twenty-six and drawing the pinned landmark twice. The command rows hand-padded their icons, so the one-cell marks started their labels a column left of the two-cell ones. The empty-message count was ·, which in that same row is also the status separator and what the console folds 🔕 to — a muted channel with no messages drew it twice, two cells apart, meaning different things; it is ○ now, the app's empty mark. And the detail title was a 42-cell parenthesised blob that filled the PicoCalc's whole title bar, leaving nowhere to say Esc leaves.

• Every channel edit paid up to 64 device round-trips before the screen could redraw. The chat service's slot map was walking the radio itself, unbounded, skipping empty slots all the way to the 64-slot cap on firmware that never rejects an index — on top of the manager's own re-read. It builds from the probe that was being made anyway.

• A channel write that landed and then raised never invalidated what it had made stale, so a slot list and a chat slot map outlived a layout that had already moved. A reorder that drops partway now says so at once, since the reader is about to be looking straight at the half-applied layout, and the standard Public channel can no longer be added twice by a second press already on its way.

• Two of the Trophy case's seven discipline marks started their titles a column left of their siblings: 🛣 and 🕸 sit outside Emoji_Presentation, so Rich and wcwidth both measure them at one cell where the other five measure two. The marks now pad out to the widest of the seven, measured against what the platform will actually draw rather than written down.

• A route that has finished no longer ends on the chevron that means "the path runs on past the edge" — it ends square, and the cell that frees up goes back to the route.

• A fully charged pack redrew the activity sparkline twice a minute. The charger cuts out at full, the pack settles back to 99, the charger restarts, and the companion reports that flip every poll for as long as the thing is plugged in. The gauge is pinned to the header's right edge and the pulse takes whatever is left, so the fourth cell 100% needed came off the sparkline and redrew the whole activity history at a new scale, on a device sitting still. A full pack reads 100 now, with no sign: three cells, exactly as the 99% it keeps flipping back to, and the one reading whose % can be inferred.

• On the PicoCalc every channel row in the chat picker sat a cell to the left of every direct row, with the header over neither — the marker lane padded to a two-cell channel glyph that the console font draws in one.

• The device splash's own header wrapped at 53 columns, and its DEVICE lane sized itself to the longest name — which for a USB adapter is a forty-character product string, pushing HARDWARE off the edge entirely. The name lane yields now, and ←→ reads the rest of a long model string with the lanes in front of it pinned.

0.3.0 — 2026-09-08

The command line was rebuilt around the fact that it has two readers, and that trying to serve both with one stream had been making it worse at each.

Added

• --json, on every command. It used to be honoured by two of twenty and silently ignored by the rest, so meshterm --json contacts | jq failed while MeshTerm reported success. It now covers all 49 subcommands: an array for a listing, an object for a set of facts, one compact line per document, and no envelope — contacts --json | jq '.[].node.name' reads the way it looks.

  Values are typed (20, not "20"), absent is null and never an omitted key, timestamps are UTC RFC 3339 to the second so string comparison is time comparison, and a numeric field carries its unit in its key (snr_db, uptime_s, rtt_ms). A key is never truncated — a short id is a hash, because a truncated key cannot go back into --to. monitor and chat listen emit one document per record as they arrive, all the same shape.

  --json changes the rendering and never the report: the same exit status, the same records. An empty result prints its empty document and still exits 5.

• A documented exit status per outcome, listed under every --help: 0 success, 1 failure, 2 usage error, 3 no device, 4 the device was reached but the operation failed, 5 nothing to report.

  5 is the one worth knowing about. A command that ran fine and found nothing — an empty contact list, a trace that never came home — returns it, so a script can tell "found nothing" from "worked" without counting lines.

• --absolute, restoring ISO-8601 timestamps for a run, over a new cli_time_format preference. JSON is always absolute UTC regardless: a local offset is a fact about the machine that ran the command, not about the event.

• A global option may be typed anywhere. meshterm contacts --json and meshterm --json contacts are the same run. The first is what everyone types and it used to fail with a bare usage error.

• contacts gains HASH and LOCATION. The hash is the token --path takes; you used to slice it out of KEY by hand. preferences show gains DESCRIPTION back, and info glosses its second-valued readings (uptime_s 93784 (1d 2h)).

• docs/cli.md, a manual for the whole thing: both faces of every command, where MeshTerm keeps its state, what each failure looks like, and recipes. Every sample in it is captured from a real run rather than written.

Changed

• The plain face is for a person now, and says so. It had grown the menu's manners — colour, boxes, section headings, glyph columns, a closing ✓ — and then briefly overcorrected into something only awk could love. Machine-readability is --json's job, so the plain face is free to be read: no colour and no frames, still, but alignment is the delimiter and names are bare rather than "quoted".

• A time is an age — now, 5m, 3h, never — because "recently?" is the question you typed the command to ask. An absolute instant survives where the instant is the fact: the device clock, an appointment, a live capture's own TIME.

• A route is drawn and a path is typed. A route reads Yagi-Repeater (a1) → Alice (d4) → MockCompanion (00); a --path spec stays the comma-joined hex it has to be, because it is the one line that round-trips. Our own node is a hop like any other — the menu's ★ says "you already know who this is", which is true of the reader and false of whoever opens the file later.

• A value read out of show can be typed back into set. The settings dump printed an enum as 0 (off) and an unset string as (not set), neither of which config set would take back.

• ui.ack and a tool's closing message go to stderr rather than being dropped. stderr keeps the promise the dropping was made to keep — a redirect catches only the answer — while giving the person at the prompt back their ✓ and their count.

• --help is Click's own plain help, with no boxed panels and no markup to strip out of a pipe.

Fixed

• A node name could not be printed safely. A node broadcasts its own name, and Rich read [...] in one as console markup: a node called [bold]Loud printed as Loud — silently no longer the string that identifies it — and one called [/]Bob raised MarkupError and took the command down, then took the error handler down with it while reporting the crash.

• A control character in a name reached stdout. Escaping covered the newline, the tab and the return and let ESC through, which put a live colour run into the caller's file — the one thing "no escape sequences" exists to prevent. BEL was dropped in silence, so the printed name was not the advertised one, and U+2028 ended the record like a newline. It is now every C0 and C1 control plus the Unicode separators.

• Numeric columns never right-aligned. Rich's Text.wrap returns early on overflow="ignore", above the justify step, so asking for one threw the other away — while the standard, the code's own docstring and the manual all promised alignment.

• config show printed an empty string as "", which config set read as those two characters. Feeding a dump back replaced every empty setting with a pair of quote marks, and the next dump looked identical, so nothing ever said so. It also masked an unreported PIN behind bullets, telling the reader the radio was PIN-locked when it was not.

• meshterm about drew the rule above its colophon at console width — one 48KB line in a 4KB page.

• config export-key > key.hex wrote a file with [muted] tags around the key that was supposed to be its whole content.

• Failures were classified wrong in six places. Nothing transmitted is not a device failure: an unopenable --port is 3 rather than 4 with a message about a connection there had never been, and a missing --yes, an unknown --sort/--category/--profile, a missing admin password, an unknown contact and a bad --at are all usage errors. A --category typo used to come back as 5 — indistinguishable from a real empty result — and an unknown --profile fell through to whichever radio was attached, which is the one wrong answer that puts a packet on the air.

• Errors go to stderr, in the meshterm: what went wrong shape, and stop folding at 80 columns — a sentence broken across three lines is a sentence grep cannot find. Progress bars moved there too and draw nothing off a terminal.

• An expected failure no longer dumps a traceback. A lost serial link, or an argument a command rejected on its own, reads as one line and the right exit status.

Removed

• meshterm map. A map is a picture — braille cells whose meaning is their position, and whose nodes are told apart by colour. Stripped of colour it would be unreadable; left coloured it was the one command whose output could not be piped anywhere useful. The map stays in the menu, and the located nodes are scriptable through contacts, which now carries their coordinates.

• The QR codes from channels share, config share and the About pages' scripted face. A QR is a second rendering of a link the output already prints, drawn for a phone pointed at a screen; redirected into a file it was a block of block characters wrapped around the one thing that was actually the answer. The menu still draws them.

0.2.8 — 2026-09-07

Fixed

• The window MeshTerm opened for itself was too small, and it showed. The startup wordmark is 71 columns wide; below that the splash quietly swaps to the narrow one drawn for the PicoCalc — so a desktop session came up wearing the handheld's mark, with every menu description truncated onto the pager underneath it.

  MeshTerm was opening a tab in whatever Windows Terminal window happened to be around, inheriting its size (64 columns on the machine this was found on). It now asks for a window of its own, sized from the platform's own minimum plus a margin. Windows Terminal clamps that to what the display can show, so a small screen degrades exactly as before.

• The tab it opens is titled MeshTerm, not the executable's full path — which on a downloaded build was a line of Downloads folder.

0.2.7 — 2026-09-07

Changed

• MeshTerm moves to Windows Terminal rather than asking to. It still says so, and still tells you how to stop it, but it doesn't put the question. The classic console can't draw a single icon whatever font it's given, so there was only one sensible answer — and it was being asked of someone who hadn't seen the app yet and had nothing to judge it by.

  Installing a font still asks, because that writes a file to your machine. Moving window doesn't. Preferences → Display → Console setup stops both.

0.2.6 — 2026-09-07

Fixed

• Accepting "reopen in Windows Terminal" killed the session in the downloadable builds. A new window opened, printed Security validation failure: parent process has different executable!, and exited — while the window that made the offer had already closed. Worse than never offering.

  A one-file build unpacks itself and re-runs itself, the two halves coordinating through private environment variables. Those were being handed to the new copy, which concluded it was the second half of a launch it never made, checked that its parent was the same program, found Windows Terminal instead, and stopped. They are stripped now.

  It worked perfectly when run from source, which is the whole lesson: the packaged build is its own platform.

0.2.5 — 2026-09-07

Fixed

• Every icon was a box in the classic Windows console. That console — which is what a double-clicked build still gets — draws no emoji at all, whatever font it is set to, so the menu came up as rows of replacement characters.

  MeshTerm now works out which console it is running in and, on that one, draws its icons through the compact single-character table it already keeps for the PicoCalc: ☼ for an advert, ¶ for a message, ★ for the trophy case. Nothing else about the desktop layout changes — same width, same colours, same accented names. Running in Windows Terminal or VS Code's terminal keeps the emoji, and MESHTERM_EMOJI=1 or =0 forces the matter either way. meshterm platform reports which it chose and why.

Added

• MeshTerm offers to reopen itself in Windows Terminal. The classic Windows console — what you get from a double-click — can't show the emoji icons at all, whatever font it is given: the only two Windows fonts with emoji in them are proportional, and a console won't take one. A terminal is the only thing that fixes it, so MeshTerm now offers to move there. One keypress, nothing installed, nothing changed — and you get the app as it was drawn: icons, charts, path chips and all.

• MeshTerm can install a font its charts will actually draw in — for anyone who stays in the classic console. That console does no font fallback at all, and none of the fonts it offers can draw braille, which every timeline and activity graph in MeshTerm is made of. Neither can Hack Nerd Font, JetBrains Mono, Fira Code, Source Code Pro, or even DejaVu Sans Mono; the usual advice works only because most terminals quietly fall back to a proportional font.

  So MeshTerm now ships Cascadia Mono PL — Microsoft's console font, SIL OFL — and on that console offers to use it. If you already have Cascadia (every Windows 11 machine, and anyone with Windows Terminal) it just switches to it. If not, it offers to install it for you: no administrator rights, nothing downloaded, 723 KB. Saying no explains what saying no looks like and asks once more; a second no is remembered and never raised again. Preferences → Display → Console setup changes your mind about either offer.

0.2.4 — 2026-09-07

Fixed

• MeshTerm crashed on startup on Windows. Building the screen raised ctypes.ArgumentError: expected LP__CSBI instance instead of pointer to CONSOLE_SCREEN_BUFFER_INFO, and on a double-clicked build the traceback and the window it was printed in were destroyed together.

  ctypes.windll.kernel32 is a cache: every caller in a process gets the same object, and each function on it is a shared attribute. The emoji-width probe declared GetConsoleScreenBufferInfo as taking a pointer to its copy of the screen-buffer struct — which rewrote the signature for prompt_toolkit, which then called that same function with a pointer to its copy. Same layout, different class; ctypes refused.

  Nothing in MeshTerm reaches for ctypes.windll any more. Five call sites now take private handles from core/win32dll.py, so a signature declared for one purpose is invisible to everything else in the process.

Changed

• The log-detail preference offers the plain level names — Error, Warning, Info, Debug — rather than descriptions of them. Someone being talked through a problem is told "set it to debug", not "set it to everything".

0.2.3 — 2026-09-07

Changed

• The log is a plain text file, ~/.meshterm/meshterm.log, one readable line per record with the traceback under the line that raised it. It was JSON Lines on the theory that something would replay it; nothing ever did, and the job it actually has is being opened by a person who has hit a problem.
• It rotates, at 2 MB across three files. It used to grow without limit — a real one reached 11 MB in ten weeks, which is a lot of disk on a handheld and an unreasonable thing to attach to an issue.
• How much it keeps is a preference — log_level, under a new Diagnostics group, defaulting to WARNING. The file now holds the problems rather than a narration of a working session: of the last twenty thousand records in a real log, twelve were a warning or an error.

Added

• One interactive MeshTerm per data directory. A second one is turned away with the way out in the message, rather than quietly overwriting the first one's contacts and settings. The lock is held by the operating system, so a crash releases it — a process id in a file would leave a lock nobody could explain.
• Failures are written down. Every unhandled error reaches the log with its traceback and the terminal says where to find it; expected errors go in as warnings, because a log that only holds crashes cannot answer "what happened just before". The bug report form asks for the file.
• The window stays open after a crash when MeshTerm owns it. Double-clicking the executable on Windows gives the process its own console, which is destroyed the instant the process ends — so an error was drawn and erased together and all anyone saw was a flash. It now waits for a keypress, but only on that path: a run from a shell leaves its output on screen already, and a successful run should not make anyone press a key.
• A readable answer when there is no Windows console. Git Bash, MSYS and Cygwin are not Windows consoles, and prompt_toolkit's own error says so in the language of its internals, arriving as a traceback that reads like a broken app rather than the instruction it is.

Fixed

• All ten stores write through one helper, and the file each writes to first is named for the process writing it. They shared a fixed .tmp name, so two copies of MeshTerm saving at the same moment took turns inside one scratch file and then each renamed whatever was in it over the real one. The rename was always atomic; what was being renamed was not.

0.2.2 — 2026-09-07

Fixed

• The downloadable builds were missing every tool. They started, printed help and drew the specimen card, and had a menu with nothing in it but Quit — no contacts, no map, no trace, no chat. Tools are found at runtime with pkgutil.iter_modules, which finds nothing inside a frozen bundle, so none of them registered. The packaging now collects them, and the smoke tests run a tool-provided subcommand instead of only --help, which a gutted build passes perfectly well.

Added

• MESHTERM_HOME points config and data somewhere other than ~/.meshterm. Every copy of MeshTerm shared one directory, so trying a downloaded build meant letting it open the same history database as the one you use — the valuable half of an install, with no way to keep a second copy away from it. Also useful for a portable install, or two radios kept apart.

0.2.1 — 2026-09-07

Fixed

• The formatter is pinned. ruff>=0.4 meant CI installed a newer ruff than a laptop had, and the two disagreed about whether the tree was clean — 0.16 formats Python blocks inside Markdown and 0.15 doesn't, so the first CI run went red on a file that was fine locally. An unpinned formatter isn't a gate.
• docs/ is out of ruff's reach. The survey documents quote code as it looked on a past date, in fragments that were never whole programs; a formatter rewriting a quotation edits the record.
• The installer builds only run for main. Every Dependabot branch that bumped an action touched the workflow file, matched its path filter, and started a five-platform build.

Changed

• The distribution is named mesh-term. PyPI prohibits meshterm (pypi/support#12162), and the name you install is the only thing that changes: the import package and the command are both still meshterm.
• pyproject.toml carries the metadata a stranger sees on a package page — project URLs, trove classifiers, and the licence as a PEP 639 expression.

Added

• Continuous integration. Lint once, tests across seven OS and Python combinations, and a packaging job that installs the built wheel into a clean environment and runs the command from outside the source tree.
• A release workflow with no automatic trigger, which publishes nothing until a human runs it on purpose and types the version.
• A security policy, a code of conduct, issue and pull request templates, weekly dependency updates, and the funding links the app's own support page already offers.
• A Releases page. Pushing a version tag builds the binaries and attaches them, with a combined SHA256SUMS and release notes taken from this file. It stays inside GitHub and is not the PyPI publish, which remains a separate and deliberate act.
• Standalone builds. A PyInstaller spec and a workflow that builds a single runnable file for Windows, macOS (Intel and Apple silicon) and Linux (x64 and ARM64), checks each one runs from outside the source tree, and writes a checksum beside it. Nothing is published; the files are workflow artifacts until someone attaches them to a release.

0.2.0 — 2026-09-07

The first version to carry a changelog. Everything before it is in the commit log and is deliberately not reconstructed here.

Added

• This file.

Changed

• The project description now says what MeshTerm is, how it reaches a radio, and which systems it runs on, instead of naming a category. It is the PyPI summary and the package docstring, which no longer disagree.
• The version is written in exactly one place, meshterm/__init__.py. The distribution metadata reads it from there rather than repeating it, so the number on the splash screen and the number in a built wheel cannot drift apart.
• The basemap user agent identifies the real repository and reports the running version. It previously sent a bare https://github.com/ and a hardcoded 0.1 to OpenFreeMap, which is the only handle a tile operator has on a client.
• macOS and Bluetooth are spelled one way across the project. BLE stays where it is an identifier — the transport name, the config keys, the CLI.
• meshterm --help opens with the same description as the package summary and the PyPI page, instead of a fourth wording of its own.

Fixed

• The three commands CONTRIBUTING.md asks contributors to run all pass: python -m pytest -q, ruff check ., and ruff format --check .. The lint gate had been reporting 2222 errors and the format gate 154 files, so a first contributor could not tell their own diff from the background.
• Two TYPE_CHECKING imports the test suite referenced but never imported, on paths that happened never to run.