User feedback: tool/thinking rows did a "v small quick lil jump up and
down" when toggled, worst on the bottom rows.
Root cause (verified live with 10ms tmux capture sampling): the
transcript scrollbox's sticky-bottom re-pin and the scroll anchor fought
AFTER paint. On a toggle near the bottom, the content-height change runs
ScrollBox.recalculateBarProps -> applyStickyStart("bottom") (the user is
at the sticky position, so _hasManualScroll is false), which paints a
fully bottom-pinned frame; the anchor's 4x16ms scrollTo re-asserts then
yanked the viewport back up. The capture burst shows the transient
pinned frame between two anchored ones on every expand — the visible
down-up flick.
Fix at the cause instead of correcting after the effect: suspend
stickyScroll (a runtime get/set property on ScrollBoxRenderable) BEFORE
running the toggle and restore it ~100ms later, once the content height
has settled. With sticky off, the toggle's layout pass leaves scrollTop
untouched — the clicked header's document position is unchanged (content
grows/shrinks below it), so nothing moves and there is nothing left to
flicker; a collapse past the new bottom clamps naturally via the
ScrollBar scrollSize setter. Restoring recomputes the manual-scroll
state from the actual position: still at the bottom -> keeps pinning for
new content; mid-content -> manual-scroll semantics until the user
returns (the same end state the old anchor produced). Rapid re-toggles
inside the window keep the ORIGINAL saved value.
The far-from-bottom anchor guarantee is unchanged (scrollTop is simply
never touched), pinned headlessly in scrollAnchor.test.tsx along with
the suspension sequencing, the clamp-then-re-pin collapse path, and the
double-toggle restore. ffiSafe's tall-diff scroll-cut regression now
drives the negative-y condition explicitly via wheel scrolls (the old
anchor exercised it through the very transient sticky-bottom frames this
fix removes).
Verified live (tmux, real gateway): before — toggling the bottom rows
painted a transient bottom-pinned frame (f141 of a 10ms burst); after —
three toggle bursts produce ONLY the clean before/after states (4
distinct frames in 458 samples), headers hold their row, including the
bottom-most rows.
User feedback: "for all tools, i'd want all their output viewing enabled
to be infinite by default."
Flip envOutputLines (HERMES_TUI_TOOL_OUTPUT_LINES): unset -> Infinity
(was 200); a positive integer RESTORES a cap (e.g. =200); 0 stays
Infinity for back-compat with the old opt-in-unlimited value; garbage ->
Infinity (unrecognized = no cap asked for). The semantic is now "cap
only when the user asked for one".
The store's raw-result preference follows the same rule: envOutputLinesSet
becomes envOutputUnlimited — whenever the cap is unlimited (the default
now) and a gateway tail-capped result_text (omittedNote) arrives with the
always-full raw result on the wire, the raw result wins, since an
uncapped view of a tail would silently miss the head. With an explicit
finite cap the gateway tail + honest omitted note are kept.
Memory safety is unchanged: tool bodies mount only while EXPANDED (rows
default collapsed and free their Yoga nodes on collapse/unmount), and the
rolling HERMES_TUI_MAX_MESSAGES cap bounds the transcript's high-water
mark.
Tests: env.test.ts expectations flipped (unset/garbage -> Infinity, 0
documented as back-compat); tools.test.tsx "flag unset caps at 200"
becomes "unset renders all 250 lines", plus an explicit =50 cap (+note)
test and =200 restored-cap test; the store preference matrix covers
unset/0 (raw wins), =50 (tail+note kept), and no-raw (tail+note, no
crash). Verified live: seq 1 220 expanded renders rows 201-220 with no
"+N more lines" note.
A patch tool's result is a JSON record whose payload IS the diff. In a verbose
session the gateway redacts + TAIL-caps result_text (_cap_tui_verbose_text),
so the echo arrived under the native diff in two broken shapes: truncated
mid-JSON (unparseable, so the old JSON.parse check failed open), or — for tall
edits — capped PAST the JSON head, which the store's normalizeOutput then
un-escapes into plain lines that duplicate the diff. North star: no raw JSON
in the transcript, ever.
Three layers:
- gateway: when diff_unified ships, result_text drops the in-JSON diff echo
(_result_sans_diff_echo) — small, parseable, carries only the non-diff
signal (success/files_modified/warnings/lsp_diagnostics).
- fileTool diffOutputPlan: anything starting with '{' under a rendered diff is
suppressed regardless of parseability; parseable JSON with real non-diff
signal (error/warning/lsp_diagnostics) renders JUST those as labeled notes;
a non-JSON fragment whose lines echo the rendered diff is suppressed too
(guards older emitters). Plain-text results (lint tails) still render.
Expanding a tall <diff showLineNumbers> pinned to the scrollbox bottom froze
the TUI with ERR_INVALID_ARG_VALUE looping out of CliRenderer.loop every
frame. Root cause: @opentui/core 0.4.0 marshals OptimizedBuffer
fillRect/drawText/setCell* coordinates as u32 in the FFI table while
LineNumberRenderable.renderSelf passes raw screen coordinates — NEGATIVE when
the diff is partially scrolled above the viewport. Bun's FFI silently wraps
negatives (native side bounds-checks them into a no-op); Node's experimental
node:ffi rejects them. bufferDrawBox already uses i32, which is why ordinary
boxes/text scroll fine and only the diff line-background path crashed.
Fix at the seam we own: boundary/ffiSafe.ts patches OptimizedBuffer to clip
fillRect to the non-negative quadrant and skip negative-origin
drawText/setCell*/drawChar before the FFI call (Bun parity). Installed from
boundary/renderer.ts (live) and test/lib/render.ts (headless). TODO(upstream):
widen those FFI params to i32 so this shim can be deleted.
Ports the engine off the second JS runtime onto Node 26.3 (node:ffi) so the
repo ships a single JavaScript runtime: child_process for the gateway, vitest
for tests, an esbuild + Solid build step. Mouse selection copies the rendered
text you highlight, and the clipboard path is crash-proofed (a broken copy
pipe no longer quits the UI). Renames the engine dir ui-tui-opentui-v2/ ->
ui-opentui/ and updates the launcher/installer/Docker references.
