Everything since v0.7.0

244 commits since v0.7.0. Two of them are new subsystems, project tapes and startup settings, and most of the rest are the kind of fix that only shows up when someone uses the thing daily, which someone does. The short version: tuios can now build a project's layout when you cd into it, launch straight into a working session instead of an empty one, and the web client renders Arabic correctly. Underneath that, tiling and resize in daemon sessions finally behave.

Project tapes

A .tuios.tape is a file in a project directory that describes the session for that project: which windows to open, what to run in them, how to lay them out. When the focused shell cd's into a directory that carries one, tuios notices. Like direnv, but for terminal layouts.

A tape is arbitrary command execution, so the whole feature is built around a trust boundary. A tape is inert until you have read it and chosen what to do with it: Run once, Trust and run, or Never. Trust binds to the file's content hash, so any edit reverts the tape to untrusted and it prompts again. By default nothing opens on its own. A badge in the dock and a notification tell you a tape is there, and the review dialog shows the full content before anything executes.

Two opt-ins trade friction for convenience without weakening the boundary. auto_review opens the review dialog on detection instead of waiting for a keypress. autorun = "auto" runs a tape without asking, but only one you have already trusted and not edited since; an untrusted or changed tape falls back to asking. Running a tape builds a session named after the project and switches you into it.

Start where you want to be

Every session used to start empty: a blank floating workspace, then the same three actions every time. Open a terminal, turn on tiling, enter terminal mode. Those are now three startup settings, all off by default so a fresh install behaves exactly as before: open_default_window, tiled, and start_in_terminal_mode. All three on means tuios launches into a tiled session with one terminal and the next keystroke goes to the shell.

The settings menu now covers everything the config file does. Border colors, preferred shell, window title format, daemon log level, mouse scroll speed, and the rest of what used to be file-only are in the menu and the command palette, with an inline text editor for free-text values. Changes persist. And when the config file itself has a problem, the error now surfaces inside the running TUI instead of being silently ignored.

The web client can shape text now

The web client moved to sip v0.4.0, which brings an opt-in WebGL renderer with real HarfBuzz text shaping. A browser terminal normally draws one glyph per codepoint, which for Arabic means isolated, disconnected, wrongly ordered letters. With shaping, letters join, ligatures form, and combining marks land where they belong. This is the difference between a terminal that technically displays Arabic and one that can be read.

The same sip release fixes a class of freeze where a terminal stopped repainting under fast output (synchronized output, mode 2026, left engaged), matches grapheme cluster widths against a reference terminal instead of a guess, and corrects kitty graphics placement.

Tiling, resize, and staying responsive

Windows created in a daemon session now tile. Placement used to only run for windows the attached client created itself, so daemon-created windows stacked on top of each other at the same position or floated over the tiled ones. A sync that re-places a window in a tiled session now retiles, and BSP tiles no longer overlap when panes shrink past the default size.

Resize was rebuilt after one bug report unravelled into three distinct defects, which got its own post. The short form: dragging a shared border now moves the two panes that share it and nothing else, an untouched split's ratio no longer drifts every time something near it resizes, and the drag sets geometry directly instead of easing toward a target that has already moved. Both defects are demonstrated interactively in the post.

A busy pane can also no longer starve the rest of the app. A background pane flooding output used to hold the emulator lock for its entire pending batch, and the renderer, which needs that lock every frame, never got in. Keystrokes in the focused pane echoed promptly and then never appeared, which reads as a freeze. Output is now written in bounded chunks, so the renderer gets its turn and typing stays responsive no matter what another pane is doing.

Keycast

tuios can now draw your keypresses on screen as you type: a small overlay in the bottom right showing the last few keys, with repeats coalesced. I added it for screen recordings, where a keyboard-driven window manager is unreadable without one. It toggles live from the command palette and the setting persists. It also draws correctly over a lone fullscreen window, which took two follow-up fixes, so it earns its place in the fixes list too.

Fewer papercuts

• Ctrl+P opens the command palette every time. It was silently swallowed when the terminal reported a lock modifier like Num Lock in the key event. Keybindings now resolve through a single registry, so a binding means the same thing everywhere.
• Quitting a session kills it, and the message says "Killed" instead of "detached". The exit message names the session you were in, not the one you first attached to.
• A grapheme cluster split across two writes no longer renders as two. Write boundaries fall anywhere; the emulator now treats that as its problem.
• Erase-character respects the right margin.
• Programs running inside tuios are told graphics forwarding is available, so image-capable tools stop falling back to blocks.
• Mouse scroll speed and window title format are configurable, in the file and in the menu.

All of this is on main now and will ship as the next tagged release. If a tape prompt ever surprises you, that is the trust boundary doing its job.