v0.1.0

This is the first release of tuios that got a minor version number. The first commit, from September 6, was already a working prototype: floating windows, tiling, workspaces, an SSH server, and window animations, all in one flat Go package. The 70 commits between that and this tag went through 26 v0.0.x tags in under two months and turned the prototype into something you could install, configure, and copy text out of. That last part took the most work.

Copy mode and scrollback

The biggest gap in the prototype was that text which scrolled off screen was gone, and text still on screen could not be copied. v0.1.0 closed both.

Scrollback landed first: a 10,000-line buffer per window, entered with Ctrl+B [ or by scrolling the mouse wheel up, navigated with arrows or vim keys. The upstream VT library did not support scrollback, so this runs on a fork, and the implementation went back upstream as a pull request to charmbracelet/x.

On top of that sits a vim-style copy mode: hjkl, word motions, gg/G, count prefixes (10j, 100G), character search with f/F/t/T that handles wide characters, / and ? search with highlighted matches, % for bracket matching, and v/V visual selection yanked to the clipboard with y. Mouse selection works too: click and drag, double-click for a word, triple-click for a line. The first version was a single 2,137-line file; it got split into six modules before the tag, which is roughly the moment copy mode stopped being a feature and started being a subsystem.

Rendering got 30x faster

The prototype rendered every cell of every window through a fresh lipgloss style object on every frame. Profiling put renderTerminal at 4.85 seconds of a 13.45-second CPU capture. Two changes fixed it: a style cache keyed on cell attributes, so a cache hit costs about 99 nanoseconds and zero allocations, and direct ANSI escape code generation for terminal content, bypassing a style pipeline built for UI boxes that terminal cells never needed. Consecutive cells with identical styling are batched, which took per-frame style renders from around 2,000 to around 50.

After both, renderTerminal measured 0.16 seconds in the same profile and overall CPU use dropped from 53% to 24%. The input path also stopped clearing the render cache on every keystroke, which is the kind of thing you only find by looking.

A config file and a real CLI

Ten days before the tag, tuios had no configuration at all. v0.1.0 shipped a TOML config at ~/.config/tuios/config.toml, generated with documentation on first run, XDG-compliant, with every keybinding in every mode rebindable. Keybindings resolve to action names and action names resolve to handlers, so rebinding needs no code changes, and the help overlay is generated from the config, so it shows the keys you actually have. Defaults are platform-aware: macOS gets opt where Linux gets alt.

The CLI moved from flat flags to Cobra subcommands with Fang for help formatting: tuios to run, tuios ssh for the SSH server, tuios config and tuios keybinds to manage the above, plus generated shell completions and man pages. This broke the old flags (--ssh became tuios ssh, and so on), which is the sort of break a 0.x version number exists for.

Driving it from the keyboard

Everything hangs off a tmux-style Ctrl+B prefix, and this window is where the prefix grew submenus: w for workspaces (switch, or move a window), m for minimize and restore, t for window commands, [ for scrollback, q to quit. A which-key style overlay appears after half a second showing what is available, context-aware for each submenu.

macOS needed its own work, because Option+number produces characters like ¡ and ™ instead of a modifier combination. tuios detects those and treats them as workspace switches, and the help text says "Opt" on a Mac and "Alt" everywhere else. Tiling mode also learned to respect workspace boundaries: swapping, minimizing, and retiling now only touch windows in the current workspace instead of pulling in windows from the others.

Behaving like a terminal

A window manager that hosts terminals inherits every obligation a terminal has. Mouse events are forwarded to applications on the alternate screen, so drag-to-select works in vim, scrolling works in less, and clicking works in htop. Paste works through OSC 52 and bracketed paste, including Cmd+V. Alternate screen use is detected through VT callbacks rather than guessed.

Two shells found real bugs. nushell cleared its own output because the VT library answered cursor position queries with stale coordinates, so tuios now intercepts and corrects those responses. And the PTY layer changed twice, ending on charmbracelet/x/xpty for Windows ConPTY support, with the forked VT package vendored into the tree so that plain go install works.

Ways to install it

A release is partly defined by whether anyone can get it. By the tag, GoReleaser built for Linux, macOS, Windows, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD, and publishing was automated for a Homebrew tap, the AUR (tuios-bin), and a one-line curl installer. The Nix package and devshell came from the project's first outside contribution. The binary is statically linked, so there is no glibc version to argue with. There is also an --ascii-only flag for machines without a Nerd Font, added four days before the tag after running tuios somewhere the icons turned into boxes.

Fixes worth remembering

• Notifications lasted roughly 17 days instead of 1.5 seconds. A duration already in milliseconds was multiplied by time.Millisecond.
• A nil pointer panic when comparing cell colors: a non-nil color.Color interface can still hold a nil value, and comparing two of them blows up. This was the last fix before the tag.
• Typing over SSH did nothing after the restructure, because the input handler was registered for local mode only.
• exit did not close the window on macOS when the exit message was missed; the tick loop now checks the process directly.
• Visual selection highlighted the empty cells past the end of each line; it now stops at the content.
• Mouse selection in copy mode was off by one row.
• Dragging a window a few pixels no longer corrupts the tiled layout.
• The Windows build compiled again after resize signalling was split into platform-specific files. Not that anyone had reported running it there.

That was tuios at v0.1.0: a window manager, a terminal you could finally copy from, a config file, and enough packaging that installing it was not a project. Everything after this builds on that base.