v0.4.0

51 commits between v0.3.0 and v0.4.0, four patch releases along the way. The v0.4.0 work itself is three things. The web terminal was added, rebuilt twice, and finally moved out into the sip library, taking 10MB of embedded assets with it. Tape scripting arrived, with a recorder and a manager UI. And ShowKeys, an overlay that draws your keypresses on screen, exists because a keyboard-driven window manager is unreadable in a screen recording without one. The patches underneath fixed resize in floating mode and taught the quit dialog to only ask when something is actually running.

The web terminal moved out

The web terminal did not exist in v0.3.0 and went through three architectures before v0.4.0 shipped. It started as a tuios web subcommand: a server speaking WebTransport with a WebSocket fallback, xterm.js with WebGL rendering on the client, a bundled Nerd Font so icons drew properly. That design embedded about 10MB of web assets in the repository and put an HTTP server inside the window manager binary.

Both problems were fixed by moving things out. First the command became its own binary, tuios-web, so the main binary carries no server code and users who never touch a browser never install one. Then the server internals were replaced by sip, a standalone library for serving any Bubble Tea app through the browser. tuios-web is now a thin wrapper that hands TUIOS instances to sip's Handler interface, and the embedded assets moved to sip with it, which is where the 10MB went.

Because tuios web was added and removed inside the same release cycle, no tagged release ever shipped it. Installing tuios-web from v0.4.0 involves no migration.

The rebuilds fixed real defects on the way. Web sessions originally spawned the tuios binary as a subprocess; they now run TUIOS in-process over pipes, the same shape as the SSH server. And the first frame used to render at a hardcoded 80x24 before the browser had reported its size, which left artifacts on screen. The session is now created only after the browser sends its first resize, so the first frame is drawn at the real dimensions.

Tape scripting, record to replay

v0.4.0 adds a scripting system for driving tuios from a file. A .tape script can open terminals, type into them, manage windows, switch workspaces and modes, and pause between steps. tuios tape validate checks a script and tuios tape play runs it live with a progress indicator. A headless tape run mode existed briefly during development; it never worked properly and was removed rather than shipped broken.

Playback goes through the same Bubble Tea update loop as live input instead of mutating state on the side, so a played tape and a human at the keyboard exercise the same code paths.

Recording is the other half. The recorder captures the state you started in, records window management actions, mode switches, and workspace switches, and coalesces consecutive characters into a single Type command instead of emitting one command per keystroke, so a recorded tape reads like something you might have written by hand. The tape manager, on Ctrl+B T m, is a modal for browsing, recording, and managing tapes without leaving the session.

ShowKeys

tuios can now draw your keypresses on screen as you type: an overlay in the bottom right showing the last few keys, inspired by nvzone/showkeys. Enable it with --show-keys at startup or toggle it live with Ctrl+B D k. Keys render as pills styled like the window title decorations, modifiers spelled out, repeats collapsed into a count (j ×3). Keys stay visible for three seconds; the first cut used one, which was too short to read while doing anything else.

The same work made the leader key configurable. The prefix was hardcoded to Ctrl+B; it now comes from leader_key in the [keybindings] section, the help menu and every chord reference follow it, and the overlay highlights it, so a viewer can pick the prefix out of a recording at a glance.

zsh

~ $

click, then type

The patch releases underneath

v0.3.1 through v0.3.4 shipped in the first week of November, and most of that was making resize in floating mode stop being visibly broken.

The fixes stack up as follows. Window geometry now updates immediately during a drag while the expensive PTY resize is deferred until release, so shells stop receiving a stream of resize signals mid-gesture. The terminal emulator's dimensions stay in sync with the window's, so content no longer sticks at the old size while the border moves. A centered "Resizing... WxH" indicator shows in the window during the drag, and in tiling mode the neighbours dragged along by a constraint show it too. When the drag ends, PTY buffers are flushed and content polling waits long enough for the shell to redraw its prompt at the new width, which is what fixed the half-drawn prompts. If the cursor ends up below the viewport after a height reduction, the view scrolls to keep the prompt visible. And a race where dragging immediately after a resize froze the window is gone.

The quit flow improved in two steps. First, a confirmation dialog before quitting with open terminals. Then it learned to check the PTY's foreground process group and only ask when a terminal is actually running something; quitting a stack of idle shells just quits. The welcome screen became per-workspace, appearing for any workspace with no visible windows instead of only a globally empty session. And the shell is now configurable, which mattered most on Windows, where tuios previously always launched PowerShell whether you wanted it or not.

Smaller changes

• Decimal durations in tape scripts parse correctly, so 1.5s no longer rounds into something else.
• The render cache is cleared when leaving resize mode, so the resize indicator disappears instantly instead of lingering a frame.
• ShowKeys tracks modifiers when comparing consecutive presses, so Ctrl+L followed by L counts as two keys instead of merging into one pill.
• A contributing guide for new contributors.
• Package documentation comments across all internal packages, a golangci-lint cleanup, and a modernization pass (any over interface{}, slices.Delete, built-in min/max).
• README keybindings render with kbd tags.
• tuios.exe is gitignored.

That was v0.4.0: the web terminal in what turned out to be its permanent home, tapes you can record and replay, and an overlay to prove which keys you pressed. The .tape format introduced here is the same one that project tapes grew out of later.