v0.7.0

157 commits between v0.6.0 and v0.7.0, and the ratio tells the story: 34 features, over a hundred fixes. This is the release where the terminal inside tuios learned the protocols real programs actually speak. You can watch a video in a pane now. Fish 4.x's kitty keyboard handshake works instead of producing garbage. Copy mode grew a scrollbar you can grab. And nearly every one of those hundred fixes is the tax on passing another terminal's protocol through a multiplexer correctly: clipping, positioning, flicker, and the difference between what a spec says and what mpv actually sends.

Video playback

mpv --vo=kitty plays video inside a tuios pane. So does youterm. Both shared memory and base64 modes work; --vo-kitty-use-shm=yes is the one to use, because it sends a file reference per frame instead of streaming megabytes of pixels through the terminal.

Getting there was most of the fix count in this release, because video is the adversarial case for graphics passthrough. mpv sets "more data coming" on every frame and never sends the final-chunk marker the protocol says to wait for, so the passthrough that worked for static images waited forever. Each frame used to get a fresh image ID, which forced a delete-and-replace and a visible flash between the two; frames now reuse the host's image ID so the terminal swaps the data in place. File-based frames are forwarded as a path instead of being read, base64-encoded, and chunked, which removed about 4MB of allocation per frame at 30fps. And all graphics output is wrapped in synchronized updates and flushed with the render cycle, because text and graphics arriving as two unsynchronized streams is where the tearing came from.

Static images got the same care: icat and yazi previews clip properly at the viewport, hide when their window leaves the screen, and follow the window during a drag instead of hiding or, worse, staying put.

The keyboard protocol shells expect

The VT emulator now implements the kitty keyboard protocol: the full push/pop/query stack, with keystrokes forwarded in CSI u encoding when a child program has the protocol active. The forcing function was fish 4.x, which enables the protocol on startup. Before this release that meant capital letters arrived as escape sequences fish ignored; the spec's answer, which is now what tuios does, is that shifted printable keys send their text directly and CSI u is reserved for real modifier combinations.

The same emulator work added OSC 4 palette queries, OSC 52 clipboard, modes 2026 (synchronized output) and 2027 (unicode core), and sixel in the DA1 response. OSC 66 text sizing ships as an experimental passthrough; it breaks with scrollback and window repositioning, and says so in the docs.

Copy mode grew up

Mouse wheel scrolling now drops you straight into copy mode, which means scrolling up and selecting what you found are finally the same gesture. The separate scrollback mode that could look but not touch is gone. While you are there: full vim navigation, visual and visual-line selection, search, yank.

The border itself is now a scrollbar. It renders in the theme's border colors, sized proportionally, and it is interactive: click to jump, drag to scroll. Dragging a selection past the edge of the pane auto-scrolls on a timer, so holding the mouse still past the boundary keeps the selection growing instead of stalling until you jiggle it.

There is also a scrollback browser, which parses your history into command blocks using OSC 133 semantic markers (with a regex fallback for shells that do not emit them). Each block is a command plus its output, navigable with vim keys, and it can pull JSON fragments and file paths out of the output for yanking. If your prompt emits OSC 133, and fish and a configured starship both do, tuios knows where every command begins and ends.

~ $ git status
On branch main
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/main'.
nothing to commit, working tree clean
~ $ curl -s https://api.example.com/health
{"status":"ok","uptime":13472}

A command palette, and layouts worth keeping

Ctrl+P opens a command palette: every tuios action, fuzzy-searched, with its keybinding shown next to it. Matches on the command name rank above matches on its category, so typing what you mean finds what you meant. It floats at the top of the screen instead of covering the terminal, and it works from both terminal and window management modes. A session switcher overlay (prefix+S) lists daemon sessions the same way.

Layout templates were rebuilt to save what actually matters: the BSP tree, each window's working directory (read from /proc), startup commands, and the tiling scheme, with positions scaled proportionally when you load a template on a different screen size. Loading is non-destructive: existing windows are repositioned to match instead of killed, and extras get minimized. There is a CLI for it (tuios layout list/delete/dir/export), and export turns a template into a replayable tape script. The layout submenu lives on Ctrl+B L.

Pane zoom is z: fullscreen the focused pane, press again to restore, with a Z indicator in the dockbar. And tiled windows can share borders. With --shared-borders, windows render borderless and single separator lines are drawn between panes with proper junction characters, which buys back two columns and two rows per split, tmux-style. It is opt-in because it took several attempts to get right, and the git log does not pretend otherwise: the feature was reverted and reimplemented three times before the separator overlay approach stuck. A smart split scheme that picks the split direction from the focused pane's aspect ratio also landed, opt-in for the same reason: as a default it produced narrow slices, so spiral stays.

Faster underneath

The rendering loop was rebuilt around PTY events instead of a tick. A PTY delivering output signals a render; the tick survives only for animations and script playback, and drops to an idle rate when nothing moves. Dock clock, CPU, and RAM stats are now off by default and only polled when shown, which together gets idle CPU near zero. Unfocused windows without a selection take a fast render path that bypasses the cell-by-cell styling machinery, and windows on other workspaces skip render work entirely; for tuios-web and SSH clients, their PTY output is not even streamed until you switch to that workspace.

The graphics path got the same treatment: base64 payloads pass through without a decode and re-encode round trip (about 8MB of memory traffic saved per 4MB image), /dev/tty is opened once instead of per frame, and only placements whose position actually changed get re-placed.

This release also lands on the stable Charm v2 releases: bubbletea, lipgloss, wish, and log, after riding the release candidates.

Fixes

Over a hundred fixes shipped in this window. Most of the graphics ones are already described above, because for passthrough the fixes are the feature. The rest, grouped:

Daemon mode. The daemon's emulator was silently discarding kitty graphics capability queries, so icat and chafa concluded there was no graphics support and fell back to blocks; the daemon now answers them directly. PTY dimensions sync on session reattach instead of leaving windows sized for the previous client. The client's pixel dimensions and graphics capabilities travel to the daemon at hello, and the subscriber buffer grew 16x so video frames survive the daemon-to-client socket.

Input and mouse. Mouse motion events are only forwarded to programs that asked for them; kakoune was being flooded with hundreds of motion events per second it never requested (#78). Phantom keypresses from misparsed mouse fragments are suppressed. Visual line mode highlights immediately instead of on the next cursor move.

Colors and light themes. Unstyled cells inherit the terminal's real default foreground instead of being forced to white, and SGR 39/49 reset to transparent rather than a baked-in default, which fixes light themes (#41, #72, #74).

Responsiveness. Closing a window via exit or ctrl+d no longer waits out a 500ms timeout (now 10ms), and a race that dropped the close notification about half the time is gone. Background windows no longer show stale content until you poke them.

Everything else. A --confirm-quit flag and confirm_quit option for always confirming quit. Tape scripts send CRLF on Windows, contributed by @dodorz. And a long tail of smaller fixes across scrollback, tiling toggles, and overlay positioning that this page does not enumerate; the full changelog does.

Known limitations

Shipped honestly incomplete: OSC 66 text sizing breaks with scrollback and repositioning. Sixel passthrough exists but is disabled until pixel-level clipping is implemented, so sixel images cannot yet be cropped to a window; use kitty graphics. The kitty animation protocol (a=f, a=a, a=c) was tried and dropped, because it requires image IDs to stay consistent between guest and host and tuios remaps them; animation-protocol apps should run outside tuios for now. Video without shm can flicker depending on frame rate.

v0.7.0 is the release where running a program inside tuios stopped meaning running it in a worse terminal. The protocols are there, the fixes are the proof of how much work "just pass it through" turns out to be, and the limitations section above is the honest list of where that work continues.