Give the terminal back the width and the keyboard the session shell took
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Seven things reported from a day's use of v5b's session shell, and they are one
commit because five of them are the same complaint from different angles: the
window spends too much of itself on chrome describing the session, and the parts
that are not chrome do not behave.

◆ THE HOST HEADER IS GONE, and that is a deliberate departure from the design.

Terminal.dc.html and SFTP.dc.html both draw a 60-pixel row above the pane: the
address on the left, a cross-surface button on the right. Both facts are worth
having and the strip they sat in was not — the tab already names the host, and a
full-width bar repeating it was the cheapest 60 pixels in the layout to give
back. The address is now the first line of the sidebar and the button is
stretched across the column under it, so nothing is lost and the pane is taller.

Which word that button carries and which command it runs used to be handed in
from the two usage sites in MainWindow.axaml, because the control was drawn
twice. One sidebar cannot do that, so SessionCrossSurfaceLabel and
OpenOtherSurfaceCommand resolve it in the shell — the same place SessionAddress
already decides which surface's fact to read. The two directions underneath are
untouched: SelectFilesHostAsync for a tab's host, OpenTerminalForFilesHostAsync
for a fresh terminal at whatever SFTP has open.

SessionHeader.axaml is deleted rather than left unused, and LayoutHarness stops
subtracting its 60 pixels from every session screen's budget — the same
treatment the retired window-wide tab strip got, and for the same reason: a
constant for chrome nobody draws is a suite quietly measuring the wrong
rectangle.

◆ AND THE SIDEBAR CLOSES, which the design has no state for at all.

300 pixels of an 1081-pixel minimum is a great deal to spend on a list that is
often two rows long. The column now folds to a 34-pixel rail carrying the
chevron that brings it back — a rail rather than nothing, because a panel that
vanishes leaving no trace is one people report as lost rather than as closed.
Both states live in the one control and swap on IsSessionSidebarOpen, so
MainWindow's own "Auto" column takes whichever width is showing without knowing
the state exists.

Written through to ClientSettings.SessionSidebarOpen rather than held for the
session. It is a decision about how much of the window a terminal gets, and one
that had to be made again on every launch would not really be on offer.

---- THE FOUR SMALLER ONES ----

A SNIP LANDED IN A TERMINAL NOBODY COULD TYPE AT, and looked selected when it
got there. Two causes with nothing in common. The click moved Win32 focus onto
the sidebar row, and term.focus() in the page cannot take it back — only the
host can, so the shell raises TerminalFocusRequested and the window answers with
the same posted focus every other path here uses. The highlight was bash: xterm
wraps a paste in bracketed-paste markers, readline marks what arrives inside
them as an active region, and it stays in reverse video until the next
keystroke. Right for a clipboard paste, wrong for a snippet picked off a
sidebar. Single-line snips are typed rather than pasted now, which needs no
markers; multi-line still pastes, because "runs three commands unasked" is the
worse of the two failures and the markers are the whole of what prevents it.

A BLACK BAR UNDER THE TERMINAL, on Windows. xterm.css paints its scrolling
viewport #000 — its own comment explains why, and it is a macOS scrollbar
concern. Everywhere else that black is covered by the rows, except along the
bottom: the fit addon floors the row count, so the remainder below the last
whole row is bare viewport, up to a line tall, against this page's #171a26. The
light square at its right-hand end is where WebView2's classic scrollbar corner
lands. The viewport is repainted in the page's own background, and the scrollbar
with it — thin and in these colours rather than a grey Windows channel down the
side of a near-black terminal, and kept rather than hidden, because a surface
that scrolls with no sign that it does is worse than a quiet bar.

THE PINS ROW DREW A TOFU BOX. U+E946 is not in the embedded Material Icons face
at all — that file is the 2019 build and its cmap skips E944 and E946 — so the
rail's Pins row and the hosts screen's own pin badge have both been drawing a
missing-glyph rectangle since v5b picked the codepoint. push_pin in that vintage
is U+F10D, verified against the file rather than against a codepoints table for
a later release of the font. Every other icon codepoint in the repository was
audited the same way; this was the only miss.

THE KBD CHIP CUT THE CHORD IN HALF. 34 pixels is the design's width for a chip
reading ⌘K, and this build substitutes CTRL K — six characters and a space,
wider than 34 at 10.5 mono. MinWidth and padding instead, so the design's
footprint survives for the day this face has a ⌘ to draw.

---- AND THE POPOVER UNDER THE USER CHIP ----

Reported as not matching the design, and it was not: Button.poprow set a corner
radius and a padding and never touched the Background, so every row wore the
Fluent theme's own #33FFFFFF button fill. Six raised pills stacked in a menu the
design draws as six lines of text — and the hover rule underneath was already
correct and simply invisible against a fill that never went away. Set on the
ContentPresenter as well as on the Button, the same as Button.flat, because the
theme binds its brush there and a Background set only on the control loses to
it. The panel itself gets this window's own radius-12 card treatment through a
FlyoutPresenter class rather than by widening the shared context-menu rule, and
Vaults and Preferences stop being drawn one step dimmer than Settings and
Logout, which read as two disabled entries in a menu of five live ones.

---- WHAT PROVES IT ----

Three tests in the layout suite, two of them checked against the defect they
describe: the popover row's resting fill (fails with #33ffffff without the
style), and the kbd chip against the natural width of its own text, measured on
a detached copy because a TextBlock's DesiredSize is already clipped to what it
was given and reports 34 inside a 34-pixel chip either way. SessionSidebarTests
is new — the sidebar has never been laid out by a test, and it now holds a
string of unbounded length beside a button that has to stay clickable. In the
shell suite: the cross-surface row in both directions, the closed state
surviving to disk, and the focus request being made when a snip lands and not
made when it does not.
This commit is contained in:
2026-08-10 16:49:44 +02:00
parent 6fc1e3a7c5
commit ccaf7a8e72
22 changed files with 865 additions and 216 deletions
@@ -550,16 +550,30 @@ internal sealed partial class MainWindowViewModel : ObservableObject, IAsyncDisp
updateScreen = CreateUpdateScreen(updates);
// Read straight away rather than at first use, so the value is right before anything can read it —
// a phone draws its terminal buttons from this, and a size that arrived a moment later would show
// as the interface correcting itself.
TerminalFontSize = ClientSettings.ClampTerminalFontSize(settings.Read().TerminalFontSize);
ApplyStoredPreferences();
_ = TellRendererTheFontSizeAsync();
StartSessionShellTracking();
}
/// <summary>
/// Takes this machine's own preferences off disk, before anything can read them.
/// </summary>
/// <remarks>
/// Read straight away rather than at first use, and both of them for the same reason: whatever is stored
/// is what the first window draws. A phone builds its terminal's font buttons from the size, and the
/// session shell decides whether to give a sidebar 300 pixels — either arriving a moment later shows as
/// the interface correcting itself in front of the user.
/// </remarks>
private void ApplyStoredPreferences()
{
var stored = settings.Read();
TerminalFontSize = ClientSettings.ClampTerminalFontSize(stored.TerminalFontSize);
IsSessionSidebarOpen = stored.SessionSidebarOpen;
}
/// <summary>
/// Wires up the two pieces of v5b's session shell that this constructor had no room left to inline.
/// </summary>
@@ -1003,6 +1017,20 @@ internal sealed partial class MainWindowViewModel : ObservableObject, IAsyncDisp
/// </remarks>
internal event EventHandler? TerminalSessionOpened;
/// <summary>
/// Raised when something this shell did belongs in the terminal the user is already looking at, so the
/// view can put the keyboard back there.
/// </summary>
/// <remarks>
/// Separate from <see cref="TerminalSessionOpened"/> because no session opened: the sidebar's SNIPS row
/// typed into one that was already running, and the click that did it moved Win32 focus onto an Avalonia
/// button. The page cannot fix that from its side — see the <c>term.focus()</c> at the end of
/// <c>terminal.js</c>'s paste handler, which only ever reaches <c>document.activeElement</c> — so the
/// half that can only be done by the host is asked for here. The view re-checks that a terminal is
/// actually showing before it acts; see <c>MainWindow.FocusTerminalWhenLaidOut</c>.
/// </remarks>
internal event EventHandler? TerminalFocusRequested;
internal bool IsStarting => State == ShellState.Starting;
internal bool IsNeedingServer => State == ShellState.NeedsServer;
@@ -3824,6 +3852,72 @@ internal sealed partial class MainWindowViewModel : ObservableObject, IAsyncDisp
(IsTerminalSurface && SelectedTab is not null)
|| (IsTransfersShowing && Transfers.IsConnected);
/// <summary>
/// Whether the sidebar is drawn in full, as opposed to collapsed to the rail that brings it back.
/// </summary>
/// <remarks>
/// A separate question from <see cref="ShowsQuickAccessSidebar"/>, and the two are not interchangeable:
/// that one is "is there a session for this to be about", which the shell answers, and this one is "does
/// the person want to see it", which only they can. Closed still draws something — a 34-pixel rail with
/// the way back on it; see <c>SessionSidebar.axaml</c> — because a panel that vanishes with no trace of
/// how to get it back is one people report as lost rather than as closed. Remembered between launches;
/// see <see cref="ToggleSessionSidebar"/> and <c>ClientSettings.SessionSidebarOpen</c>.
/// </remarks>
[ObservableProperty]
private bool isSessionSidebarOpen = true;
/// <summary>Opens the session sidebar, or closes it to its rail.</summary>
/// <remarks>
/// Written through on every toggle rather than on shutdown: this shell is disposed on paths that do not
/// all run to completion — a killed process, a phone's activity going away — and a preference that
/// survives only a clean exit is one that will sometimes be forgotten for no reason the user can see.
/// The store swallows its own failures and says whether it wrote; nothing here can do anything useful
/// with the answer, so the toggle stands whether or not the disk took it.
/// </remarks>
[RelayCommand]
private void ToggleSessionSidebar()
{
IsSessionSidebarOpen = !IsSessionSidebarOpen;
_ = settings.Write(settings.Read() with { SessionSidebarOpen = IsSessionSidebarOpen });
}
/// <summary>
/// The label on the sidebar's cross-surface row: where the other half of this host is.
/// </summary>
/// <remarks>
/// v5c-4 moved this button off the session shell's own 60-pixel header row and into the sidebar, and the
/// header went with it — see <c>SessionSidebar.axaml</c>. What the two surfaces hand in separately used
/// to be a pair of properties on the header control; it is resolved here now, for the same reason
/// <see cref="SessionAddress"/> is: the sidebar is one control drawn on both surfaces, and a view that
/// branched on which one it was would be asking a question the shell has already answered.
/// </remarks>
internal string SessionCrossSurfaceLabel => IsTerminalSurface ? "Open SFTP" : "Open terminal";
/// <summary>Goes to the other half of the session the sidebar is about.</summary>
/// <remarks>
/// The two directions were two commands bound from two usages of the header control, and they still are
/// two methods — <see cref="SelectFilesHostAsync"/> takes a tab and opens an SFTP connection to its host;
/// <see cref="OpenTerminalForFilesHostAsync"/> dials a fresh terminal at whatever SFTP has open, because
/// there is no terminal session to reuse. What is new is only that one control now asks for both, so the
/// branch lives here beside <see cref="SessionCrossSurfaceLabel"/>, which has to agree with it.
/// </remarks>
[RelayCommand]
private async Task OpenOtherSurfaceAsync()
{
if (IsTerminalSurface)
{
if (SelectedTab is { } tab)
{
await SelectFilesHostAsync(tab).ConfigureAwait(true);
}
return;
}
await OpenTerminalForFilesHostAsync().ConfigureAwait(true);
}
/// <summary>
/// Opens the files screen on the active tab's host and navigates its remote pane to one of its pins.
/// </summary>
@@ -3896,6 +3990,12 @@ internal sealed partial class MainWindowViewModel : ObservableObject, IAsyncDisp
if (screen.CanInsert)
{
await screen.InsertCommand.ExecuteAsync(null).ConfigureAwait(true);
// The click that got here took the keyboard off the terminal and gave it to the sidebar row, so
// the command lands at a prompt that cannot be typed at until somebody clicks the pane. Asked
// for after the insert rather than before it, so the caret arrives to find the text already
// there. See TerminalFocusRequested.
TerminalFocusRequested?.Invoke(this, EventArgs.Empty);
return;
}
@@ -3989,14 +4089,15 @@ internal sealed partial class MainWindowViewModel : ObservableObject, IAsyncDisp
}
/// <summary>
/// The account and endpoint the session shell's header and status bar are about right now, or null when
/// The account and endpoint the session shell's sidebar and status bar are about right now, or null when
/// neither surface has one.
/// </summary>
/// <remarks>
/// One property reading whichever surface is showing, rather than one binding per surface reading its own
/// source directly — <c>SessionHeader.axaml</c> and <c>SessionStatusBar.axaml</c> are the same markup on
/// source directly — <c>SessionSidebar.axaml</c> and <c>SessionStatusBar.axaml</c> are the same markup on
/// both surfaces precisely because the shell resolves "which fact source" here instead of asking the view
/// to. The terminal's is <see cref="SelectedTab"/>'s own address; SFTP's is <see cref="TransfersViewModel.ConnectedTo"/>,
/// to. It was the retired header row that printed this first; v5c-4 moved the line into the sidebar's own
/// session block and left this property exactly as it was. The terminal's is <see cref="SelectedTab"/>'s own address; SFTP's is <see cref="TransfersViewModel.ConnectedTo"/>,
/// which is already the account and endpoint actually dialled — nothing here re-derives it.
/// </remarks>
internal string? SessionAddress => Surface switch
@@ -4141,6 +4242,10 @@ internal sealed partial class MainWindowViewModel : ObservableObject, IAsyncDisp
OnPropertyChanged(nameof(SessionIdentityLabel));
OnPropertyChanged(nameof(SessionIdentityText));
OnPropertyChanged(nameof(ShowsQuickAccessSidebar));
// v5c-4: the sidebar's cross-surface row says where the other half of this session is, so it turns
// over with the surface exactly as the facts above do.
OnPropertyChanged(nameof(SessionCrossSurfaceLabel));
}
/// <remarks>