Commit Graph
10 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
jaap-jan c8507b44fe Give the application a settings area built from what really exists 2026-08-08 14:17:19 +02:00
jaap-jan 43c939b697 Give the window its v5b chrome and each session surface its own shell 2026-08-08 00:49:59 +02:00
jaap-jan 2ba7c14e35 Restyle the drawer, pin folders on a host, and say when it was last connected 2026-08-07 18:12:31 +02:00
jaap-jan 6728a0a597 Let the desktop client replace itself, and give the repository one version
Packaging for Windows, and the updater that only exists once something is
packaged. Velopack, win-x64, fed from the project's own forge — never from the
deployment a client signs in to, which is ADR 0011 rule 2 carried over
unchanged and is why the feed address is a constant in the code rather than a
setting. See docs/adr/0012-desktop-distribution-and-updates.md.

**Nothing is ever installed while somebody is using it.** A newer build is found
on a six-hourly pass, downloaded in the background, and then waits — for a
restart the user presses, or for the next launch they were going to do anyway.
That is a policy rather than caution: this application argues at length that
locking keeps shells running, because a lock that destroyed work would stop
being used, and a restart does not keep them. Having taught that, it owes the
user the choice at the one moment it stops being true, and the sentence saying
so counts the shells it would close.

**The version is now derived from the v* tag**, by MinVer, for everything. There
was no version before this — no property anywhere, so every assembly reported
the SDK's 1.0.0 and the API served that string as its serverVersion to every
client that asked. The tag was already the version of record for the container
image; this makes it the version of record full stop. MinVer's failure mode is
answering plausibly rather than failing, and here a wrong version is a client
that never updates, so it is guarded twice: fetch-depth 0 on every checkout, and
a step that fails a tag build when the tag and the computed version disagree.

**The pack id is DodoSSH.Desktop and not DodoSSH**, which is the one decision
here that would have destroyed data. Velopack installs to %LOCALAPPDATA%\<packId>
and removes that whole directory on uninstall, and %LOCALAPPDATA%\DodoSSH is
where ClientPaths keeps the encrypted cache, the outbox of changes not yet
pushed, and the device key. The obvious id would have had the uninstaller
silently delete work the server has never seen — the thing the application
refuses to do without a counted confirmation. Velopack's own advice to move user
data to roaming %APPDATA% is declined for the reason ClientPaths already gives.

**Releases are cut by a person, and CI gains no job that could.** The tempting
argument is that a forge write token is not a signing key. It does not survive
contact with what the token does: Velopack clients trust their feed and do not
verify a package signature when they apply one, so whoever can write a release
can ship an update every install runs. That is the capability ADR 0011 rule 1
puts on a machine which is not a runner, reached through a different door. The
mechanical objection — vpk needs Windows and the runners are Linux — is the
smaller of the two and is recorded beside it, because somebody will fix one and
believe they are done.

Unsigned for now, deliberately and with the cost stated where a user reads it:
SmartScreen warns once per person, on Setup.exe, because Mark-of-the-Web is
applied by the browser that downloaded it. In-app updates are fetched by the
application and applied from a local file, and never trip it.

The banner is a fourth row of the window rather than an overlay. Anything drawn
in the terminal's rectangle is sliced by the native child window that composites
above it — the defect this window has shipped once — and a sibling row is the
arrangement TitleBar and StatusBar already prove works.

----

Three defects surfaced on the way, none of them in the feature being built.

**A settings key absent from the file came back as the CLR default, not the
declared one.** The JSON source generator builds a record through a synthesised
parameterised constructor and assigns every property from its argument array, so
a property initializer runs and is then overwritten by a default for anything the
file did not contain. A settings.json of {} read back a font size of 0, clamped
up to the 8px floor rather than the 13px the renderer draws at. It could not bite
while there was one setting, because that setting was written on every save and
so was never absent; adding a second would have turned automatic update checks
off for every existing profile, silently, the opposite of the documented default.
Reflection-based deserialisation of the same JSON answers correctly, which is why
every way of checking it by hand agrees except the one that ships. The defaults
now live on the constructor parameters, which is the only place the generator
reads them from.

**Declaring a RuntimeIdentifier on the desktop head broke the server's image
build.** It is the obvious way to let a self-contained publish restore under
locked mode, and it writes a net10.0/win-x64 target into the lock file of every
project the head references transitively — including DodoSSH.Contracts and
DodoSSH.Crypto, which the API builds too. The Dockerfile restores those with no
RID and fails NU1004. Found by running docker build rather than by reading. The
RID stays out of the committed state; the two commands that need one ask for it
unlocked, and the release script puts the lock files back.

**A Docker ARG named VERSION silently sets MSBuild's Version.** An ARG is an
environment variable for the rest of the stage, MSBuild reads environment
variables as properties, and property names are case-insensitive. With the
workflow passing main-<short sha> on a main build the publish died with
NETSDK1018 pointing at DodoSSH.Contracts, a project nobody had touched. The build
stage's argument is ASSEMBLY_VERSION now, empty except on a tag build.

All three are in docs/platform-flags.md, which is where the next person will look.

----

Verified: the whole solution builds and restores locked; 289 shell, 93 layout and
54 session tests pass, including the regression test for the settings defect and
a measurement of the banner at the window's minimum width. vpk pack runs end to
end and reports "Verified VelopackApp.Run()" against Program.Main. The API image
builds correctly both as a main build and as a tag build, carrying 1.0.0 and
0.1.0 respectively.

Not verified, and it needs a published release to be: installing, updating and
uninstalling on a real machine. That is Phase 15 of docs/manual-checks.md, and
the pack id and the WebView2 profile fix are reasoned and commented but only
proved by walking it. Two things to watch at the first upload — the reverse
proxy's body-size limit for a 64 MB asset, and whether vpk upload gitea is happy
with Gitea 1.27.1.
2026-08-04 17:04:41 +02:00
jaap-jan 208443b932 Move SFTP and S3 into the tab strip, and the host list into a card grid
Four asks in one pass over the desktop head, and two of them are furniture
moving rather than anything new.

THE STRIP IS THE WINDOW'S NOW, not the terminal's. Vaults, SFTP and S3 sit at
its head and cannot be closed, and open terminals follow them. SFTP and S3 left
the nav rail to get there, which is the one semantic change: they are the two
destinations you stay in while something runs, and a rail entry is for
somewhere you go and come back from. So the rail belongs to the Vaults tab and
collapses with it, which also means SFTP, S3 and a terminal each get the full
1016 rather than the 826 a page gets.

The tab is expressed as "a page, and not one of the two the strip took" rather
than as a fourth ShellSurface. Both are still ShellScreen members and have to
be — that is what they are on the phone, where they are two rows in a hub — so
a surface each would have been a second way to say a thing Screen already says.
IsTransfersShowing and IsBucketsShowing light the other two tabs unchanged.
What is new is one field: the page Vaults comes back to, because it is the one
tab with sub-navigation and therefore the one that can return to the wrong
place. That is not the hidden field ShellSurface argues against — that one
would be a second copy of "which page"; this is a tab remembering its own.

THE HOSTS SCREEN IS A GRID, and the 268-pixel sidebar is gone. That column was
choosing among forty machines and editing one of them at two-thirds width, and
it was narrow so the editor beneath it could be a column at all. Cards took the
first job at full width; a 304-pixel drawer took the second and collapses when
nothing is selected. Pressing a group card narrows the grid; SHOW ALL is the
way back. The group editor moved into the drawer as well, which finally makes
IsEditingGroup mean the same thing on both heads — it was the phone's alone,
because the desktop's editor was a bar that was always on screen.

AreHostsExpanded and ToggleHosts went with the control that used them. They
folded the whole list away under one heading, an affordance that existed
because the column was narrow. Folding a single group is a different thing and
is still here.

THE TYPE SCALE IS A POINT LARGER and the text ramp is white. The base size was
never stated anywhere — a bare TextBlock took TextElement's default of 12 — so
raising the scale meant naming it, on Window and on UserControl. The second
selector is not redundancy: the layout harness hosts a UserControl in a window
it builds itself, and without it the suite would measure every screen a point
smaller than it ships, silently. A selector on TextBlock would have been the
obvious way and is wrong, because a style setter beats an inherited value and
would collapse every deliberate step back to one number.

#E3E7F4 is a blue-tinted white on blue-black surfaces, which costs contrast
twice — once for being darker than white and once for sharing a hue with what
it is drawn on. Pure white is 18.3:1 against the canvas where that was 15.5:1.
Every step below moved with the top, so the intervals the design chose are
kept and TextDim clears 9:1 against 6.4:1. The palette is shared, so the phone
has both changes too.

TWO DEFECTS THE HARNESS STRUCTURALLY CANNOT SEE, found by rendering the screen
rather than by measuring it, and both now covered.

The tile was 232 and was first written as 248, from arithmetic that left out
the scrolling stack's own margins. Every layout test passed — the harness asks
whether a control is inside the window, never how many fit on a line — so the
grid quietly became one column wide at exactly the minimum this application
guarantees, which is the shape cards exist to avoid.
TheHostsGridKeepsTwoColumnsAtTheMinimumWithTheDrawerOpen counts columns
instead, and fails at 248.

And a card's text ran past its own border, because a horizontal StackPanel
measures children with infinite width: a TextBlock inside one never learns it
is short of room, so TextTrimming never fires. Both card rows are grids with a
star column that gives way and an Auto column that does not — a hostname with
its tail cut is still the machine you were looking for, where a badge or the
word naming an auth method is not.

The keychain header changed shape for the same class of reason. It was
Auto,Auto,*,Auto with the buttons last, so the slack column was the only thing
absorbing a change of width and five buttons fell off the right edge the moment
the type grew. That is how GENERATE lost the word KEY once already. The summary
sits in the star column and trims now, so the buttons always get their width.

HostSidebarTests became HostGridTests and moved to the grid with the gestures
it drives. docs/design-import-gaps.md gains a v3 section naming the five
toolbar controls in the design with nothing behind them — a view-mode switch, a
tag filter, a calendar, a share control and Serial — and manual-checks.md and
the README follow the controls that moved.
2026-08-03 15:08:48 +02:00
jaap-janandClaude Opus 5 3627021420 Give the desktop the second design too, and the window the size it now needs
The desktop v2 design is the other half of the one the phone took last commit, and this is its chrome: a
190-pixel labelled sidebar where the 54-pixel icon rail was, a titlebar with the search box centred in it,
and session tabs drawn as pills. The palette was already here — it is shared, and moved when the phone's
did — so what this changes is shape rather than colour.

**The window's minimum grew, and by exactly what v2 added.** The sidebar is 136 wider and the chrome 14
taller, so 880x560 became 1016x574. That is not a round number somebody liked: it leaves every screen the
same 826x464 it was designed against, which is the arithmetic the layout suite is built on. Four of the
tables stop fitting at 690 wide, so widening the sidebar and leaving the window alone would have broken
them somewhere no test was looking. LayoutHarness carries the new constants and the suite still passes at
the minimum, which is the whole reason it exists.

The rail's five-character abbreviations are gone with the width that caused them — PINS and SNIPS are Pins
and Snippets again — and each row gains a glyph and a count. A count is drawn only where one is real, so
SFTP, Logs and Preferences show nothing rather than a zero: a transfer queue's depth is not how many files
a screen holds, and a log has no total until it is read. The count beside Pins is the vault's own, not the
Pins screen's VisiblePins, which is the filtered list and would have made the sidebar count whatever
somebody had just typed into a filter box on another screen. Teams has no count for a related reason: they
are read from the server when that screen is opened rather than on unlock, so a number there would read 0
until somebody had already been to look.

One colour moved with it, finishing what the repalette started: the live-session summaries on the unlock and
sign-out cards were Info, so the two heads disagreed about a fact the phone paints green. They match again.

**Buckets became a destination rather than a mode**, which is what the design draws and what the phone
already does. The HOST / BUCKET pair inside the files screen is gone; ShellScreen.Buckets draws the same
TransfersScreen with the other picker, and the sidebar entry is what sets it. That also settles an old
disagreement rather than merely moving it: TotalItemCount is keys plus passwords and excludes buckets, so
the number beside the keychain used to disagree with the list under it, and now counts what that screen
shows.

There is one session behind both file destinations, so asking for the other kind while something is open is
refused rather than obeyed — and refusing means staying put. An earlier turn of this had it move anyway and
only decline to switch the picker, which put the S3 entry in the sidebar over a screen still listing an
SFTP host: two pieces of chrome disagreeing about where you are, which is worse than the navigation simply
not happening. The message that says so goes to Transfers.Status, which turned out to be drawn in the same
grid cell as the connected chip — survivable while it was mostly read before connecting, and not once a
refusal reports itself there. It has its own column now.

The design has nine entries' worth of screens and draws five. Pins, Teams, Import and Preferences are
built, working screens, so they keep their entries — the sidebar is labelled now and has the room, and
dropping an entry would have stranded a screen rather than simplified anything. The Team vault card the
design pins to the foot is not drawn: it is a second route to a screen already in the list, carrying a seat
count nothing here produces.

**The status bar survives the design that deletes it**, cut down to one thing. Two of the three facts it
carried moved into the titlebar with v2 — the sync word is beside its dot and the shortcut hint is inside
the box that uses it — so those are gone from it rather than printed twice. The third is Vault.Status, the
only channel this application has for saying a save failed or a merge picked a winner. The design is a
mock-up of an afternoon that goes well and has nowhere to put a sentence like that; dropping the bar would
have meant dropping the sentence or repeating it on nine screens.

What v2 draws and this does not is in docs/design-import-gaps.md, and it is the same list as the phone's
for the same reasons: the forwarding screen and both its chips, the host detail's fingerprint, tags and
last-session cards, the keychain's rotate button, the logs' FOLLOW pill and severity filters, and the
session footer's latency. The terminal is not inset behind a rounded frame either — it is a native child
window that composites above everything Avalonia paints, so the frame would clip nothing, which is the same
answer the phone gave.

**The light theme is not built.** Its accent is #6D5AE6, a different hue rather than a tint of the dark
one, so it needs every colour doubled, a variant to switch on, the renderer's own page switching with it,
and contrast checked twice. That is a piece of work rather than a setting, and it is separable from the
layout — which is why this commit is the layout.

The screens themselves are restyled through the shared vocabulary rather than rebuilt: corner radii,
chips, cards and the accent's ink, all in App.axaml, so every screen moves at once. Their layouts are left
alone deliberately. The design draws read-only detail panes and these screens carry the editors and forms
it has no equivalent of, so replacing a layout with the mock-up's would have lost the half that is
actually used.

Verified by the whole suite: 1309 tests over nineteen projects, none failing, including the 68 layout cases
that stand up real Avalonia and measure every screen at the new minimum. Both heads build. Not run on a
machine with a display — see docs/manual-checks.md for what wants looking at.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01AZE3u99BNt6LzgTC5jhbz2
2026-08-02 19:29:21 +02:00
jaap-jan d07b336868 Free the terminal from the Hosts screen, and fill the room it left
The WebView sat inside the Hosts grid, so navigating to Files or the keychain
hid every open terminal and the strip that named them. A connection you had
opened was invisible from four of the five screens. The window now has two
surfaces rather than one: a nav rail that says which page you are on, and a
terminal strip that is always there and switches the whole content area to a
shell. Screen keeps meaning "which page" and never becomes a sixth kind of
page, which is why this is two properties instead of one enum with a terminal
member in it.

Every screen lives inside one wrapper panel that collapses when a terminal is
showing. That is not tidiness — the WebView hosts a Win32 child window that
composites above everything Avalonia draws, so a screen left visible over its
rectangle is a screen sliced in half, and this window has shipped that defect
once already. One decision point, IsTerminalShowing, and a nested panel rather
than five compound bindings nobody would remember to extend.

The focus choreography is the part no test in this repo can see. Every reveal
path now focuses in the same turn the WebView appeared, so all three of them
post at DispatcherPriority.Loaded and let the native control re-push its bounds
first. Going the other way had a real bug: the screen-changed branch called a
bare Focus() where it had to release the keyboard from the native child, so
switching from a terminal to Files silently ate the first keystrokes. Rare
before this commit and the primary gesture after it.

The tab strip grew a cross inside each tab, a plus that opens the quick-connect
palette, and middle-click close. Nested buttons are correct here: Avalonia
handles a left press on the cross and deliberately does not handle other
buttons, which is exactly what lets middle-click bubble up from the cross as
well as the tab. The test is PointerUpdateKind rather than
IsMiddleButtonPressed, because the latter reports button state and is also true
for a left press made while the middle button happens to be held. The handler
is on the tab and not the strip, so the background closes nothing by
construction. Plus opens the palette rather than a flyout, since a menu
dropping into the WebView's rectangle may or may not composite above a child
HWND and this repo does not make rendering claims it has not photographed.

Everything a user reads now says keychain. The wire, the database and the
cryptographic spec still say vault, deliberately: renaming those is a migration
and a protocol change for a word. That split is written down rather than left
to be rediscovered as an inconsistency.

Four things that were squeezed into the keychain's category rail, or into
nothing at all, now have screens. Pinned host keys get one, with fingerprints
never truncated and a filter that matches them, because comparing what you have
against what the operator published is the whole workflow; the approved date is
read out of the item's UUIDv7 rather than added as a column, and says so, since
it means first approval and not last use. Keys can be generated in the client,
which needed the openssh-key-v1 container written by hand — there is no BCL or
NSec helper, and the PKCS#8 route is unverified in the SSH library this uses.
The armour carries no passphrase: encrypting it needs bcrypt_pbkdf, which is
Blowfish with a swizzle, in a project whose crypto is otherwise entirely
libsodium, for a protection the key's own remarks argue is redundant inside a
vault. Generation fills the existing editor and stops, so SAVE stays the one
thing that writes. ~/.ssh/config can be imported behind a preview that is
ticked per row and writes nothing until the button; IdentityFile records the
path and imports the key material only on an explicit opt-in, because reading
somebody's private key into a vault is precisely the act this product exists to
make deliberate. Match blocks and ProxyJump are reported rather than obeyed —
one cannot be evaluated statically and the other has nothing behind it to route
with, and a preview that implied otherwise would be worse than one that admits
it.

Files can be dragged in all four directions that are honestly available. Remote
to Explorer does not ship and is not pretended to: the shell wants the bytes
during the drop, which needs a virtual file and a native COM data object,
outside what Avalonia offers. Note for the next person that Avalonia 12
replaced the drag model outright — DataObject and DataFormats are no-op stubs
and IDataObject is not in the reference assembly, so every tutorial written for
11 does not compile here.

Hosts can be grouped, flat and never nested. A parent id merged as a scalar
lets two offline clients each re-parent A under B and B under A, producing a
cycle inside an encrypted payload that no server can police and every reader
would have to detect for ever. Membership lives in that payload rather than in
the one plaintext concession ADR 0001 allows, whose test is that the relay
cannot function without it — nothing on the server reads a group, so what
plaintext would hand over is a clustering of the estate for nothing. The
plaintext column reserved for it is dropped, provably always null, and the
server now refuses a client that sends one; it was never populated, was copied
on apply, and was not cleared on delete, so a group id would have outlived the
host it described.

Snippets insert through xterm rather than through the pump, because xterm is
the only thing that knows whether the remote has bracketed paste on, and that
is what makes a shell treat embedded newlines as text instead of as execute.
The host process moves opaque bytes and never parses output, so it would have
to guess, and guessing wrong runs every line. Running is off by default and the
copy says the text goes into whatever is there — the terminal has no notion of
being at a prompt, and may be in vi or at a password prompt with echo off, so
the Enter the user presses themselves is the entire safety property.

Connections and keychain changes are recorded as synced encrypted items, which
is what makes them auditable by a team later and costs the server knowledge of
connection rate and timing from row counts alone. ADR 0001 already concedes it
cannot hide that class of metadata; the trade is now written into it rather
than left implicit. A connection entry is written once, at close, which is what
makes a synced log tractable: nothing to merge, one outbox row, no chance of
colliding with itself. Live sessions come from memory, not from the log. The
write is void by contract and posts to a bounded channel, because putting an
encrypt-and-write on the teardown path of every session is how closing the
application comes to take four seconds. A ticket opened before a lock still
closes afterwards, since a shell outlives the vault. The activity log hooks the
one generic repository every kind writes through, so it cannot miss a caller —
which is also why the log kinds themselves declare they are not audited, or the
first entry would write an entry about writing an entry. It records the names
of the fields that changed and never their values; a log with an old password
in it would be a plaintext credential store with no vault around it. Retention
is 90 days or 5,000 entries, whichever bites first, pruned on the sync loop
rather than on a second timer.

That log traffic then broke the status line, which is worth recording because
the fix is a shape and not a patch: background sync counted its own log rows as
pushed items, so the quiet rule stopped being quiet and every action's message
was overwritten a second later by a sync report. The report now separates log
rows from user items and the rule reads the latter.

S3 buckets appear as a remote in the file browser, behind the same interface an
SFTP session implements, so the queue and both panes did not have to learn what
they are talking to. Uploads go through a pipe, because the queue wants to
write and the SDK wants to read; memory is then bounded by the part size
instead of buffering a file to disk twice.

Finally, the Windows device key store moved out of the session project, which
was the one thing keeping it from being portable — everything else in it is
platform-neutral, and a Windows CNG dependency in the middle of the vault code
meant a second head could not reference it without dragging Windows along. The
seam that made the move free was already there. docs/android-port.md is the
audit behind that: what ports, what does not, in order of cost, the four
decisions taken, and an inventory of every screen and state the interface has
to carry, written so a design can be made from it directly.

dotnet build, dotnet test and dotnet format --verify-no-changes are all clean:
1240 tests at zero warnings, including the end-to-end suite against real
containers. The manual checks that headless Avalonia cannot make — the drag
from Explorer, a generated key against a real host, twelve tabs at the minimum
window width — are listed in docs/manual-checks.md and are still outstanding.
2026-07-31 20:30:05 +02:00
jaap-jan 0b261c4d39 Stay signed in, come back online by itself, and let a machine be given up
Three things a machine that has been set up could not do. Unlock now takes
Enter, which is the gesture everybody makes after typing a password and which
did nothing until they found the button.

Signing in survives a relaunch. The refresh token is kept in the local cache,
sealed under the vault's own cache key, so a later launch resumes the session
through the refresh grant with no browser and nobody present — and because it
is sealed under that key, only an unlocked vault can resume it. A locked
client therefore cannot reach the server at all, which is a consequence worth
stating rather than working around; docs/crypto.md §3.2 records it. Every sync
pass asks the shell for a connection rather than reading one captured at
unlock, so a laptop that unlocked on a train is online within a minute of
finding a network, with nothing pressed. Unlocking itself still never waits on
a socket.

Signing out empties this machine: the profile, the cached items, the outbox
and this machine's device key, with the account's row withdrawn when the
server can be reached. It asks first and says what it costs — the outbox count
when the vault is open, an admission that it cannot be counted when it is not,
and the shells that keep running either way. The vault is on the server and is
untouched, which is what makes the same button the only honest answer to a
forgotten passphrase, so it is on the unlock screen as well as in preferences.
It cannot end the session at the identity provider, and says so.

Two defects surfaced on the way. The synchronisation pass that runs when the
vault opens never ran at all: the loop is started from inside the unlock
command, so the busy flag it yields to was raised by that command — the first
sync was a minute late on every launch. And signing in from preferences while
unlocked threw an unlock screen over an open vault whose keys were still in
memory.

The unlock card and the new confirmation live in their own controls because
MainWindow cannot be laid out headless, so markup left inside it is markup no
test can measure; both are now measured at the window's minimum size in the
shapes that grow. What is still unverified is the composed window itself.
2026-07-31 11:07:36 +02:00
jaap-jan 9a76eced14 Give hosts and terminals their own screen, and the rest of the vault another
ci / build and test (ubuntu) (pull_request) Canceled after 0s
ci / build (windows) (pull_request) Canceled after 0s
Rebuilds the client's shell from an imported design: a titlebar and nav rail
it draws itself, real multi-session tabs over the one WebView, a Ctrl+K host
search, and a vault screen that merges keys, passwords and pinned host keys
into one table. Hosts left the vault column for their own screen beside the
terminal, which is what the design asks for and turned out to be the better
split anyway.

Two screens the design shows have nothing behind them yet — file transfer
and teams — and say so plainly rather than rendering invented data; every
other gap between the design and this build is recorded in
docs/design-import-gaps.md.
2026-07-31 08:39:37 +02:00
jaap-jan c5dec2d68e Measure the vault column instead of arguing about it
Nothing in this repository loaded a .axaml, so the one class of defect this
window has actually shipped — a control arranged past the edge of its container,
where it cannot be clicked — was the one class nothing could catch. The setup
screens rendered sliced once, with their buttons unreachable. The vault column is
the next candidate: 340 pixels wide, two lists and two editors, and the only
thing keeping it from clipping its own Save button at the window's 520-pixel
minimum is a state rule that one editor may be open at a time.

That rule was added on the strength of an argument. This adds an
Avalonia.Headless project that lays real XAML out at a real size and reports
what a user could not reach, and the argument is now a number: with both editors
open the column overflows, so the rule is load-bearing rather than defensive.
BothEditorsAtOnce_DoNotFit_WhichIsWhyTheRuleExists is the test, and it says what
to do if it ever starts passing — the column has room, so delete the rule, not
the test.

Two findings arrived by measuring rather than by reasoning, and the first one
changed the design.

MainWindow cannot be shown headlessly at all. Showing it attaches the terminal's
NativeWebView, whose Win32 adapter initialises WebView2 on attach, and WebView2
refuses a non-STA thread — which is exactly why Program.Main carries [STAThread]
and is written down in that comment. A HeadlessUnitTestSession owns its
dispatcher thread and offers no apartment choice, so the whole window is out of
reach at any size. That is pinned as a test asserting RPC_E_CHANGED_MODE by
HResult rather than by message, so a future Avalonia that makes the adapter lazy
will fail it and the harness can be widened.

So the column had to become its own control to be measurable, which is the
extraction the type-selector rework wanted anyway. Keyboard release moved with
it: MainWindow used to call Focus() on HostList by name, and now asks
VaultColumn.KeyboardTarget. The window decides that the keyboard should leave the
terminal and the column decides where it lands — which is the seam the rework
needs, because once the column shows one list at a time, "which list owns the
keyboard" is a question only the column can answer.

The second finding is the way this kind of test lies quietly. The hint class
lived in MainWindow.Styles and carries TextWrapping. A Window's styles reach its
whole tree, so nothing about the application depended on where it lived — but a
control laid out on its own loses them, and every hint paragraph would have
measured as a single line. The harness would have passed while measuring heights
that were all too small. The three shared classes now live in App.axaml, which
changes no rendering and makes the measurement honest.

The detector is calibrated in both directions, because a clipping detector that
never fires reads as a guarantee: a deliberately clipped Save button is caught by
name, and a list longer than its viewport is exempt. Scrolling is how a list is
supposed to handle more rows than fit, and without that exemption the host list
would fail the moment it had content. It also mis-fired once and the rule is
narrower for it — an empty ListBox is zero pixels tall and correct, so "arranged
with no size" now applies only to controls the theme gives a height to.

Skia rather than the headless drawing stub, deliberately. The stub's font manager
invents glyph metrics, and text height is an input to every stacked panel in this
column, so measuring against it would produce numbers that are self-consistent
and unrelated to the application.

A separate test project rather than more tests in DodoSSH.Client.App.Tests.
Avalonia's application, dispatcher and platform are process-global singletons
initialised once, and that project's identity is the shell's state machine
without Avalonia — the whole reason sign-in is a delegate. The fakes needed to
reach a real unlocked vault are shared from DodoSSH.Client.Session.Tests by
source link: a project reference would make one test project a library of
another, and a copy would be a third implementation of the same decision table
drifting from the other two.

855 tests green, 10 of them new. Zero warnings, dotnet format clean.

Not done, and this is groundwork rather than the item itself: the type selector.
The column still holds both lists at once, so a third item type would still
recreate the defect the one-editor rule works around. What is different is that
the rework can now be checked instead of eyeballed — including the claim it is
being made for, that one editor at a time stops being a runtime rule and becomes
a fact about what is in the visual tree.

What this harness will never catch is the terminal's native child window
compositing over Avalonia content. That is a Win32 property of a real window, no
headless surface reproduces it, and it is the reason the WebView is collapsed
rather than covered.
2026-07-30 11:34:09 +02:00