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2 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
laurensandClaude Opus 5 1908189100 Make the terminal's right button copy and paste, and never open a menu
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Selecting output and right-clicking it opened the WebView's own context menu with
Copy on it, which is correct behaviour for a web page and wrong for a terminal.
What a terminal's right button has meant since the Windows console got QuickEdit,
and since PuTTY shipped, is this: with something selected it copies and drops the
selection, with nothing selected it pastes. No menu, no second click.

The gesture can only live in the page. The selection is drawn into a canvas the
host never sees, and once a terminal has focus the host's window receives no input
events at all — the same reason the Ctrl+plus chords are handled there.

◆ THE CLIPBOARD IS THE HOST'S IN BOTH DIRECTIONS, AND THE READING IS WHY.

navigator.clipboard.readText() is gated behind the clipboard-read permission in
every Chromium, and an embedded WebView with no PermissionRequested handler
answers a permission request by putting a prompt on the screen. Trading a context
menu for a permission dialog is not this change. So the page asks and the host
answers, exactly as requestFontSizeStep does.

Writing does not go the other way either, although navigator.clipboard.writeText
would have worked from the page on Windows: a clipboard that is the host's in one
direction and the page's in the other is two mechanisms to keep working across
WebView2, WebKitGTK and Android's WebView. The host has owned a clipboard delegate
since the keychain grew its COPY buttons, so each App.axaml.cs grows a
ClipboardReader beside its ClipboardWriter and MainWindowViewModel takes it.

Three opcodes: client ClipboardCopy and ClipboardPaste, server Clipboard.

◆ Clipboard IS NOT Paste, AND THE DIFFERENCE IS THE BRACKETING.

Paste carries a snippet off the sidebar, and the page deliberately *types* a
single-line one rather than bracketing it, because bash marks a bracketed paste as
an active region and a snippet should read as though it had been typed. A clipboard
paste is the case those markers are for — readline uses them to decide it has been
pasted into — so Clipboard is always bracketed and never followed by an Enter. One
opcode for both would have needed a flag meaning "which of the two kinds of paste
is this", on a payload whose existing flag byte means something else.

Both client frames are dispatched before the session lookup, which is what keeps
the gesture working in a pane whose shell has just ended: squinting at the message
a remote left behind is exactly when somebody copies the line. Dispatch was past
MA0051's length once it grew a second such branch, so the frames no pump needs to
see moved into Announce() and the font-size chord went with them.

◆ CAPTURED AND STOPPED, RATHER THAN MERELY PREVENTED.

preventDefault alone suppresses the menu and still lets xterm's own contextmenu
handler run, which moves its helper textarea under the pointer at z-index 1000 and
leaves the selection sitting in it, selected. Both of those exist to serve the
native menu. Taking the event in the capture phase on the pane and stopping it
there is what keeps the gesture wholly the page's.

rightClickSelectsWord is now false, which on macOS is a change of default rather
than a restatement of it: xterm sets it true there alone, so a right-click would
have selected the word under the pointer and copied that instead of pasting —
wrong on one platform only, which is the worst way for it to be wrong.

The renderer harness grows the pane it has been inviting since
RendererReconnectionTests: a fake Terminal, the two addons, and a real UTF-8 codec,
because both directions run through the page's own TextEncoder and TextDecoder and
a Latin-1 stub would pass a test with an em dash in the selection. Its warning
about declaring names terminal.js declares now covers the half that does not
SyntaxError — a harness frame() was silently replaced by the page's frame() and
failed six tests on a type error a long way from the cause.

Manual checks 1.11 and 11.13 are what is left for a person: that a real contextmenu
event reaches a capture listener, that no native menu is drawn once it is
prevented, and that xterm's real paste() brackets. 11.13 also records what is
unverified — whether Android's WebView delivers a pointer's secondary click as a
contextmenu event at all. ClipboardReader is wired on that head regardless,
because the alternative is a head where the paste half silently does nothing and
nobody finds out; that head is not compiled here either, this machine having no
android workload.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-25 14:46:36 +02:00
jaap-jan 963cb7f670 Reconnect the terminal view when somebody comes back to it
ci / build and test (pull_request) Failing after 2m29s
ci / desktop nightly (pull_request) Skipped
ci / api image (pull_request) Skipped
ci / android head (pull_request) Successful in 3m23s
Going back to a terminal left alone for a while found it stuck on
"Reconnecting the terminal view…", and stuck is the right word: the banner
stayed and nothing behind it was reconnecting.

The page's whole recovery story was a setTimeout chain, and a chain is exactly
what a WebView is entitled to stop running. Chromium throttles timers in a page
nobody is looking at — down to once a minute once it has been hidden five
minutes — and a renderer that is frozen, or reclaimed and not yet reloaded,
runs none of them. So the socket drops while nobody is watching, the banner
goes up, the retry is scheduled, and the retry is then the one thing not
running.

Three defects, each of which leaves that banner up for the rest of the page's
life.

◆ NOTHING LISTENED FOR THE PAGE COMING BACK. The only thing that could clear
the banner was a timer that may never fire. terminal.js now reconnects on
visibilitychange, focus and online — the events that mean somebody is looking
again, and the ones that cannot be throttled — cancelling the pending timer and
resetting the backoff. Over a healthy socket all three do nothing, which is
what makes them safe to fire as often as clicking a window does.

◆ A HANDSHAKE THAT NEVER FINISHED WAS INVISIBLE. Every retry was scheduled by a
close or an error, so an attempt parked in CONNECTING — which is what a
suspended renderer leaves behind — scheduled nothing at all, ever. There is now
a five-second watchdog on the handshake.

◆ STALE SOCKETS SCHEDULED RETRIES, AND THAT ONE IS A LOOP RATHER THAN A STALL.
connect() never detached the old socket's handlers, and the host aborts the
displaced socket on takeover — TerminalDataPlane.UpgradeAsync, doing exactly
what it should. That close read as a fresh failure and scheduled a retry
against the socket that had just succeeded, whose own close scheduled the next:
no fixed point, reconnecting every second forever with the banner up for most
of it. Every handler now asks whether it is still the page's own attempt, and
connect() closes what it abandons.

◆ WHICH OF THE PLATFORM BEHAVIOURS ACTUALLY BIT IS NOT ESTABLISHED, and the fix
does not depend on knowing. Throttled timers, a frozen renderer and a reclaimed
one all end at the same dead timer; guessing between them would have produced a
narrower fix for one of the three.

THE TEST RUNS terminal.js ITSELF, in a fake browser, inside dotnet test.
RendererPage loads the file the shell project ships — not a transcription of its
logic into C#, which would be a copy that stays correct while the page rots —
into a Jint engine, one per test, over a harness that fakes a WebSocket and a
clock and nothing else. Jint rather than a node script because CI would run the
node one and nobody's inner loop would; the cost is that Jint is not Chromium,
so this proves the page's logic and nothing about how a WebView behaves. That
line is drawn in RendererPage's remark and picked up by two new manual checks,
1.10 for the desktop and 11.12a for the phone, which own the platform half.

Four of the nine tests fail against the page as it stood — the stale close, the
parked handshake, and the two wake-ups. Two more assert that a wake-up over a
healthy socket does nothing, and pass against either version on purpose: they
are what stops the cure being worse.

Left alone deliberately: a socket that is open and dead shows no banner at all,
because readyState still reads OPEN. That looks like a terminal that swallows
what is typed, needs a liveness probe rather than a faster retry, and is written
down at the end of 11.12a rather than quietly bundled in here.
2026-08-14 15:09:43 +02:00