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term-input

The command line lives outside xterm, so the arrow keys are ours.

A live terminal swallows every keystroke — including the arrows we navigate the tree with. So the command line lives outside xterm: the terminal is a read-only display, and a separate input owns the keys. Because the input is ours, an arrow can mean two things — navigate when the line is empty, edit when it isn't. Empty is the signal. This is the whole node: a cross-cutting contract, realised wherever a live terminal sits beside spec navigation.

the input owns its keys

  • Empty-line arrows navigate; text-present arrows edit. With the line empty, ←/→ walk parent/child and ↑/↓ walk the column (the same nav the graph uses — see keyboard-nav); with text present the arrows walk the caret and stop there, so nothing double-fires. List nav is lifted to the window level so it survives xterm focus — the keys are ours, not xterm's.
  • Dispatch goes through the control socket, never the pane. A running session's message is injected out-of-band (the rendezvous control socket, bypassing tmux), so it lands even when scrolling has put tmux in copy-mode — where bytes written into the pane are eaten as navigation and never reach the agent. Dispatch is fail-loud: a failed send restores the draft and flags the error rather than pretend it sent. A set of / commands never reaches the agent — the board commands, handled by the dashboard itself: /exit stops the session but keeps its worktree (it goes offline, resumable), /close removes the worktree (the no-prompt discard), /merge merges it, /nav toggles nav mode, /proof opens the proof. Each is the typed twin of a header button — drawn from one registry, so the command and its button are one action, one identity colour, and can never drift. Sending these words to a live agent would only drive the agent's own process, not the board. Realised in session-console.

completion menus answer different questions

A leading character opens a dropdown. For authoring rows — @ nodes, config presets, Claude Code's own commands — a row only ever inserts its token text and never runs anything; they are authoring aids, not a second control plane. The one exception is a board command (below): its row is the typed twin of a header button, so accepting it runs the action — it is the board's control plane, not a hint toward one.

  • @ — spec nodes, on every prompt. Which node does this target? The focused node is the first suggestion, so just typing @ opts into it. It is the same dropdown on the New Session prompt and on a running session's ❯ inbox — one menu, not two.
  • / on the New Session prompt — the config presets (our own bespoke preset set), not Claude Code's palette.
  • / on a running session's ❯ inbox — the board commands, then Claude Code's own / menu. The board's own commands (/exit·/close·/merge·/nav·/proof) lead the list, each in its identity colour with a [board] tag, visibly apart from CC's blue command rows below — because there you talk to a live agent (CC commands make sense), but the board commands act HERE on the dashboard.

the New Session / composes at launch

The dropdown stays decoupled: picking a preset only inserts /<name>. The body is woven in only at Enter. The grammar /<preset> @<node>… <free text> assembles one prompt — the preset's body with its targets placeholder filled by the @-resolved nodes, then the free text appended. No @ leaves a "current/focused node" note for the body to handle. A leading / naming no known preset, and any plain or @-only prompt, launch verbatim — the existing paths are untouched.

the running session's @ resolves at send

The same authoring aid, mirrored into the live conversation. An @<node> typed into a running session's ❯ inbox is resolved at send-time — each token expands in place to its node id plus a pointer to that node's live spec.md path, so the driven agent is aimed at the node's current contract and reads the file itself, never a pasted body. This is the in-conversation twin of spec-pointer's launch pointer: New Session resolves @ at Enter into the launch prompt; a running session resolves it at send into the keyed message. An unknown id passes through untouched, and the rest of the line is sent verbatim — the @ is the only thing rewritten.

no source of its own

This node is the cross-cutting contract, so it governs no files directly; the realisations live where other nodes own them — the docked terminal, input, and /·@ menus in SessionInterface.jsx (session-console); the dormant in-popup original TermPane.jsx (session-peek); the capture-phase arrow routing in App.jsx (keyboard-nav); and the CC-command union plus config presets in spec-cli. A change to any of those is that surface's drift, not a phantom warning here. The realisation moved surfaces; the principle — input outside xterm so arrows can navigate — did not.