terminal-input

A live session opens focused in its real TUI. Selecting a session, reselecting its active row, choosing the Terminal tab, or returning from command-box explicitly activates that TUI and restores its focus. Pointer activation must not blur xterm's hidden textarea before the activation lands: an in-progress browser IME composition remains attached to the same input element instead of being ended by dashboard chrome. Beyond activation, console chrome is pointer-inert for focus: clicking and operating the sidebar list, zone headers, fold pods, the list resizer, the toolbar, or any other non-input chrome never takes focus from the TUI — the console's panel-wide blanket cancels the press's focus move while the click still acts (the same blanket protects whichever composer currently owns the surface). A transient pop above the console that legitimately takes focus — the search palette, a modal — returns it to the TUI on exit (focus-return owns that boundary), so leaving any pop lands you typing again, never on dead chrome.

xterm owns ordinary keyboard input and its hidden textarea owns browser IME composition; SpexCode does not translate DOM keydowns into a second vocabulary. Unmodified printable keys complete through the browser's native text events instead of xterm eagerly translating their physical key code on keydown; the IME's committed text therefore wins when the same comma or period key means ， or 。. Once xterm publishes an ordinary insertText, its terminal-only helper value is cleared; sent keystrokes never accumulate invisibly and displace the next composition. The pane also never moves while you type: xterm parks that textarea at the cursor cell and widens it to the composition string, so at the rightmost columns the focused box pokes past the pane edge — and the browser's caret-reveal will drag ANY scrollable ancestor sideways to chase it, overflow:hidden included. The console's terminal chrome is therefore overflow: clip (not a scroll container at all), so a right-edge composition finds nothing to scroll and the grid stays put. Consecutive composition commits are independent: a new Chinese/Japanese/Korean candidate can never reuse or replace itself with the prior committed candidate. xterm's ordered onData bytes travel on the terminal WebSocket to the visible viewer's one live-view helper, which writes them to that same native tmux client's PTY. Rendering, resize, wheel navigation, and input are therefore four messages on one terminal relationship, not separate approximations of the terminal.

Only the visible, live viewer may write. Hidden or disconnected browsers never queue keystrokes for replay, and an input message from a stale viewer is ignored. A transport loss remains visibly reconnecting and fails loudly by withholding input until the socket is open; it never pretends a key landed. The helper bounds each input message before writing it, while preserving the byte string and event order xterm produced.

Dashboard-global shortcuts are the narrow exception. The capture layer may consume its documented navigation chords and the reserved Command Box chord before xterm sees them. The terminal adapter also encodes Shift+Enter as ESC CR, the conventional modified-Enter sequence understood as a draft newline by both Codex and Claude inside true tmux; composition Enter is never intercepted. Everything else, including arrows, ordinary Enter, Escape, control sequences, paste, and composed Chinese/Japanese/Korean text, belongs to xterm and the agent's own TUI by default. Opening command-box moves focus to its textarea; closing or successfully sending from it returns focus to xterm. No type mode, raw-key batching, menu sniff, or private xterm focus override exists.

The pointer is the browser's and never the application's. Plain drag always makes a local xterm selection (the patched selection predicate diverts every button event from mouse reporting), ⌘/Ctrl+C copies it, and paste remains xterm's native bracketed paste — no modifier is ever required. While a terminal selection exists the copy chord is consumed before xterm's own key handling (it must never fall through as \x03/SIGINT into the application), and it stands down only for a real composer field's own selection — the helper textarea's mirrored selection is the terminal's, never a stand-down reason. Without a selection the chord stays the terminal's ordinary interrupt. Motion tracking is filtered at the adapter so hovering emits nothing; only wheel reports leave the browser, routed by tmux's native bindings (live-view owns that contract).