Three different things used to do this job, and which one you got depended on
where the machine was running. On a terminal the host held the line and did the
echoing and the backspacing; behind a window the console's own gatherer did it;
from a file nothing did it at all. One job, three implementations, none of them
in the system - which is why there was no way to move about in a line and
nowhere for a history to live.
So editLine does it. Key mode while a line is being read and line mode straight
after, so nothing else in the system and no program calling osReadLine notices
anything changed. Left and Right, Home and End, Backspace for the character
before the cursor and Delete for the one under it, and anything typed goes in
where the cursor is with the rest of the line moving along.
Ctrl-D means the end of input again, on an empty line, because that was a thing
the terminal did while it was holding the line and it is not holding it now.
Same trade as the echoing.
MOST KEYSTROKES DRAW NOTHING BUT THEMSELVES. A character typed at the end of a
line needs no cursor moved: printing it is the whole change, and a backspace
there is three ordinary bytes. That matters beyond speed - moving the cursor by
hand is what a terminal is TOLD about, in an escape sequence, so redrawing on
every keypress would fill every recorded transcript in this suite with them.
The line is only reprinted when something happened in the middle of it.
Where the line STARTS is worked out backwards from where printing ended, rather
than trusted from what was remembered. That is what makes it survive the screen
scrolling: a line printed on the bottom row moves everything up by one, and a
remembered row would be one too low from then on.
The command line holds 127 characters, up from 63. The limit started to be felt
the moment a line could be moved about in.
58 recordings changed, and every one of them by the echo. THE PROOF IS NOT A
HEURISTIC: a CosmOS built with the echo silenced reproduces 187 of the 188
recordings byte for byte. The one exception is cosmosTyped, the backspace test,
where the rub-out marks now come from the shell instead of from the console's
gatherer - same marks, different author.
cosmosEditKeys is the new test, and every line in it is typed wrong and then
corrected with a different key. Its last line is eighty six characters at a
prompt in column two on an eighty column screen, so the line runs onto the row
below and the shell has to find the start of something it can no longer see;
breaking either half of that arithmetic fails it.
Also: agree.sh looked for "> the same", anchored to a prompt that no longer
precedes what a command prints.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
"1:/notes", or "1:" on its own for wherever that drive already was. Done in
sbfsWalk, which is where every path in the system arrives - eight callers
between the shell, the config reader and the filesystem - so it works for
anything that takes a path rather than for whichever commands somebody
remembered to change.
NAMING A DRIVE GOES THERE AND STAYS THERE. Switching for the length of one
command and switching back reads better and cannot work: a path resolves to
a start block and a length, and those mean nothing without the drive they
were read from. A load that resolved on drive 1 and then read its blocks on
drive 0 would read the right blocks of the wrong disk.
A name beginning with a digit is still a name. The colon is the whole of
what tells them apart, and /2things is on the fixture disk to keep it that
way.
Two bugs, and the second is the interesting one.
SUB sets carry on a BORROW, so a character below '0' leaves it set - and
the test for "not a digit" branched on clear. Every prefix was ignored.
Then the leading-separator test reads the first character through DP0,
which sbfsPathDrive could not move because RET puts DP0 back the way it
found it. It advanced SbfsPathAt and DP0 still pointed at the digit, so
every prefixed path was judged relative and walked from the named drive's
working directory. IT ONLY SHOWED WHEN THAT DRIVE WAS STANDING SOMEWHERE
OTHER THAN ITS ROOT, because a relative walk from the root is an absolute
one - so "cd 1:/2things" worked from a fresh boot and failed after "cd
1:/notes". The test does it in that order for that reason.
Copying between two disks is still not one command: each path resolves on
its own drive and the drive stays where the last path left it. That wants
Copy to change drives between blocks.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5