Two things that were constants and had no business being constants.
Placement: the box (left, centre, right) and the index within it. The
default is unchanged -- centre, index 1, immediately right of the clock --
and an index past the end of a box lands at the end, so a large one means
"last". Applied at once, no reload.
Moving is done by rebuilding the indicator rather than by moving the actor.
addToStatusArea is what registers it under the uuid and there is no
documented call to move one between boxes; everything else reaches into
Main.panel's private boxes. It costs one re-read of a few small state files
and only when the setting is touched.
Label width: three characters by default, settable up to ten, not down.
Three is enough to keep initials apart and narrow enough not to shove the
clock about; below three, distinct projects start sharing a label. A wider
label takes more initials rather than a longer prefix -- a prefix collapses
dev-skills and dev-conventions at any width -- so dev-skills stays "ds"
however wide the setting, while claude-code-gnome-extension becomes "ccge"
at four. A disambiguating digit still eats into the label instead of
extending past the width, so a chip that gains one does not push the row.
Sticky labels work against that setting: kept labels are kept whatever
width they were cut at, so widening would leave every session on screen at
its old width until it ended. The width is therefore the one thing that
discards the map -- a relabelling that was asked for is not a label moving
under your hand.
The combo row is bound by hand: Gio.Settings.bind maps a boolean to
'active' and an int to 'value', but a string to a selected index needs
bind_with_mapping, which is not introspectable. Only the write direction is
wired up, and the test covers it, because a row that stores its index
instead of its value looks fine until the shell reads the key.
Fixed on the way, found by watching the centre box grow 2 -> 3 -> 4 -> 5
across four moves: PanelMenu.ButtonBox connects `this._onDestroy.bind(this)`
in its _init, and its _onDestroy is what destroys the container -- the
St.Bin the panel box actually holds. The name resolves through the
prototype chain, so this extension's own _onDestroy had been silently
replacing the shell's since the beginning, leaving an empty container in
the panel on every teardown. Renamed to _teardown; the box now stays at two
children across moves and across enable/disable cycles.
Verified in a nested shell on a copy of the extension carrying temporary
logging, since the shell refuses screenshots to non-portal callers: every
box, indices 0, 1 and 9, and widths 3, 5, 8, 10 and back, with no JS errors
and no leftover actors.
The panel showed a single aggregate: the most urgent session, plus a "+N"
for the others. That answers "what is the worst thing happening", which
is not the question with five projects open -- "what is each of them
doing" needs each of them on screen.
Each session now gets a chip: state glyph plus a three-character project
label, in the centre box just right of the clock. Time in state stays on
the first chip only; five counters side by side are a row of numbers,
not an answer.
Labels are initials for multi-segment names, first letters otherwise.
Initials rather than a prefix, because a prefix collapses dev-skills and
dev-conventions onto the same "dev" -- exactly the pair that has to stay
apart. Collisions, including two sessions in one project where the cwd
is identical, take a digit: ds, ds2, ds3.
Two rules keep a label still, and the feature is worthless without them.
Assignment runs oldest-session-first, so a session starting now takes
the suffix instead of displacing one already on screen; and a label
belongs to its session until it ends, even after whatever forced the
digit has closed. A label that moves under your hand is worse than one
carrying a digit that no longer looks necessary.
The zellij tab name was considered as the label source and dropped. It
arrives asynchronously from dump-layout, so a sticky label would freeze
whatever the project name produced first and never adopt it. Digits
already separate same-project sessions, so the tab name buys nothing
here and stays where it is useful, in the menu.
Menu rows now lead with the same label, so the mapping from "ds" to
dev-skills is read rather than guessed.
av