Two changes that pull in the same direction: the panel says less, and the
menu stops pretending to do anything.
The chip row had no bound. It sits in the centre box next to the clock, so
enough open sessions would have shoved the clock off centre. It now shows
the first N, settable and three by default, and counts the rest as "+N".
Chips are already ordered by urgency, so the ones that survive the cut are
the ones that need you soonest. Labels are still assigned across every
session, including hidden ones, so a chip does not change when the cap
does or when a session ahead of it disappears.
Clicking a menu row used to switch the zellij tab and raise a terminal.
That is gone. It cost real machinery for what it saved -- gnome-terminal
runs every window under one shared server process, so windows cannot be
matched by pid and the code fell back to matching the zellij session name
against window titles, with all the ways that misses. The menu reports
status; alt-tab is not the bottleneck. Rows are built inert rather than
demoted after the fact, because PopupBaseMenuItem latches _activatable in
its constructor.
zellij tab lookup stays: naming the tab is the better half of that feature
and costs one process every couple of minutes.
The preferences test now asserts a control per settings key rather than a
switch per key, so the new spin row counts and a future non-boolean
setting cannot slip in without one.
"Idle" was set by SessionStart and by nothing else, and there was no path
back into it. So it never meant "sitting unused" -- it meant "opened and
never asked anything yet", a state a few seconds long that you would
almost never catch. Meanwhile a session that finished an hour ago and was
forgotten showed as waiting, which is correct but leaves the fourth state
with nothing to describe.
A session that has just opened is waiting for your first prompt exactly
as one that finished a turn is waiting for your next. They are the same
thing, and now they are the same state. Three glyphs instead of four,
which also gives the remaining three more room to be told apart in a
monochrome panel.
Files written by the previous hook still say "idle", and a session open
across the upgrade must not disappear, so unrecognised states now read as
waiting rather than being treated as unknown. Covered by a test that
feeds an "idle" file to the store and asserts it comes back as waiting,
sorted by age among the others.
The "hide when nothing is running" setting goes with it. Its condition
was "no sessions, or all of them idle"; with idle gone the second half is
unreachable and the first was already unconditional, so the switch could
no longer change anything. A control that does nothing is worse than no
control.
The compaction test also got stronger in passing: it now checks that a
mid-turn SessionStart leaves a *busy* session alone, which is the case
that matters. It used to assert from waiting, where the state it was
guarding against happened to be the state already stored.
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.
Answers one question at a glance: is any session waiting for me, and
which one. With several sessions open the cost is not knowing what each
is doing, it is noticing that one stopped an hour ago.
Claude Code hooks write one JSON file per session under
~/.local/state/claude-code-status; the extension watches the directory
with Gio.FileMonitor, so nothing polls and there is no daemon.
Two distinctions carry the design:
* blocked (permission prompt) is kept apart from waiting (turn done).
Merged, a finished task looks as urgent as a stuck one, which is
exactly the judgement the indicator exists to make.
* the panel names the oldest session in the top state, not the latest.
The session you forget is the one that has been waiting longest.
PostToolUse is registered although it looks redundant: it is the only
event that fires after a permission is granted, so without it a session
stays blocked in the panel for the rest of the turn. It writes only on
an actual state change, so the usual case costs no I/O.
Stop and SessionEnd are synchronous, unlike the rest. Both fire as the
process is about to go quiet, and an async hook racing that exit gets
killed before it writes -- claude -p left a session pinned at busy.
Concurrent hooks for one session serialise on an flock plus a timestamp
guard; tests/test-hook.sh covers each separately, because the burst test
passes on the timestamp guard alone.
Sessions running in zellij are located by tab name rather than by path,
matched through dump-layout on the working directory. The dump carries
no pane ids, so ZELLIJ_PANE_ID cannot be used; rows that do not resolve
stay inert instead of pretending a click does something.
lib/sessions.js deliberately imports nothing from the shell resource
namespace, which lets the riskiest logic -- liveness, ordering, partial
reads, monitoring -- run under plain gjs in tests/test-sessions.js.
av