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.
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.
prefs.js had never run. It lives in its own process rather than in the
compositor, so enabling the extension in a nested shell does not reach it,
and every other check in this repo was blind to it -- it would first have
executed when someone opened the preferences and found it broken.
It builds under real Adw, and the hook-status line correctly reports all
nine registered events. The shell's ExtensionPreferences base class and its
gettext are stubbed rather than loaded: both resolve an extension by
walking the caller's URL up to a registered UUID, which needs the whole
extension manager for no gain here. The stub keeps the test on this
extension's own code.
The switch count is asserted against the schema's key count, so a setting
added without a row to change it fails the test.
av