three separate faults behind "reconnecting gets weird and the keyboard is not
natural".
── the replay typed into the shell ──
the pty buffer was stored raw and replayed verbatim on every re-attach. anything
in it that ASKS the terminal a question — DSR, DA, DECRQM, XTVERSION, XTGETTCAP,
the OSC colour queries — got asked again, and xterm answered correctly by writing
the reply to its input. the pty receives that as a keystroke nobody typed.
stripped on the way IN, since the buffer is the thing that gets replayed and a
live client already answered them once when they were legitimately asked. only
questions are removed; everything that draws is untouched. where a control shares
its final byte with one that draws, the parameter is enumerated rather than
wildcarded — CSI 18 t asks the window size, CSI 22 t pushes the title, and
stripping the second would change what a replay renders. 36 tests, both
directions, because both fail silently.
── two sockets on one session ──
handleClose armed a reconnect timer; handleVisibilityChange fired on tab focus
whenever readyState was CLOSED — which is exactly what a pending timer leaves.
both ran. every keystroke went twice, two replay frames fought over the screen,
and only one socket was ever cleaned up because __terminalCleanup is overwritten
by whichever connect ran last. connect() is now the single guard, and a stale
socket's close no longer speaks for the session.
── the keyboard ──
alt-arrow was dead for everyone: xterm.js 5 rewrote it into the ctrl-arrow
sequence, xterm.js 6 removed that rewrite and emits the honest ^[[1;3C/D
(verified — the string 1;3D does not appear anywhere in the 6.0 bundle). nothing
bound it. so it broke on a dependency bump, with no shell config changed.
bound in zsh rather than translated in the browser, deliberately: tmux.conf
claims M-Left/M-Right for pane switching, and a client-side rewrite would send
^[b to tmux and break it. the real sequence lets tmux handle it inside a session
and zsh outside.
ctrl-arrow was worse and more embarrassing: it worked for MEMBERS and not for the
OWNER. shell-skel/zshrc has had the bindings all along; the owner's .zshrc is
assembled in machine-setup and never got them. the owner had a strictly worse
shell than the accounts they provision. confirmed with `zsh -i -c bindkey`
before and after.
also: escape-time 10 in tmux.conf. the 500ms default delays every Alt chord and
every Escape, which is most of what "not natural" felt like.
applied to this host by hand — setup only runs at install. cmd+arrow is left
alone: xterm emits nothing for it, so there is no sequence to bind.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5
02e049cae8