TUI Hover Polish
Hover States for the Terminal UI
Gantry made its terminal click targets visible under the mouse, then moved menu hover colors through the widget contract.
2 milestones 9 tasks 22 agents
6 plan 9 execute 12 review
243k peak context
145k median execute
2h 35m total 10m 41s per task
10m 6s plan 1h 36m execute 17m 23s review
63 edits 699 commands
codex harness
This run made hover affordances part of Gantry's terminal interface rather than a few incidental menu effects. It started with the surfaces Gantry could own directly: frontmost modal routing, palette-backed modal chrome, shared hover targets, chat controls, inline blocker buttons, and the sidebar divider. Then it crossed into the vendored menu widget, where generic foreground hooks and snapshot discipline had to exist before Gantry could theme menu and modal hover consistently.
The cut was mostly clean inside the Gantry-owned milestone, but milestone review caught that modal close-button hover color had landed on the host side earlier than planned. The upstream-backed milestone then hit the real architectural pressure: a full snapshot refresh was too large while upstream and vendor drift still disagreed, so Gantry replanned the first widget sprint into a narrower hover contract before finishing the reconciliation and palette wiring.
How this walkthrough is structured
Feature
What did the run build and ship?
Gantry now tracks frame-local hover targets for its own clickable TUI chrome and themes menu, dropdown, modal, chat, blocker, and divider hover states through surviving palette and widget contracts.
Build
How did Gantry structure the work?
The run split terminal hover polish into Gantry-owned interaction surfaces and an upstream-backed widget refresh, with the only recovery landing where the generic vendor boundary was too broad.
Milestone 1
Gantry Hover Affordances
6 tasks 15 agents 1h 4m wall time 165k peak context
The Gantry-owned half still stands across the TUI state, routing, rendering, modal, and theme modules. Current code exposes a GantryHoverTarget enum, updates it from draw-time geometry, suppresses it under menus and overlays, and paints chat chrome, inline blocker buttons, the composer row, and the sidebar divider from the shared palette. Some lines from the original modal color work have since been rewritten, but the host-side theme bridge remains the path Gantry uses.
This milestone carried every hover affordance Gantry could implement without changing generic widget behavior. That gave each child sprint a local surface to own: modal event routing, theme bridging, hover target state, then renderers that consumed that state. The child gates stayed green, but the milestone review found that close-button hover foreground had crossed into host code even though the split expected that concern to wait. That finding became the explicit starting condition for the upstream-backed milestone.
Modal Pointer Routing
2 agents 11m 45s wall time 165k peak context
Modal mouse dispatch is still centralized through Gantry's modal integration and the frontmost overlay router. Prompt, confirm, read-only, pager, process, git activity, stats, info, help, and stage-log overlays all route through the same frontmost decision before application actions are handled. Underlying pane hover state is cleared while an overlay owns the pointer, so modal interaction remains visually and behaviorally exclusive.
This sprint came before visual styling because a hover state on a modal control has no value if the modal cannot own the pointer. Its brief kept the worker inside dispatch semantics: frontmost overlays receive mouse events, their buttons and close affordances keep keyboard behavior, and panes underneath do not also react. The row stayed green, giving later modal styling a reachable control surface rather than a painted dead end.
Modal Palette Bridge
1 agents 7m 47s wall time 84k peak context
The current theme module still builds modal colors and modal button styles from Gantry's palette. Modal configuration is derived from menu colors, and button states have separate normal, hovered, and focused styles. Rendered modal code now consumes those styles through the shared modal layout path instead of leaving Gantry dialogs on unrelated widget defaults.
With modal clicks routed, this sprint narrowed the work to the visual contract between Gantry and the modal renderer. The agent was asked to use existing theme hooks where they existed, derive colors from Gantry's palette, and prove painted cells rather than merely checking state. It stayed green, though the milestone review later noted that close-button hover foreground had become part of the host-side work sooner than the original split intended.
Hover Target Contract
2 agents 7m 42s wall time 114k peak context
GantryHoverTarget is still the application-side hover model for Gantry-owned controls. The mouse router maps divider regions, run controls, the sidebar gutter, the chat input row, and inline blocker footprints into that enum, then clears stale targets when menus or overlays take ownership. Dynamic blocker targets still carry prompt identity, action index, and action token so rendering and clicks can revalidate against live state.
This sprint established the state contract the rendering work needed, without trying to paint every surface at once. The brief required hover targets to come from current-frame geometry, clear under overlays and menus, and carry identity for dynamic blocker buttons. It passed cleanly, so the following render sprints could consume a shared target instead of each one redoing hit testing.
Chat Hover Rendering
2 agents 9m 56s wall time 118k peak context
The chat renderer still checks GantryHoverTarget before painting the assistant title, size controls, drag band, and composer row. Hovered chat title text and compact controls use the bright accent, the drag band lifts its surface, and the unfocused composer row gets a distinct hover style. Focused composer rendering remains separate, so a mouse pass over the row does not masquerade as keyboard focus.
This sprint consumed the new hover target contract for the assistant pane's own chrome. Its scope was visual: title surface, collapsed strip, minimize and maximize controls, divider drag band, and chat input row, while keeping click and focus behavior unchanged. The gate stayed green, which matches a cut that depended on the previous routing contract rather than reopening action semantics.
Inline Blocker Hover
2 agents 10m 41s wall time 93k peak context
Inline blocker rows still publish button footprints from the draw pass and render button spans with hover-aware styles. The current style resolver distinguishes plain hover, action-row keyboard focus, composer-return focus, and combined hover cases using background, foreground, bold, and underline changes. Click handling still rechecks the visible footprint against the pending blocker before answering.
This sprint handled the most dynamic Gantry-owned target: blocker action buttons embedded in transcript content. The brief kept routing and identity validation as inherited contracts, then asked the agent to render resting, hovered, keyboard-focused, composer-return, and combined states distinctly. It stayed green, leaving the final Gantry-owned row to finish the static divider affordance.
Sidebar Divider Affordance
2 agents 4m 57s wall time 87k peak context
The sidebar and feed divider is still painted as an actual surface when the sidebar is visible. The mouse router recognizes the recorded divider column as a SidebarFeedDivider target, while drag start still depends on the same rendered gutter. Later code has grown around the split behavior, but the resting and hovered divider affordance remains tied to the live layout column.
This was a narrow finishing sprint for a discoverability gap rather than a new interaction model. The brief asked for a visible resting gutter, a stronger hovered version, and no change to drag, wheel, clamping, or text selection precedence. It stayed green because the target contract and divider geometry already existed by the time this row ran.
Milestone 2
Menu Hover Refresh
3 tasks 14 agents 1h 26m wall time 243k peak context
The menu refresh still stands in the vendored widget snapshot and Gantry's theme bridge. Menu colors now carry foreground roles for highlighted menu titles, selected or hovered dropdown rows, and modal close-button hover, while the vendored documentation records the snapshot refresh and its intended local metadata drift. Gantry's theme fills those roles with palette-derived accent colors, so menu hover no longer depends on background-only changes.
This milestone owned the work that could not be honestly solved only inside Gantry. It began with the reviewer finding from the prior milestone and then hit a broader one of its own: the initial widget task tried to reconcile too much vendor drift at once, so review forced a replan around a smaller hover foreground contract. After that cut was narrowed, the remaining sprints completed the snapshot refresh and Gantry palette wiring.
Widget Hover Contract
6 agents 33m 36s wall time 145k peak context 2 replans
The vendored menu crate still exposes the hover foreground contract this sprint introduced. MenuColors has separate foreground fields for highlighted bar titles, selected or hovered dropdown items, and menu-derived modal close-button hover, plus a trait that names that public theme surface. Rendered widget tests still assert those configured foregrounds reach real menu and modal cells, including the rule that nonselectable rows do not become hover-highlighted.
This sprint is where the run came under stress. The original milestone expected a broad upstream-to-vendor agreement, but review found that source, modal behavior, tests, examples, and dependency metadata had drifted too far for a single worker. Gantry replanned this exact row into a narrower contract: port the generic hover foreground API and rendered tests, while leaving full reconciliation for the next sprint.
Vendored Reconciliation
2 agents 28m 15s wall time 243k peak context
The vendored mcurses-menu snapshot now contains the reconciled modal and menu behavior described in its vendoring note. The current tree keeps generic modal sizing, chrome, button rows, backdrop dimming, scrollable text, form focus mechanics, event fallthrough, examples, tests, and the vendored lockfile together. The only documented local drift is the nonpublishable package metadata, so Gantry can consume the crate without pretending host behavior lives upstream.
This sprint took the broad snapshot problem only after the hover contract had been isolated. Its brief required a fresh audit against upstream, preservation of generic hover and backdrop behavior, and documented local drift rather than a destructive copy. It stayed green, and the later files show it also updated the vendor process note so future refreshes have a concrete source and boundary.
Hover Palette Wiring
2 agents 12m 8s wall time 151k peak context
Gantry's theme module now fills menu hover foregrounds, dropdown selected foregrounds, and modal close-button hover foreground from the bright accent color. Menu configuration and modal configuration are built through helper functions, so callers inherit the same palette ramp instead of using widget defaults. The exact theme test still guards that modal colors and styles are drawn from Gantry's palette rather than vendored defaults.
This final sprint consumed the refreshed widget contract at the application boundary. The worker no longer had to modify generic behavior; it only had to wire Gantry's palette into the supported menu and modal fields and prove the visible cells. It stayed green, closing the run with the upstream-backed hover roles connected to the same visual language as the Gantry-owned surfaces.