Work log: Textorium TUI — March 18, 2026

What shipped today

This was a cleanup and polish session — five issues closed across refactoring, bug fixes, UX, and docs, all discovered by yesterday’s scout pass and triaged in the same session. The issue queue went from five scout-created issues to zero open non-backlog items.

The refactoring highlight was #88, which extracted a shared Post::sync_fields_from_frontmatter() method and a parse_date_string() helper. Three separate places in the codebase — read_post(), the revert handler, and the edit handler — had duplicate logic for syncing frontmatter HashMap fields back to the Post struct. Now they all call one method. Net reduction of 70 lines.

Two user-facing bugs were fixed. Save errors (#89) now show the actual error message in the status bar instead of just a count — “✗ 1 error: Permission denied” instead of “✗ 1 error(s)”. The content pane scroll (#91) was using logical line count for the max bound but ratatui’s .scroll() with Wrap operates on visual wrapped lines. Long-line content couldn’t scroll far enough; short content scrolled into blank space. The fix computes visual line count from the content pane width. The ratatui Paragraph::line_count() API would have been ideal but it’s behind an unstable feature flag, so we compute it manually.

The marquee addition was the help overlay (#90) — pressing ? now shows a centered overlay listing all keybindings grouped by context (global, posts, metadata, content). It intercepts all keys while visible and dismisses on ? or Esc. The status bar hints were also tightened to fit better on narrow terminals while adding the ? reference.

A quick doc fix (#92) corrected two references from config.toml to config.json in CLAUDE.md — the config format changed earlier but the docs weren’t updated.

Completed

• #88 — Refactor: extract shared frontmatter-to-struct sync function (PR #94)
• #89 — Fix: save error message discarded — user sees count but not cause (PR #95)
• #90 — Feature: help overlay with ? key showing all keybindings (PR #96)
• #91 — Fix: content pane scroll max uses logical lines, not wrapped visual lines (PR #97)
• #92 — Docs: fix config path references in CLAUDE.md (PR #93)

Release progress

• TUI on Homebrew: 5/6 closed (1 remaining: #8, backlog — email signature, unrelated to TUI)
• CLI essentials: 3/3 closed
• All scout-discovered issues (#88–#92) resolved. Issue queue is clean.

Carry-over

• v1.0.1 GitHub release notes are still auto-generated PR noise — could use a human-written changelog (flagged yesterday)
• Consider closing the “TUI on Homebrew” milestone — #8 is backlog and unrelated to TUI

Risks

• The HOMEBREW_TAP_TOKEN PAT has repo scope and no expiration (flagged yesterday, still open)
• Node.js 20 deprecation warnings in GitHub Actions — deadline June 2, 2026
• ratatui’s Paragraph::line_count() is behind unstable-rendered-line-info — if it stabilizes in a future version, we could switch from manual visual line computation. Monitor ratatui releases.

Flags and watch-outs

• Test count is 21, all in core::posts. Still no TUI-specific tests — the help overlay, scroll fix, and save error display are only manually verifiable.
• The visual line computation in #91 uses character-level division ((len + width - 1) / width), not word-wrap-aware calculation. This is an approximation — ratatui’s actual wrapping may differ slightly for lines with very long words. Good enough for scroll bounds but not pixel-perfect.
• Many open milestones have zero issues and are past their due dates (Visual overhaul, Bulletproof editing). Worth cleaning up.

Next session

• Clean up v1.0.1 GitHub release notes with structured changelog
• Close stale milestones (TUI on Homebrew, Visual overhaul, Bulletproof editing, CLI essentials — all completed or empty)
• #56 (frontmatter macros) is the next feature if there’s appetite — needs prep
• Consider a v1.0.2 release to ship today’s fixes to Homebrew users
• Scout for new issues or start on the “First external user” milestone