feat: answer OSC colour queries and track dynamic colours - #85
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aymanbagabas wants to merge 7 commits into
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feat: answer OSC colour queries and track dynamic colours#85aymanbagabas wants to merge 7 commits into
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A screenshot and a color assertion disagreed about what a cell was painted. `render/svg.rs` carried a private sixteen-color table and `assert/color.rs` carried a different one, so `expect --fg "#800000"` passed on a cell the screenshot drew `#e88388`. Both tables are deleted here and both callers resolve through one profile, which is what makes them agree by construction rather than by coincidence. The palette had to become configurable to fix it anyway: the two tables could only be collapsed by choosing which one was right, and that choice belongs to the user rather than to whichever module was read first. The shipped default is the VGA/xterm palette that `TERM=xterm-256color` already promises, which is what the assertion side used. A profile is read from `shell-use.toml` and sets scrollback and colors. Only the sixteen ANSI slots and the three defaults are configurable; indices 16-255 are the xterm color cube and gray ramp, which are fixed by the spec, so a config that could move them would let two sessions disagree about what `--fg 196` means. Profiles are named, and `--profile` selects one. The file is looked up nearest first, project before user, so a repository can pin the terminal its tests expect. Resolution happens in the CLI rather than the daemon: the daemon is long-lived and shared, so it has no single working directory to resolve a project-local config against, and a resolved profile travels on `Request::Open` the same way timeouts already do. Absent settings take the default, and the field is `#[serde(default)]`, so a client that predates this keeps the behavior it had. Scrollback moves from a hardcoded 5,000 to a configurable 10,000, matching alacritty's own default. Two things are deliberately errors rather than silent fallbacks: an unknown profile name, which reports the ones that exist, and a config file that does not parse, which would otherwise run the session with settings nobody asked for. A *missing* file stays fine, since running without one is normal. Screenshots will look different: the default background is now black rather than the previous dark blue-gray, and the palette is saturated rather than muted. Both are recoverable in a profile. Co-authored-by: Copilot <223556219+Copilot@users.noreply.github.com> Signed-off-by: Ayman Bagabas <ayman.bagabas@gmail.com>
Programs ask the terminal what color it is before deciding whether to draw for a light or a dark background. Nothing answered, so every one of them blocked until it timed out and guessed. The emulator answers now, through `take_pending_writes`, which already exists for exactly this: the replies a terminal owes to device queries. alacritty parses the sequence, tracks what a program set, and hands back a formatter with the query's own prefix and terminator already captured, so the only missing piece was the color itself. That comes from the session profile, which the emulator is now constructed with. The alternative was parsing the sequences off the PTY stream, the way shell integration is tracked. That would have meant reimplementing color parsing, the runtime table, reply formatting, and terminator tracking, all of which the emulator already does — and getting the terminator wrong, since it is only visible to whoever parsed the sequence. Reading what the emulator already knows is both less code and more faithful. Colors resolve in three layers: what a program set, else the session profile, else the table the specification defines. A reset clears only the first, so the profile is unreachable from the byte stream and there is always something to restore. That is what the specification asks for, describing a reset as restoring "the color specified by the corresponding X resource". `Emulator` gains `color(slot)`, which every backend answers from its own state, plus a `palette()` snapshot of all 259 slots. The screenshot renderer and `expect --fg/--bg` take that snapshot rather than the emulator, so neither holds the session lock while it renders, and neither knows which backend produced the colors. Five conformance cases cover queries, terminator echo, set-then-reset, unconfigured indices, and that a cell follows whatever its slot now holds. They run against every backend, so a future one cannot answer differently. An end-to-end test drives a real program through the whole path: it reads the configured background, sets its own, resets, and gets the configured one back. Co-authored-by: Copilot <223556219+Copilot@users.noreply.github.com> Signed-off-by: Ayman Bagabas <ayman.bagabas@gmail.com>
Follow-up to the previous commit, which routed color resolution through a `Palette` snapshot the session passed around. That put the fallback in the wrong place: the emulator reported only what a program had set, and every consumer had to know how to fill in the rest. The emulator now takes the session profile at construction and answers `color(slot)` for any slot, mapping its own table onto the profile when nothing has overridden it. Consumers ask the emulator and get a color, with no second layer to consult. `Palette` is gone. The 256-color table above the sixteen configurable slots is a static built at compile time rather than arithmetic run per lookup. It is the same in every terminal, so computing it repeatedly only invited the two implementations of it to drift. Co-authored-by: Copilot <223556219+Copilot@users.noreply.github.com> Signed-off-by: Ayman Bagabas <ayman.bagabas@gmail.com>
The profile addressed colors by index, using 256, 257, 258 for the foreground, background, and cursor. That is alacritty's layout — it stores the dynamic colors after the palette — and it had spread into the profile, the emulator trait, and the conformance suite, none of which have any reason to know it. A backend that numbered its own table differently would have had to pretend otherwise. Slots are a `ColorSlot` enum now: `Indexed(u8)`, `Foreground`, `Background`, `Cursor`. The alacritty backend translates that to its own indices inside the one match that reads its table, and resolves an unset slot to the profile, falling back to the xterm table for an index the profile does not name. The tests for that resolution moved to the backend that performs it, where they exercise the real path rather than a helper that mirrored it. Co-authored-by: Copilot <223556219+Copilot@users.noreply.github.com> Signed-off-by: Ayman Bagabas <ayman.bagabas@gmail.com>
A snapshot stores the palette slot a cell chose rather than the color that slot resolves to, which is what lets a saved baseline outlive a profile change: recoloring a terminal would otherwise invalidate every snapshot in a suite at once. That was already true and nothing checked it, so a change to how colors are serialized could have quietly made snapshots profile-dependent. The companion case pins the exception: a true-color cell names its own color, so that one is recorded literally. Co-authored-by: Copilot <223556219+Copilot@users.noreply.github.com> Signed-off-by: Ayman Bagabas <ayman.bagabas@gmail.com>
…fter The color tests leaned almost entirely on `OSC 11`. That is the sequence programs actually reach for, but it meant the foreground and cursor were never set, never queried, and never reset, so wiring any of them to the wrong slot would have gone unnoticed. Three conformance cases now set all three to distinct colors and check that each reset frees only its own, that each answers its own query, and that a bare `OSC 104` resets the palette without touching them. Nothing covered the path from an escape sequence to a rendered pixel either. Both halves are pinned now: a screenshot paints the background a program set and recolors a cell whose slot it moved, and an assertion matches that same color while still comparing the index unchanged. Both return to the profile after a reset. They read the same state, so this is the earlier "a screenshot and an assertion agree" guarantee held at every point in a session rather than only at the start. The end-to-end test drives all three dynamic colors over a real PTY. It needs a wide terminal: its report is one line, and `text` returns the grid, so a narrower one wrapped the reply out of the assertion's reach. Co-authored-by: Copilot <223556219+Copilot@users.noreply.github.com> Signed-off-by: Ayman Bagabas <ayman.bagabas@gmail.com>
This was referenced Aug 4, 2026
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August 4, 2026 21:07
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The probe puts its own terminal in raw mode so it can read a reply that arrives without a newline and must not be echoed. That needs `termios`, which Windows CPython does not ship, so the test could only ever fail there, and a fail-fast matrix let it cancel the other two platforms. Nothing about the reply is platform specific. Its format is covered by conformance cases that run against every backend, and the write that carries it to the child is the same `pty.write` that every `type` and `submit` already exercises on Windows. Co-authored-by: Copilot <223556219+Copilot@users.noreply.github.com> Signed-off-by: Ayman Bagabas <ayman.bagabas@gmail.com>
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Second of a three PR stack: #84 → #85 → #86. Stacked on #84; a cross-repo PR cannot be based on a fork branch, so GitHub shows #84's commit here too. Review only
feat(terminal): answer OSC color queriesonward.A terminal is supposed to answer when a program asks what colors it is using. Ours never did, so every program that asked had to time out and guess.
Before: the query goes unanswered
A program asking for the background (
OSC 11) and cursor (OSC 12) color:That silence is not harmless. Programs use
OSC 11to decide whether they are on a light or dark background, so a timeout means an editor or a diff tool picks a theme by guessing, and an agent driving the terminal sees whichever colors the guess produced rather than the ones actually configured. It also costs a real second of wall clock per query while the program waits.After: setting works too
OSC 10,OSC 11,OSC 12set the foreground, background, and cursor;OSC 4sets a palette entry.OSC 110,OSC 111,OSC 112, andOSC 104reset them.Background
#000000→#1c2833→#000000, red#800000→#ff5f87→#800000. The reset returns to the profile from #84, not to a second hardcoded default.How it resolves
A reset clears the runtime value only. It can never clear a configured one, so
OSC 104from a stray program cannot wipe the palette a test was pinned against.Notes for review
Event::ColorRequest, whose formatter already captured the query's prefix and terminator, so aBEL-terminated query gets aBEL-terminated answer and anST-terminated one getsST. There is no second parser over the PTY stream, andTerm::colors()is readable directly onceadvance()returns.PtyWrite, so ordering with other terminal output is unchanged.ColorSlotis an enum (Indexed(u8) | Foreground | Background | Cursor). Alacritty's internal 256/257/258 numbering stays insidealacritty.rsand does not leak into the profile type.