0137. The face wears pi's chat surface

Accepted 2026-08-29.

Context

The operator console's face was a ported v1 design: a fullscreen band layout (banner, fixed-height transcript viewport, status bar, typeahead, editor) with its own markdown blocks, its own scrollbar, and a hand-rolled SGR mouse stack for drag selection, click-to-collapse, and clipboard copy. The captain already runs on pi, and pi ships its entire interactive chat surface as importable components — user message boxes, assistant markdown with thinking blocks, bordered tool executions, bash blocks, a working indicator, a footer — kept current with every pi upgrade the repo already takes.

Maintaining a parallel chat renderer meant every transcript improvement (streaming polish, tool-output previews, markdown fidelity) had to be rebuilt by hand, while the parts of the console that are genuinely Clankie's — the banner, the slash-command typeahead, the Ctrl+/ workbench, the guided setup modals — carried the cost of the custom layout's mouse and band math.

Decision

The chat surface is pi's, verbatim, in pi's fullscreen mode: a TuiAltScreen whose transcript lives in a ScrollView above a dock pinned to the bottom of the terminal, rendering conversation content with pi's own components against pi's dark theme (initTheme("dark")):

Mouse behavior is pi's alt-screen layer: the wheel and scrollbar scroll the transcript, dragging selects text (copied via the clipboard), double-click selects a word, Ctrl+Shift+F searches the transcript, and OSC 8 links open in the browser. On top of that, a plain left click on a tool or bash block toggles that block between preview and full output — a terminal-level input observer hit-tests the click against the transcript, since the alt screen consumes mouse sequences before shell input listeners run. Ctrl+O still toggles every block at once, matching pi. On exit the transcript is written to the primary screen so the conversation stays in scrollback, pi's fullscreen exit default.

The conversation renderer maps operator conversation events onto typed insertions (user box, assistant markdown, reasoning, tool begin/complete) instead of markdown strings, so tool calls get pi's bordered execution blocks with live loaders.

The selected conversation keeps exactly one cursor-backed tail attached. While the editor is idle, that tail renders operator turns and Clankie replies from phone, desktop, or another surface immediately. A local prompt briefly takes over the same cursor until its run and all locally steered or queued inputs settle, then idle observation resumes; the two modes never tail concurrently. Enter steers the active Pi turn; Alt+Enter queues a separate follow-up (ADR 0091).

Clankie's chrome stays Clankie's — the banner (name and rule only — the model and workspace moved to the footer), the slash-command typeahead panel, the Ctrl+/ command workbench, the guided-flow modals, and the inline ! shell escape (rendered through pi's bash block, streaming as it runs) — but wears pi dark's palette: teal accent #8abeb7, muted grays, #cc6666 errors, #b5bd68 success, and pi's heading gold #f0c674 where pi's harsh literal warning yellow would be too loud. The input top/bottom and status placement layout settings are retired; /layout keeps only the header toggle.

Consequences

• The chat UI tracks pi: transcript rendering improvements arrive by bumping the pinned pi version, not by porting them.
• ~2k lines of custom face machinery (viewport, blocks, mouse, layout math) are gone; scrolling, selection, search, and copying are pi-tui's alt-screen implementation, and the face owns only chrome, routing, and click hit-tests.
• The editor is always docked at the bottom of the terminal; the transcript has no native terminal scrollback (the ScrollView holds the history, and exit dumps it to the primary screen). Home/End scroll the transcript, as in pi fullscreen, so editor line jumps are Ctrl+A/Ctrl+E.
• Clankie chrome colors are pinned copies of pi dark's values; a pi dark palette change requires re-syncing clankie-face-theme.ts by hand.