| name | terminal-ui-vt-rendering |
| description | Projects backend-provided immutable terminal cell snapshots/deltas into deterministic Bubble Tea frames. Use for client-side glyph/style/cursor presentation, clipping, damage tracking, and golden frames. Do not use for raw VT parsing, authoritative cell-state mutation, PTY supervision, protocol design, web rendering, or suite-wide test strategy. |
| when_to_use | When implementing or reviewing the client renderer that presents an approved immutable cell snapshot/delta interface as deterministic TUI frames. |
| type | specialist |
| derived_from_template | guild.skill_template.v1 |
When to use it
Use for presentation of backend-provided cell snapshots/deltas, frame composition, cursor/style projection, Unicode-width display, clipping, damage regions, and golden-frame fixtures.
When not to use it
Do not use for parsing raw PTY/VT bytes, defining or mutating authoritative cell state, spawning PTYs, changing IPC, implementing browser canvases, or defining the global QA strategy.
Required inputs
- Architect-approved renderer boundary and backend-provided immutable cell snapshot/delta interface.
- Supported presentation/Unicode corpus and terminal capability matrix; raw VT conformance remains a backend input.
- Viewport dimensions, pane rectangles, focus/cursor state, and ordered cell updates.
- Explicit frame-time and allocation budgets.
Output format
Produce Go renderer code, renderer-neutral fixtures, golden terminal frames, benchmark results, and a handoff listing unsupported sequences or contract changes as follow-ups.
Workflow steps
- Pin the cell, style, cursor, grapheme, width, and clipping invariants with fixtures.
- Implement pure cell-grid-to-frame projection before Bubble Tea integration.
- Add wide, combining, zero-width, alternate-screen, cursor, and resize cases.
- Integrate damage-aware frame composition without changing protocol truth.
- Measure allocations and frame duration against the accepted profile.
- Hand raw-VT, parser, or authoritative-state defects back to
backend and systemic boundary defects to architect.
Evidence requirements
Golden fixtures must be byte-reviewable; repeated replay must produce identical frames; benchmarks report profile, frame size, allocations, and percentile duration.
Escalation rules
Escalate raw-VT semantic ambiguity to backend, renderer/interface redesign to architect, and new suite-wide coverage requirements to qa.
Safety constraints
Never interpolate terminal content into shell commands, trust terminal escape content as control-plane input, or claim conformance beyond the tested corpus.
Eval cases
- Backend-cell-snapshot presentation request produces a deterministic renderer plan and golden fixtures.
- Unicode width defect includes combining and wide-glyph regression cases.
- PTY spawn request is rejected and routed to
backend.
