typewriter/CONTEXT.md

Typoena

A single-purpose writing appliance: e-ink + mechanical keyboard + ESP32-S3. The user opens the lid, writes Markdown, and (when they choose) publishes to a git remote. This glossary fixes the language of that workflow, and of the screen the writer looks at while doing it.

Related docs: README.md — project overview, hardware, macro roadmap. docs/adr.md — load-bearing decisions; ADR-010 is the formal record of the Publish UX defined below. docs/qfd.md — requirements ↔ functions ↔ components, ranked by user-facing weight. References the terms in this file as canonical. docs/v0.1-mvp-product.md — the v0.1 product surface, expressed in this vocabulary. docs/v0.1-mvp-technical.md — how v0.1 is built. docs/roadmap.md — per-version scope, where new terms (e.g. multi-file Buffer concepts at v0.5) will enter this glossary.

Language

File scopes

Tracked: A file that lives in the device's git working copy and can be published to the remote. Lives under /sd/repo/. Avoid: synced, public, remote, committable.

Local: A file that exists only on the device and can never be published. A permanently-private scope, not a draft staging area — files are born Local and stay Local for their lifetime. Lives under /sd/local/. Avoid: draft, private, untracked, scratch (these all imply impermanence or promotability, which is not the model).

User-facing actions

Save: The act of durably writing the current buffer to the SD card. Triggered by Ctrl-S. Applies to both Tracked and Local files. Avoid: write, flush, persist (use them only in implementation talk).

Publish: The atomic act of pushing the current state of the entire Tracked working copy to the git remote. Workspace-scoped, not buffer-scoped: a Publish ships every dirty Tracked file on the device, not just the one the user is viewing. Triggered by Ctrl-G. Internally: stage all → commit with a timestamp message → push → on push failure, pull (merge, no-edit) → push again. Unavailable in Local. Avoid: push, commit, sync, upload, git-push (these leak transport details into user-facing language).

Commit is deliberately not a user-facing term. The device authors all commit messages itself (ISO-8601 timestamp); the user never sees a commit prompt. A Publish is the only user-observable unit of "shipping work"; internal commits are an implementation detail of that.

Screen regions

Writing column: The left region of the panel showing the text being edited — the only region that repaints per keystroke. ~60 columns, full panel height; straddles the driver's x = 396 seam invisibly. Avoid: edit area, text area, main pane (superseded — they named the old full-width text region before the side panel carved out its right edge).

Side panel: The right region (~150 px / ~20 cols, full height) holding all metadata: filename + dirty dot, word count, elapsed time, clock, Wi-Fi, keyboard-disconnect flag, publish state, and the mode indicator at its bottom-left. Sits entirely in the master half (right of the x = 396 seam). Every field is static, event-driven, or throttled — never per-keystroke. Avoid: header, status line, status bar (retired — the old top header band and bottom status band are both collapsed into this one right-hand region); sidebar. Do not write bare panel: it collides with the transient panel (the modal full-screen help/config view that swaps in over the editor — a later release, see docs/spikes.md Spike 11). Always qualify: side panel vs transient panel.

Relationships

• A File belongs to exactly one scope (Tracked or Local), fixed at creation. There is no operation that moves a file between scopes.
• Save applies to any File; Publish applies only to Tracked.
• A single Publish is atomic from the user's view: a Wi-Fi failure or remote divergence surfaces as a single retry-able outcome, not as a multi- step progression the user has to reason about.

Example dialogue

Dev: "If I'm in a Local file and I press Ctrl-G, what happens?" Domain expert: "Nothing — Publish is unavailable in Local. The side panel says so. There is no path from Local to the remote." Dev: "So if I want to publish something that started as a journal entry, I have to copy-paste it into a Tracked file?" Domain expert: "Yes, deliberately. Promotion is a manual gesture, not a built-in operation." Dev: "And if the remote has changed since I last pulled — does Publish fail?" Domain expert: "It pulls (merge, no edit) and pushes again. From the user's view it's one action with one outcome — success or retry."

Principles

• The device is a writing tool, not a sync engine. Every git operation is the direct, in-session consequence of a Ctrl-G the user pressed. The device does not auto-publish, auto-pull, retry-on-boot, or otherwise reconcile remote state in the background. If a previous Publish ended mid-flight and left a local commit unpushed, the next user-initiated Publish picks it up; until then, the device is silent about it.
• Publish is sync, not history. The user's mental model is a Google Doc that happens to be backed by git: the point is "I want to read this on my phone later," not "I want a curated commit log." Commits are a transport detail the device authors itself. Branches are out of scope for the same reason — the device tracks one linear stream of work on whichever branch the remote was cloned on, and never switches.
• Durability before delivery. A Publish's user-meaningful moment is when the local commit lands (~0.2 s), not when the push completes (~5–10 s). The side panel surfaces the commit-landed state as soon as it exists; the remaining push time is the transport of an already-safe thing. Long-form rationale: docs/notes/ctrl-g-perceived-latency.md.
• No state the user didn't ask for. No banners about pending work, no prompts about divergence, no "did you mean to publish" warnings. The status line reflects the current action's outcome, nothing else.

Flagged ambiguities

• "Local" was initially ambiguous between (a) a draft pen that gets promoted, (b) a permanently-private scope, (c) a second git repo, (d) .gitignore'd files inside the working copy. Resolved: (b). Each File's scope is fixed at creation; there is no promotion operation.
• "Commit" was used loosely across early docs as if it were a user-facing action. Resolved: it is not. The user has Save and Publish. Commits are an internal unit inside Publish, never authored or named by the user.