Brennan Benson
468e4e1167
* fix(native-chat): an answerable prompt card owns the chat input until its answer lands * fix(mobile): a terminal chat's composer waits while its prompt card is up * test(native-chat): type the prompt card fixtures without casts * fix(native-chat): scope replies to acknowledged prompt occurrences * fix(native-chat): preserve answer ordering and verified delivery * test(native-chat): keep mock RPC client inside test boundary * test(native-chat): place mock fixtures in the test-only scope * Keep runtime comments within the module size limit * test: preserve prompt delivery coverage in desktop CI * Treat an older host's accepted write as delivered A newer desktop or phone talking to a host that predates the write settlement field read every accepted reply as "unconfirmed". Prompt cards never dismissed, the phone showed "Response unconfirmed" on every tap and ordinary chat messages were held as "Delivery unconfirmed". The reader now uses writeSettlement when present and otherwise keeps the host's whole-write accepted/refused verdict, exactly as before this branch. Only prompt answers ask for provider settlement; ordinary callers (follow-up delivery, paste drafts, option commands, composer sends) are back on the original contract, so the legacy-handoff error class, its flag, the sequence-only send helper and the mobile handoff hook are gone. * Keep terminal-pane Escape on the plain accepted write Every pane's Escape/Ctrl+C goes through pty:writeAccepted. This branch had switched that IPC to wait for provider settlement, which dropped the "remount this pane" signal for a daemon session awaiting recovery and could stall later keystrokes behind a slow daemon acknowledgment. pty:writeAccepted is back to its original local-only, synchronous write. Prompt answers opt into settlement with requireWriteSettlement on the same channel, and a settled refusal while the daemon recovers now sends the same remount signal. Ordinary verified sends regain their original fallback write. * Report a partly accepted local paste as unconfirmed A settled local write split into chunks returned plain false when a later chunk was refused after earlier ones were accepted. Callers read false as "nothing was written", so chat showed "Message not sent" with a prefix already in the agent's input. It now reports the write as unconfirmed, the same verdict the paired host gives for a partial write. * Hide the chat composer under a prompt card instead of unmounting it When an approval or question card took the input region, the composer unmounted. A message still waiting for its Enter was cancelled and its bubble deleted after the draft had already been cleared, so the message vanished without a notice; composer history was also wiped each time. The composer now stays mounted but hidden while a card owns input, so its state survives. A send that has not submitted yet is still stopped (its Enter would answer the card), but its bubble stays with "Message not sent" so the text is not lost. The composer ref is detached while hidden, so root typing, paste and reveal focus never reach it. * Keep an answered prompt hidden after the chat view remounts The "answered" dismissal lived in component state. Toggling chat to terminal and back, a PTY reconnect, or leaving the phone session and coming back while the approved tool was still running brought the answered approval back, and it then took over the input again. Desktop now keeps the answered occurrence per pane outside the view; phone keeps it per chat tab outside the controller. Both still retire it when the pane observes the prompt clear or change, desktop also when the tab retires, and both maps are size-bounded. * Update the prompt-reply reliability gate for the review fixes Older hosts' accepted answers now dismiss like acknowledged ones, the composer stays mounted under a card, and answered prompts survive a view remount. The gate's invariant, oracle, assertion list, new test files and the two latest evidence runs now describe that contract. * Let users hide a prompt card, keep Escape from denying, and gate only Send on the phone The chat input could stay locked behind a card the host never closes (for example after a Deny typed in the terminal), and Escape on a focused approval card denied the tool even when the user meant to close a picker. - A Hide control (chevron) on terminal approval and question cards, desktop and phone, hides that prompt occurrence and gives the input back. It writes nothing to the agent and uses the same per-occurrence dismissal as an acknowledged answer, so a new occurrence shows the card again. - On desktop, Escape on a card now does the same Hide instead of Deny, and a card that appears while the user is typing no longer takes focus. - On the phone, a card blocks only Send: typing, dictation and image attach keep working on the draft. The placeholder is back to the normal one. * Fix two comments that still called older-host replies unconfirmed Since an older host's accepted write now counts as delivered, the requireWriteSettlement comment and the reliability gate's oracle said the opposite of the code. Both now describe the current rule. * Collapse prompt cards to a strip instead of hiding them, and close the round-2 gaps Hide removed a card completely, so nothing on screen said a prompt was still waiting, and several edges let the chat type into a live prompt. - Collapse (the header chevron, or Escape on desktop) folds the card to a one-line strip above the composer; the strip's chevron expands it back. Collapsing writes nothing, frees the composer, and is disabled while an answer is still being written. Each pane or tab keeps the occurrence as answered or collapsed, so a remount restores the same view. - Questions now carry the host wait's start like approvals, so an identical question in a new wait shows again (desktop and phone). A transcript-only prompt, which has no wait start, is dropped when the view stops observing it, and a transcript still loading no longer clears a dismissal. - Desktop: while a card owns the input, the hidden composer cannot send or interrupt even if it still has keyboard focus, and the card takes focus in the same commit. A send the card retires no longer types Ctrl+U under it. - Phone: an Ask hides the heuristic card read from the same waiting status, and the dismissal store is scoped by host, worktree and tab. * Keep a collapsed card's partial answer, and scope its focus to its own pane Collapsing a question card unmounted it, so expanding it again lost the chosen step, selections and typed "Other" text; Escape typed in that text field collapsed the card. A card arriving while the user typed in another surface (sidebar, notes, a browser URL bar) also took the keyboard. - The collapsed card now stays mounted but hidden (and inert on desktop) under its strip, on desktop and phone, so a partial answer survives collapse and expand. Escape inside the card's text field no longer collapses it. The question card shows the same focus ring as the approval card. - A card takes focus only from inside its own pane (its hidden composer) or from the page body, never from a text field elsewhere. - Desktop and phone share one dismissal store in src/shared, bounded by the existing scope-cache helper, which moves to src/shared with it. - The card send imports the verified helper from its own module, and the phone files are split so each name matches its contents (header action, strip, lane selector). * Return focus to the composer after a prompt card collapses Since a collapsed card stays mounted, Escape or the chevron left keyboard focus inside the now hidden, inert card. The composer's reveal-focus took that as focus already in the pane and stood down, then the browser dropped focus to the page body, so typed keys went nowhere. Reveal-focus now treats focus inside a hidden or inert subtree as not in the pane and focuses the composer. On the phone, collapsing a card also dismisses the keyboard so a hidden reply field does not keep it. * Keep the question card's collapse chevron beside its Cancel button The question card header spread its three items with justify-between, which put the new chevron in the middle of the header. The title now takes the free space, as in the approval card, so the chevron sits next to Cancel at the right edge. * Run the prompt tests on the merged main Main now runs Vitest under Bun, which resolves a long data: URL import as a package name, so the SSH delivery test loads its bundled mobile module from a temp file instead. The phone prompt harnesses mock the live line that main's view now renders, and add Platform, which main's text-selection helper reads, the same way main's own view tests do.
Orca Mobile
React Native companion app for Orca. Monitor worktrees, view terminal output, and send commands from your phone.
Local development uses two processes:
- Orca desktop/Electron from the repo root. This hosts the mobile WebSocket RPC server on port
6768. - Expo Metro from
mobile/. This serves the React Native app on port8081.
Unless a command says otherwise, run mobile app commands from the mobile/ directory.
Prerequisites
- Node.js 24+
- pnpm
- Xcode and/or Android Studio tooling for simulator or device builds
- Expo Go on your phone, or a development client build when native modules are needed
- Phone and desktop on the same LAN when testing a physical phone
Start Desktop Orca
From the repository root:
pnpm install
pnpm dev
Confirm the mobile RPC server is listening:
lsof -nP -iTCP:6768 -sTCP:LISTEN
Restart pnpm dev after changing Electron main-process code. Metro hot reload only applies to the mobile JavaScript bundle.
Start The Mobile App
cd mobile
pnpm install
pnpm start
Scan the Expo QR code with your phone's camera on iOS, or Expo Go on Android.
For a native dev-client build:
pnpm exec expo run:android
pnpm exec expo run:ios
pnpm start --dev-client
Pair With Desktop Orca
- Open Orca desktop.
- Go to Settings > Mobile.
- Scan the pairing QR code from the mobile app.
- Confirm the mobile host endpoint is
ws://<desktop-ip>:6768.
For the Android emulator, use ws://10.0.2.2:6768. For a physical phone, use the desktop LAN IP, for example ws://192.168.0.179:6768.
If the phone has a stale host entry, remove it from the app and pair again.
Development Paths
Android Phone
- Install Expo Go from Google Play
- Run
pnpm start, scan QR with Expo Go - For native modules:
pnpm exec expo run:android - Run with
pnpm start --dev-client
iOS Simulator
- Install Xcode from the App Store
- Run
pnpm start --iosto open in iOS Simulator
Physical Phone Debugging
The phone can be inspected through the connected device tooling:
orca snapshot --json
orca click --element @e3 --json
orca fill --element @e1 --value "ls" --json
orca screenshot --json
Use snapshot first to find the current element refs, then click/fill those refs. After mobile file edits, Metro usually hot reloads automatically, but navigating out of and back into the session screen can be useful because it re-runs terminal.subscribe.
Terminal Streaming Repro Without A Phone
Use this when terminal output does not render on device and you need to split server streaming bugs from WebView/UI bugs:
cd mobile
ORCA_MOBILE_WS_URL=ws://127.0.0.1:6768 pnpm exec tsx scripts/test-subscribe.ts <deviceToken> <serverPublicKeyB64>
You can pass a worktree selector as the third argument:
pnpm exec tsx scripts/test-subscribe.ts <deviceToken> <serverPublicKeyB64> "id:<worktreeId>"
pnpm exec tsx scripts/test-subscribe.ts <deviceToken> <serverPublicKeyB64> "path:/absolute/worktree/path"
pnpm exec tsx scripts/test-subscribe.ts <deviceToken> <serverPublicKeyB64> "name:my-worktree"
The expected result includes:
streamSawMarker: true
readSawMarker: true
If this repro fails, debug the desktop runtime/PTY path before the mobile WebView. If it passes but the phone is blank, debug the session screen or TerminalWebView readiness/queueing path.
Terminal Color Repro Without A Phone
Use this when terminal colors disappear after switching tabs. Open a Claude Code terminal and at least one other terminal in the target worktree, then run:
cd mobile
ORCA_MOBILE_WS_URL=ws://127.0.0.1:6768 pnpm exec tsx scripts/repro-terminal-colors.ts \
<deviceToken> <serverPublicKeyB64> "id:<worktreeId>"
The script captures terminal.subscribe snapshots in an A → B → A sequence and writes raw snapshots to mobile/terminal-color-repro/. If the two A snapshots have different sgrColor counts, the desktop snapshot changed during the switch. If they match, the ANSI color data is still present and the bug is in mobile replay/rendering.
Validation
Run these checks before committing mobile terminal changes:
cd mobile
pnpm exec tsc --noEmit
pnpm run check:tests-typecheck
pnpm lint
cd ..
pnpm typecheck:node
tsc --noEmit reads tsconfig.json, which excludes test files so Metro never bundles them.
tsconfig.test.json puts them back, and pnpm run typecheck:tests shows their errors in full.
check:tests-typecheck is the gate over it: a ratchet against tests-typecheck-baseline.txt, the
127 test files that do not typecheck yet. It fails when a file that checks today stops checking,
and when a baseline entry starts checking (prune it with
node scripts/check-tests-typecheck-ratchet.mjs --prune). The list may only shrink.
The same gate censuses the program first: every *.test.ts(x) on disk must be in it, or named in
the script's TESTS_OUTSIDE_PROGRAM with a reason. Without that, a test excluded from
tsconfig.test.json — or a Foo.test.tsx shadowed by a Foo.test.ts beside it, which a wildcard
include drops for the higher-priority extension — would leave the ratchet silently.
Protocol Version Compatibility
Mobile and desktop talk over a versioned protocol. Because mobile updates lag desktop by 24-48h via the App Store, both sides exchange version numbers on status.get so a genuinely incompatible combo can hard-block instead of silently misbehaving.
Constants live in two files (Metro can't resolve outside mobile/):
src/shared/protocol-version.ts—DESKTOP_PROTOCOL_VERSION,MIN_COMPATIBLE_MOBILE_VERSIONmobile/src/transport/protocol-version.ts—MOBILE_PROTOCOL_VERSION,MIN_COMPATIBLE_DESKTOP_VERSION
Today all four are set so evaluateCompat always returns { kind: 'ok' } — nothing blocks. The wire format is in place to flip a switch when needed.
When to bump
Bump DESKTOP_PROTOCOL_VERSION (and the mobile mirror MOBILE_PROTOCOL_VERSION when relevant) for breaking changes:
- Removed RPC method or required parameter that mobile uses
- Changed meaning (units, nullability) of an existing field mobile reads
- Changed encryption, framing, or auth handshake
Do not bump for additive changes:
- New RPC methods
- New optional fields on existing methods
- New event types in
terminal.subscribe
Set MIN_COMPATIBLE_MOBILE_VERSION (kill-switch) when desktop ships a change that requires a minimum mobile version to function safely. Same for MIN_COMPATIBLE_DESKTOP_VERSION from the mobile side.
When a verdict is blocked, mobile/src/components/ProtocolBlockScreen.tsx renders a screen pointing the user at the update that clears it. When mobile is too old it opens the newest release if the installed app's update check knows one, otherwise the App Store (iOS) or GitHub Releases (Android). When desktop is too old it opens GitHub Releases.
To exercise the block screen locally: set MIN_COMPATIBLE_DESKTOP_VERSION = 999 in mobile/src/transport/protocol-version.ts, rebuild, pair to any desktop. Revert before merging.
Mock Server
Develop the mobile app without a running Orca desktop instance:
pnpm mock-server # starts mock WebSocket server on port 6768
Connect from the app using endpoint ws://localhost:6768 and token mock-device-token.
Environment variables
MOCK_NATIVE_CHAT=1— serve the native-chat scenario (one live agent tab, empty transcript, image upload) instead of the default terminal fixtures.MOCK_CHAT_AGENT=omp— withMOCK_NATIVE_CHAT=1, present an OMP tab and four decoded transcript messages, including a tool call and result, instead of the default Claude scenario. It deliberately omitstranscriptPathto exercise legacy-hook readability discovery; current OMP hooks may report a path.MOCK_SERVER_KEY_FILE— persist the server keypair across restarts so a paired device keeps its public-key pin. A missing or invalid file is re-keyed with a warning, which forces a re-pair.
Scenario control files
Read on every request, so behaviour can be flipped mid-session without a restart (a restart would re-key E2EE and force a re-pair). Write the mode into the file, or delete it for the default.
MOCK_SEND_MODE_FILE(defaultorca-mock-send-modein the system temporary directory) —accept(default) accepts the send,errorfails it withmobile_input_floor_unavailable, anything else reports the send as rejected.MOCK_TERMINAL_LIST_MODE_FILE(defaultorca-mock-terminal-list-modein the system temporary directory) —omitreturns an empty terminal list,otherreturns a list that omits the chat handle, anything else lists it.MOCK_TERMINAL_STREAM_MODE_FILE(defaultorca-mock-terminal-stream-modein the system temporary directory) —deadanswers a subscribe withsubscribedthenend(a gone PTY), which is what exercises the rearm bound and terminal prune; anything else streams normally.
Connecting to Real Orca
- Start Orca desktop with WebSocket transport enabled
- In Orca, go to Settings > Mobile and scan the QR code with this app
- The QR encodes the connection endpoint, device token, and TLS fingerprint
Project Structure
mobile/
├── app/ # Expo Router screens (file-based routing)
│ ├── _layout.tsx # Root layout with navigation stack
│ ├── index.tsx # Home screen — paired hosts list
│ └── pair-scan.tsx # QR code scanning screen
├── src/
│ ├── terminal/ # Terminal WebView and xterm bridge
│ └── transport/ # WebSocket RPC client
├── scripts/
│ ├── test-subscribe.ts # Desktop streaming repro without a phone
│ └── mock-server.ts # Standalone mock WebSocket server
└── assets/ # App icons and splash screen