The terminal face

The kernel's honest reading in a terminal: facts and actions as text, canvases as half-block cells. No widgets, no framework - a Screen of cells, diffed and flushed.

Entering

mrlycli tui, or bare mrlycli on a terminal. Piped stdin still gets the line repl, so scripts and tests are untouched.

Reading

Title bar (emoji, title, beat verb right-aligned), route params, the canvas from the frame fact, the remaining state keys one per row, notices, the action bar, then the status row.

Keys

• arrows or wasd - the focused app's manifest keymap (keys), if bound
• 1-9 - the nth action; argless verbs fire, the rest prefill the line
• : - type a verb and optional JSON args, enter acts, esc cancels
• esc - back to the menu, q or ctrl-c - quit

Laws

• Redraw iff the kernel tick advanced, the terminal resized, or the command

line changed. The kernel decides what changed; the shell only asks.

• The shell owns the clock: a 125ms beat drives view.beat, never the app.
• Cells are diffed at the transport - only changed runs move the cursor,

and style bytes ride only on style changes.

• Render is total: any app, any state, any size down to 20x6.
• libc is rented for termios, ioctl and isatty (DEPS.md: own the face,

rent the platform). VT escape codes are a dead spec, so they are ours.