nodeterm Files

Highlights

The ⌘M chat view became a reading surface. Six changes rebuilt it. A busy turn used to be a wall of Bash / Read chips with nothing saying why: now a run of two or more consecutive tool calls folds into one closed block that names its own count ("6 tool calls Bash ×4, Read ×2", and "+N more" past the third name), and Claude's thinking sits in the gaps between the runs as a closed, dimmed fold labelled with how long it took. Code blocks are syntax-colored through Monaco, loaded only when the first fenced block appears, and Copy still copies the exact source — if the colored output does not match the source text the block stays plain rather than hand you something subtly wrong. An Edit or Write call draws its diff in the thread. Pasted images show as thumbnails. Thinking folds carry a real duration ("Thought for 1m 35s"), measured against 1,037 records across CLI 2.1.275–2.1.316. User bubbles carry a clock time and the thread has day dividers. A context compaction is a chip — Compaction · auto, with 274430 → 16889 tokens inside — instead of the summary wall. Page Up / Page Down scroll it, and a pill tells you how many messages landed while you were scrolled up. One fix in there is worth naming on its own: a one- or two-word answer typed into the view — a, c, yes — often sat unsent in Claude's composer, because the old send waited for the text to appear more times on the whole screen, and typing a also removed the one in "agents" from the status line. The composer itself is read now. The todo-list card is in the build but inert: the measuring host held zero TodoWrite records, because current CLIs write TaskCreate/TaskUpdate instead.

Liquid Glass stopped fighting the GPU. A backdrop-filter re-runs every time its surface is drawn, and a terminal is drawn for every line it prints — so each streaming terminal re-blurred its own glass at frame rate, and the damage spread to the glass around it. Terminal glass is now a static, downsized copy of the wallpaper under the same filter chain, which Chromium draws once and reuses, and the SVG refraction filter runs only on the Clear side of the Readable tick, where it actually displaces anything. Measured on an M2 Air with six glass terminals: one terminal streaming went from 71% GPU to 20%, six from 92% to 42%; CPU went 32% to 20% for one terminal and 100% to 50% for six. The honest trade: a glass node no longer shows a node it overlaps — it frosts the wallpaper only — and its outermost 1–2px are slightly lighter. A focused node, an aerial wallpaper and Reduce Transparency keep the live backdrop.

Focus mode has arrows. In focus mode, ⌘←/→/↑/↓ move to the neighbouring terminal and you stay in focus mode; a switch used to be ⌘⇧F, ⌘→, ⌘⇧F. It swaps the node rather than flying the camera, because the canvas pane is hidden in focus mode and framing a node on a zero-sized pane is the jump-to-origin bug.

A station can wake the agent that opened it. Two changes close the same gap from either side. report-outcome --notify-opener sends the opener one notice written by nodeterm, so an orchestrator that ended its turn after opening stations is woken when they report instead of polling; only a changed outcome notifies, so a station repeating itself cannot keep waking anyone, and the station's reply says whether its opener heard — told, told when idle, or could not be told, with the reason. Separately, a station on the Server Edition can now reply to its orchestrator at all: the delivery gate required the caller to have opened the target, and a station never opens its opener. send and notify are unchanged.

The check feed can show a one-time popup. Next to the existing banner messages, e.g. a Pro offer aimed at free users. It is recorded the moment it is shown, so a reload, a crash or a quit never brings it back; at most one appears per feed read; it waits until nothing else is open and no key has been pressed for four seconds; it takes Escape in the capture phase, because xterm stops Escape from propagating and the agent in the pane would otherwise receive an interrupt; and it focuses its own box rather than a button, so Enter presses nothing. An upgrade popup is skipped for a Pro user and closes the moment Pro arrives.

macOS 12 Monterey is the minimum, for the app and for building it. Both floors belong to the toolchain rather than to nodeterm — Electron 42 ships binaries for Monterey and up, and the esbuild binary Vite uses needs the same. If you are on Big Sur, v0.4.5 is where you stop.

nodeterm for Android is on Google Play. The links in the README and the app point at it.

Fixes you will meet. On a DPR-1 display the last column of a full row no longer loses the right edge of its glyph, and text is no longer pinned about 10% too tight. Typing in the find bar of a node that had been made narrower no longer replaces it with "This API only accepts positive integers". Pro survives a rate-limited or failed status read instead of being deleted while still valid — a few users behind one NAT was enough to trip it. The title-bar Update button appears as soon as a newer version is known, not after the download finishes. The Dock badge counts unread nodes some project actually holds, which is the end of a Dock reading 20 beside a single tab badge of 1 (found and first fixed by @Senzaiken). A joined team tab shows the host's RUNNING / NEEDS YOU badges, and a desktop Team Access host now emits agent events to its peers at all. The board's Filter and Views menus open above the columns rather than behind them under Liquid Glass, the macOS Dock icon is restored only when it is actually gone, and a terminal node's comments composer keeps the keyboard.

New

• check — state the plan so the backend can target paid or free users · #1310 by @eneskirca
• chat — show Claude's thinking summaries in the ⌘M chat view · #1269 by @probertson
• chat — Page Up / Page Down scroll the ⌘M chat view · #1341 by @probertson
• chat — a scroll-to-latest pill in the ⌘M chat view · #1342 by @probertson
• onboarding — add a ⌘M chat-view step to the setup tour · #1343 by @eneskirca
• chat — fold runs of tool calls into collapsed blocks in the ⌘M chat view · #1344 by @probertson
• focus-mode — ⌘←/→/↑/↓ switch the focused node without leaving focus mode · #1351 by @eneskirca
• mobile — link nodeterm for Android on Google Play · #1353 by @eneskirca
• onboarding — teach focus mode in the shortcuts step · #1354 by @eneskirca
• announcements — one-time popups from the check feed · #1349 by @eneskirca
• chat — ⌘M view phase 1 — code colors, in-thread diffs, images, thinking folds, timestamps, compaction chip · #1355 by @eneskirca

Improved

• glass — frost terminals with a static wallpaper copy; refraction only on the Clear side · #1360 by @eneskirca
• Founding Sponsor: feat(stations): report-outcome --notify-opener tells the opener · #1359 by @croakingtoad
• Founding Sponsor: feat(messaging): let a station reply to the node that opened it · #1358 by @croakingtoad

Fixed

• updates — show the title-bar Update button as soon as a new version is known · #1306 by @eneskirca
• macos — restore the Dock presence only when it is gone (#1305) · #1309 by @eneskirca
• terminal — stop the find bar from crashing a node after a narrowing resize · #1313 by @ezwep
• license — keep Pro when the device-bound status read does not answer · #1314 by @eneskirca
• canvas — the terminal node's comments composer keeps the keyboard · #1315 by @eneskirca
• unread — count the Dock badge over live nodes; sweep orphans only once their clock ages out · #1318 by @eneskirca
• chat — confirm a typed ⌘M prompt from the composer, so short answers submit · #1345 by @probertson
• terminal — stop cutting off the last column on low-DPI displays · #1295 by @ezwep
• relay — a joined team tab shows the host's agent status in its own session store · #1348 by @eneskirca
• kanban — keep the header's Filter / Views menus above the columns · #1352 by @eneskirca
• canvas — let the session-memory and usage popovers scroll with wheel zoom on · #1379 by @eneskirca

New contributors

• @croakingtoad made their first contribution in https://github.com/eneskirca/nodeterm/pull/1359

Full Changelog: https://github.com/eneskirca/nodeterm/compare/v0.4.5...v0.5.0