Name the key on the row that needs it, and stop hardcoding keys

[navbytes]

The keymap is vim's, which is transparent if you already know vim and opaque otherwise: nothing on screen said that the ▸ on a folded turn opens with za.

The row tells you the key

The selected row, and only the selected row, carries a right-aligned hint for the one action it affords:

│ ● T5 add a retry to the flaky test   ▸ 6 steps · ~12k · 1 ✗          ~13k
› ● T6 now make it pass on CI                              za fold      ~2k

za open / za fold on a turn · → expand / ⏎ switch on a branch · space crop on a fat tool result · u restore on a cropped one.

It is cursor chrome, not content, so it is passed into rowLine as an argument that the live-search path does not pass — / can never match it. It gives way to the row's own text rather than clipping it on a narrow terminal, and crop mode and the ? pane suppress it (both already own a key legend of their own).

l / → opens a folded turn

vim's foldopen default includes hor: a horizontal move opens the fold under the cursor. Only opening — nothing in vim closes a fold by moving, so h / ← keep their branch meaning and za / zc stay the way to close one. On a turn row this key did nothing at all before (at depth 0 there is no branch to expand, and deeper the branch is already shown), which is what left it free to mean this.

Nothing names a key with a string literal any more

A hint is worthless if the key it names is not the key that is bound, so every key on screen now comes from keyLabel(command, keybinds): the ? pane, all five footers, goVerb, the inspector's Crop and branch lines, the zr / zm notices, the discard gate. UNDO_KEY is gone.

test/help.test.ts runs its whole suite twice — once on the defaults, once with every verb it documents rebound and branch unbound — which is exactly what a pane assembled from literals cannot survive. Three bugs it caught on the way in:

• the decisions footer still advertised E export after export moved to ge in beta.1;
• keyLabel wrote a modifier with no separator, so a rebind to ctrl+u displayed as ctrlu;
• an unbound command left a headless branch — try something risky… instead of dropping its clause.

The footers fit the terminal

The tree footer was the one line on screen with no width budget — the header and the status line both had one — and it overflowed at about 97 columns, more with a long branch name. core/help.ts#footerLine drops verbs from the right until the line fits, keeping ? help last since it is the route to everything it dropped.

Drift guards

• test/help.test.ts — the doubled suite above, plus unit tests for keyLabel, rowHint, and footerLine at every width from 40 to 200.
• test/docs-links.test.ts — the guide's keybinds command list is now held against DEFAULT_KEYS. The list is a hand copy, and a name missing from it is a rebind nobody can discover, since an unknown command name is silently ignored.
• test/e2e/tui.test.ts — the fold test is rewritten for the world beta.2 actually ships. The default posture opens one turn, not three, so its old assertions were stale; it now walks the real tree (gg, za, zm, l, zr) and checks the hint appears on the cursor's row and only there.

I mutation-checked the two guards that matter: restoring a literal c crop and restoring a headless clause each fail the rebind pass.

Verification

• bun run typecheck, bun test (451 pass, 0 fail), bun run build — clean.
• The fold e2e passed against the real TUI (CTREE_E2E=1, OpenCode 1.18.26 in a pty), including the hint and l-opens-a-fold. The full e2e suite was still running at the time of writing; I will report it on this PR if anything comes back red.

What to look at by hand

1. /tree, move up to a folded turn — the row should read za open on the right, and the hint should move with the cursor.
2. l on it opens it; h should not re-fold it.
3. Narrow to ~90 columns: the footer sheds gs consumers, then u undo, and never wraps.
4. "keybinds": { "fold_toggle": "f2", "crop": "none" } — the hint says f2 open, the pane says f2 fold this turn, and crop disappears from both the pane and the footer rather than showing a keyless crop —.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01VkCWU9Ab6wYHmTke8vuVMv

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