tui

A demo video is a take, not a screen capture. Someone scripts it, a machine performs it the same way every time, and every gesture is checked before the next one runs. That is the difference between a recording that sells a tool and one that shows an app being poked at.

Three claims the whole skill is built on

• The subject is a sandbox. A terminal shows the operator's home directory, prompt, hostname, repository, branches and open work. A demo gets published; none of that should be.
• Nothing addresses the screen by a coordinate typed in advance. Tab strips shift, sidebars grow, labels are named by the app. Read the frame that is on screen right now.
• A beat that silently did nothing spoils the take. The next beat types into whatever has focus and the video ends up looking like the app misbehaving. Verify each gesture; abort and retry rather than ship it.

The pipeline

scripts/tui-record is one stage per subcommand, each reading the previous stage's file, so a take can be re-cut and re-rendered without recording again.

scripts/driver-lib.sh is what a driver sources: screen reads, mouse and keyboard gestures, typing with human cadence, per-beat assertions, and the marks that tell compress which stretches were only waiting.

Cut the waiting, not the events

Real software takes real time: a build runs, an index rebuilds, a model answers. Wrap exactly those stretches in wait_span, and compress rescales them to a fixed span:

wait_span build 120 test -f "$fixture/dist/app.js"

Compression rescales timestamps; it never drops events before the end. The startup frames carry the terminal's first full paint. Drop them and the player draws the rest of the take onto a blank screen, which looks exactly like a sidebar that renders nowhere else. If a rendered GIF is missing panels the live app clearly draws, that is the cause.

The cut does drop the app's exit, though: a GIF loops, so a blank final frame reads as a pause at both ends.

The leak check is not advisory

tui-record check runs on the final cast before anything is handed over. It scans for the operator's username, home path and hostname, session URLs, sk- style tokens, bearer headers, private keys and private IPs.

Anything it finds is redacted with same-length replacements, so nothing on screen reflows. A redaction that shortens a string moves every glyph after it on that row.

Then it tells the person what remains visible that a scanner cannot judge: a plan name, a version number, a model name, a workspace title. Those are theirs to decide, but only if they are told.

Bundled references

The skill keeps its long material out of context until it is needed: references/driving.md, references/post-production.md and references/example-driver.sh are loaded on demand.

references/driving.md is the driver vocabulary, including how to drive a mouse-driven TUI. press/click/dclick write SGR mouse events straight into the pty, which the app cannot tell from a hand. Reach for the mouse when the app does; a keyboard-only take of a pointer-driven app is what makes a video look robotic.

The skill