# Interactions

Selection, drag & drop, keyboard, clipboard, search. This is where the old app spent most of its polish budget; nearly everything here is carried over as settled — the details below are the contract, not suggestions.

## Selection

- Cards: click selects; ⌘-click toggles; ⇧-click range-extends; click-drag rubber-bands across lanes. Lanes: ⌘/⇧-click multi-select.
- **The range anchor** (settled — standard macOS list semantics): the anchor is the last plain- or ⌘-clicked item, per board window, transient — never persisted. ⇧-click ranges from anchor to target in the flatten order (cards), lane order (lanes), or the trash's own order — rows of both kinds included, since trash selection went kind-blind (re-ruled 2026-07-31; The trash below) — replacing the selection and leaving the anchor in place. A marquee and wholesale selections (Select All) set no anchor, so a following ⇧-click acts as a plain click; a reload that drops or liveness-flips the anchor clears it.
- Selection is **homogeneous**: cards XOR lanes — on the live board. The trash's selection is **kind-blind** (re-ruled 2026-07-31; The trash below): cards and lane rows select together there, and the guard lives at the exits instead.
- **Board background** — the margins around and between lanes, and below short content (settled): a plain click clears the selection — the pointer twin of Escape's deselect, Finder's behavior; modified clicks (⇧/⌘) are no-ops there — extension needs an item to extend to; the background is also a rubber-band origin surface on the live side, alongside lane empty space (live) and the trash column's empty space (trashed) — which extends the full column height below the last row, card and lane rows alike (re-affirmed 2026-07-29; the rewrites dropped the clause, the ruling never changed): no dead zone, a band can arm from anywhere in the shown trash's column.
- Lane empty-space: single click selects the lane (click again to unselect); double click creates a card at the bottom, title editor focused. **The lane header is click-to-select too** (settled — a full lane has no empty space left): a plain click on the title bar selects the lane — **and toggles like empty space** (settled): a click on the already-selected lane's header unselects, one lane-click behavior everywhere, so a full lane keeps a pointer path out of selection; the drag surface (03-board-ui.md ▸ Lane) engages only on movement — the click-vs-drag split cards already have.
- **Clicking never edits** (pivot from the pathfinder's Finder-rename two-stage click): one click selects, and that is all a single click ever does — no slow-second-click rename, no timers, no accidental edit on a hesitant click. Inline rename is **Return** on a sole selected card, or Board ▸ Rename — the menu item is a lane's only rename path, since Return on a lane creates a card (Grammar below). A fast double-click opens the card window (⌘↩'s pointer twin). Committing an empty rename on an existing item removes its `title` key (titles are optional; the face shows the untitled placeholder).

## Drag & drop

- **Shadow placeholder with live reflow**: dragging shows a shadow at the exact landing spot; the board reflows to make room. The whole slot is the trigger zone; proposals are geometry-based so the shadow is stable, never jittery. Width-aware triggers for lanes (no reflow until the cursor reaches where the dragged lane would actually land); the shadow holds until a real new candidate appears. (The old repo's DRAG-REORDER.md documents the full model — port that document alongside the implementation.)
- Cards reorder within a lane and move between lanes (folder move). Lanes reorder; a full-size replica travels under the cursor.
- **Multi-drag**: dragging any member of a multi-selection drags the whole selection; N contiguous shadows; drop inserts contiguously in preserved relative order — defined, for any multi-selection, as lane `order` first, then card `order` (a cross-lane selection flattens left-to-right, top-to-bottom).
- **Locality picks the default — the Finder volume model** (settled): within a board a drag is a **move** (rearranging); between boards it is a **copy** (transferring — the system copy badge shows over the foreign board). **⌥ always forces copy** and **⌘ always forces move**, Finder's exact modifier grammar; each is a no-op where its behavior is already the default. The badge tracks the effective operation live as the cursor crosses a board boundary.
- **Within-board ⌥-drag copies**: originals stay, cursor shows the copy badge, fresh-GUID duplicates land at the drop. Lane drags never copy *within their board* — a within-board lane duplicate is **not available by drag** (⌥ is simply ignored there: the drag stays a clean reorder and the badge never shows copy); the duplicate itself is supported, via the clipboard (Lane paste below) — the usual shape: the keyboard path is the canonical one, drag the enhancement (10-accessibility.md).
- **Cross-board copy** (the default): cards and lanes (including multi-selections) drag between open boards; fresh-GUID duplicates land at the drop, originals stay, `created` is kept (a copy is a fork — 01-storage-format.md). **Locality means the board the drag was picked up from** (ruled 2026-08-06): a drag knows where it came from — the Finder volume model — so a rename or Finder move of the source board absorbed mid-drag is not a departure: the relocation carries the live drag with it (the drag holds its source *store's* identity, not a frozen copy of its key — a frozen key would let a new board opened at the vacated path compare equal to the renamed-away one, turning a copy into a silent cross-board move, the worse failure), and a within-board reorder stays a reorder across a mid-drag rename. Until the carry ships, the recorded residue — the minted key follows the folder, so a mid-drag rename finishes a reorder as a copy — is cosmetic and bounded by the seconds a drag is in flight. Lanes copy cards and all — transferring workflow structure between boards is safe by default. A lane carries exactly its cards — the trash is board-level (`.trash/` — 03-board-ui.md), so there is nothing lane-nested to strip or carry: copy and ⌘-drag move alike transfer the lane's folder as it is (resettled 2026-07-28; the old tombstone-stripping rule is retired with the tombstone model).
- **Cross-board move** (⌘-drag): a real filesystem move, works across volumes — identity travels. A moved folder whose UUID already exists in the destination board arrives as a fresh-UUID copy (01-storage-format.md's import-boundary rule); in a compound move (lane with cards, multi-selection) only the colliding folders are reminted — the rest is a true move (01's per-folder degradation).
- **Files from Finder**: dropped on a card → copied into its `attachments/` (any *file* type, multi-file; card highlights while hovered). Dropped on lane empty space → creates a card with the file attached, titled with the filename without its extension (multi-file drop: one card per file). **Folders are refused at hover** (settled — the attachment model is flat top-level files, and the importer refuses directories by design): a drag containing only folders never engages — no highlight, no drop proposal, the standard incompatible-payload read; a mixed drag proposes for its files only, and the drop imports the files while a loss row (02-architecture.md's warning tone) names the skipped folders ("Folders can't be attached — 2 skipped"). The create path thereby only ever fires with at least one importable file — no card is minted for an import that cannot succeed. **Created cards land at the drop position** (settled): resolved through the same card-grid zones an ordinary card drag uses, shadow included — drops are positional everywhere, and append-at-bottom stays the creation *trio's* rule, not the drop's. A multi-file drop shows **one nominal-height shadow per incoming file** (the multi-drag precedent; when macOS withholds item counts during hover the count floors at one shadow, the commit unaffected). **A release on the lane header resolves to the topmost position** (settled — forgiving beats a dead stripe: the header's chrome roles don't collide with a file payload). **The landing shadow is the create path's whole feedback** (settled): no lane-level highlight on top — each target gets one clear signal, and the card-attach highlight exists precisely because that target has no shadow.
- **A foreign reload mid-drag re-grounds the drag, never corrupts the drop** (settled — a two-second drag racing agent edits is the designed concurrency). Three rules compose: (1) **geometry re-derives** — the frozen-at-drag-start inputs are the *dragged items'* sizes and the physical pointer only (03-board-ui.md ▸ Motion); the analytic resting zones recompute against each new snapshot, so a foreign lane-count re-divide mid-drag just moves the zones and the next proposal targets the board as it now is. (2) **Proposals re-validate by liveness** — a proposal whose target lane vanished in the reload is invalidated; the shadow withdraws and no proposal stands until the pointer reaches a live target, and **release with no valid proposal cancels** — items return, nothing is written; a card is never filed under a vanished parent. (3) **An emptied drag cancels itself** — drag membership is already a UUID set that vanished items leave silently (02-architecture.md); when the *last* dragged item vanishes the replica dissolves and release is a no-op. Partial vanishing drops the survivors, matching the pending-cut precedent. **A cross-board lane arrival pre-divides the destination strip during hover** (settled): while a foreign lane drag proposes into a board, the destination's standard width is computed with the arriving run's units included, so the shadow draws at the width the lane will actually take — without this it overflows the strip (the pathfinder's stripWidthUnits). The first entry samples the un-widened standard for one frame before hysteresis settles — accepted, imperceptible.

## Clipboard

- ⌘X/⌘C/⌘V on cards **and lanes** (resettled — lanes joined the clipboard so cross-board structure transfer has a keyboard path under the every-function contract; the cards-XOR-lanes selection rule means the clipboard holds cards or lanes, never both). Hybrid clipboard: pasteboard carries a JSON manifest + plain text; full folder snapshots staged app-side (02-architecture.md ▸ Per-board app state's app-wide home) so paste reproduces the item byte-for-byte — cards, attachments and all — across boards. Each manifest entry embeds the full `index.md` — identification metadata (menu validation, refusal wording, the plain-text flavor's source), **never a materialization source** since the 2026-07-29 refuse-don't-degrade ruling below (a lane entry embeds its cards' too). **Staging lifecycle** (settled): snapshots are staged **eagerly at ⌘C/⌘X time** — copy captures the source as it is at the gesture, immune to later deletion or unmount — and the store holds at most the *current* copy: a new Lanework copy replaces the previous snapshot, and a sweep at launch and on each copy purges entries the pasteboard no longer references (another app taking the pasteboard orphans the snapshot; the next sweep collects it). The snapshot survives relaunch exactly as long as the pasteboard still points at it — a copy made before quitting pastes whole after restart. **A paste is an import boundary, so normalization applies** (settled 2026-07-28 — 01-storage-format.md's loose-file rule): loose files the staged snapshot carries beside a card's `index.md` land in the pasted card's `attachments/`, Finder-renamed on collision — nothing the snapshot preserved is dropped on arrival. **A paste whose staged snapshot is missing or unreadable refuses loudly — never degrades** (re-ruled 2026-07-29, retiring the degraded embedded-`index.md` fallback and its loss row; Finder's invariant adopted, and 01's leniency doctrine applied — proceed-partially-lose-a-little is never a verdict): the paste produces **nothing**, and a one-shot failure banner names it from the manifest's metadata ("The copied cards are no longer available" / "Couldn't paste 'Fix login' — the copied content is gone"; BannerCenter owns the phrasing). An item arrives **whole — index, attachments, loose files, and comments when they ship — or not at all**; a hollowed card is never materialized, so the loss-accounting problem (what didn't arrive, and whether the totals are honest) dissolves rather than being solved. The refusal is transactional — all-or-nothing for the whole paste, the copies-are-transactions posture (01). With eager staging and the shared-store sweep discipline this is a rare corner, not a flow: the refusal names it, and ⌘C again is the recovery. **The pasteboard is re-read lazily, and the brief lie is accepted** (settled): changeCount is checked on activation, on menu validation, and before paste — no timers. Menu validation is two concrete checkpoints (refined 2026-08-09, with the image branch): a menu beginning to track, and **⌘ going down** — commands validate by conditional responder attachment, so the key-equivalent path needs a re-read *before* the chord's letter lands, and the modifier's own beat is that moment; without it, the one pasteboard writer that never deactivates the app (the screenshot hotkey) left ⌘V dead until the next app switch. A background app taking the pasteboard while Lanework stays frontmost can still leave Edit ▸ Paste enabled until the next check, and the paste itself re-validates and no-ops — nothing stale ever lands, which is the guarantee that matters.
- **Cut is Finder-style deferred**: cut items dim in place until paste moves them; voided if another app takes the pasteboard or the source board closes; second paste materializes copies. **Deletion voids per item**: a cut item that is deleted (moved to the trash or destroyed) or vanishes externally before paste drops out of the pending cut — 02-architecture.md's UUID-set rule; transient state never resurrects what's gone — so paste moves only the survivors, and a cut voided down to nothing is simply void (paste disabled, no error).
- Paste lands after the anchor card (or appends to a selected lane); a multi-selection anchors at its last member in flatten order — the ⌘N target rule's shared anchor (The map below). Copies keep `created` (a duplicate is a fork) and take fresh GUID/`order`/`modified`. **A trash selection never anchors paste** (settled — the ⌘N target rule's own wording, returned to the precedent it cites): ⌘V stays enabled and behaves exactly as with nothing selected — a card payload appends to the last-active lane, a lane payload lands at the board's right end; the trash is never the destination (▸ The trash), and a trashed card's live disk-lane never leaks in as "the selected card's lane".
- **⌘V's image-data branch** (ruled 2026-08-09): when the pasteboard carries **raw image data and no file URL** — a screenshot, a browser's Copy Image, Preview's ⌘C — ⌘V lands the picture as a new file in a card's `attachments/`. **Precedence, in one order**: the app's own clipboard type wins outright (a Lanework copy still pastes as cards or lanes); a **file URL** on the pasteboard suppresses the branch entirely (a Finder copy is a reference to a file the user already filed — a different gesture, and this one declines rather than guessing); raw image data is the fallback. **Target**: the board window pastes onto the **anchor card** (the existing paste-target grammar — the last selected card in flatten order), so a lane, an empty and a trash selection all grey the row out rather than the app guessing a card; a card window pastes onto **its own card**, and a focused text field still wins ⌘V natively, as everywhere else. **Format**: a file-shaped flavor is kept byte for byte — PNG, JPEG, GIF, HEIC, WebP, extension its own — and everything else (TIFF, BMP: interchange encodings, not files people want in a folder) is re-encoded to PNG; PNG is preferred when several flavors are offered, which is the screenshot's case. **Name**: Finder's own — `Pasted Image.png`, then `Pasted Image 2.png` — minted by the existing import path's own collision ladder. It **is** that import path (the one Finder file drops and ⇧⌘A take), so the bracket, the read-only lock, the banners, the echo receipts and "no undo step for an attachment arrival" all hold unchanged, and the arrival announces exactly as a drop's does. A pasteboard that declares a flavor it cannot back up writes nothing at all. **Edit ▸ Paste as Board Background** is the same payload's other destination and a named row rather than a ⌘V branch — a backdrop has no selection to target (03-board-ui.md § Styling ▸ Capabilities).
- **Lane paste** lands after the anchor lane — the selected lane, or the selected card's lane (several selected: the last, per the shared anchor rule); nothing selected = the board's right end. Semantics mirror the drag pair above exactly: a pasted *copy* takes fresh GUIDs throughout; a cut-paste is the ⌘-drag move — the folder moves whole (nothing lane-nested to strip or carry — the trash is board-level, resettled 2026-07-28). **Pasting into the source board is supported and is the within-board lane duplicate** (settled): fresh GUIDs apply as anywhere else, no menu-validation special case — the drag path deliberately lacks this operation (⌥ ignored on lane drags, above), the clipboard is its one home.

## Keyboard

**Keyboard navigation is a first-class UX concern** — the board must be fully operable without the mouse: creating, navigating, renaming, moving, deleting, and opening items all need keyboard paths, and **every board function must have a menu item** — the menu home is what makes a function keyboard-reachable (full keyboard access) and remappable (Configurable bindings below) — **with a default chord where one earns its keyspace**: 11-command-nexus.md's "— (no default)" rows are deliberate, not gaps, and remap like any other (toolbar-hosted functions included — toolbars are pure enhancement, 03-board-ui.md ▸ Toolbar). The pathfinder covered creation, navigation, rename, and delete; the keyboard-map iteration's outcome — settled as a coherent whole — is inventoried in 11-command-nexus.md, with its behavioral rules below.

### Grammar (fixed keys — deliberately not remappable)

- **Arrows**: spatial card navigation (nearest card in the direction, across interior grid columns and lanes) — **except ←/→ crossing lanes, which preserve the origin's ordinal** (settled 2026-08-09; the *sticky ordinal*): a run of lateral presses remembers the 1-based position the card it started from held in its lane's logical order, counting the cards the board is showing (search filter respected), and each hop lands on `min(that ordinal, the target lane's count)` in the next lane that is showing cards — collapsed and query-emptied lanes hopped over as everywhere else. So a 10-3-10 walk goes 8th → 3rd (clamped) → 8th, which no rule over drawn rectangles can do: after the clamp, "8 cards down" is no longer on screen to be measured. The ordinal is **transient per-window state** (`TransientBoardState.lateralOrdinal`), never persisted, and **any non-lateral selection change resets it to the actual new position** — ↑/↓ steps, ⌥-jumps, clicks, the rubber band, ⌫'s successor, and programmatic re-selection after a reload. A wide lane's interior masonry columns keep their spatial step and do not participate: stickiness is lane-granular, and the ordinal is the lane's logical order whichever column drew the card. With a lane selected, ←/→ move lane selection; ⇧-arrow extends — except **⇧↑/⇧↓ in the lane domain, which are inert** (settled: there is nothing above the lane domain and no vertical range within it); selection scrolls into view; all grammar keys inert while a title editor is focused, and menu dispatch narrows to the text domain (focused-editor rule below).
- **⌥-arrows jump**: ⌥↑/⌥↓ to the current lane's first/last card; ⌥←/⌥→ to the first/last lane. **The horizontal jumps land on a card** (settled — ⌥↑ is the keyboard's one entry to lane selection, so ⌥←/⌥→ never select the lane itself): the first card of the first/last *non-empty* lane, scanning inward past empty lanes; ⌥→ prefers the shown non-empty trash — its first entry — per the last-container rule (The trash below). **⌥↑ escalates into the lane domain** (settled — the keyboard's one entry to lane selection): with the lane's first card already selected, ⌥↑ selects the *lane* itself — up in the hierarchy sense, the same key one press deeper; with a lane selected, ↓ (or ⌥↓) descends back into its cards at the first (last) card, and ⌥↑ is inert. **An empty selection seeds at the first lane's first card** on any plain arrow (deterministic origin; the ⌥-jumps behave as specified regardless) — two ⌥↑ presses from nothing reach the lane domain.
- **Return** on a selected lane: creates a card at its bottom, editor focused; Return commits and re-selects the lane (next Return = next card); ⌘↩ commits and opens the card window. Abandoned placeholders (Escape, empty commit, click-away) are discarded — creating-then-abandoning never leaves an empty card behind (untitled cards exist only when made deliberately, e.g. by an external writer or by clearing an existing title). The placeholder is store-transient overlay state — the named exception to 02-architecture.md's one-way flow; nothing exists on disk until the title commits.
- **Inline rename tracks its target by UUID, and vanishing discards it** (the placeholder and card-window kin rules — 02-architecture.md — applied to the third inline editor): a foreign *move* mid-rename is invisible — the editor follows the UUID and the commit writes the title wherever the card now lives; a target that is trashed, deleted, or gone at commit time discards the editor and its keystrokes silently (entering the trash is a vanish from the board; nothing is ever written into a vanished folder). A write that fails *after* a valid commit is the ordinary one-shot write-failure banner. VoiceOver announces the vanished target per 10-accessibility.md's recovery rule.
- **Return** on a sole selected **card**: inline rename. Return disambiguates on card selection — sole card = rename, lane = create (above) — and is **inert on a multi-card selection**; a lane's rename path is Board ▸ Rename. **Escape** steps outward one layer per press: abandons an open editor; else clears search, returning focus to the board (Search below); else **clears the selection** — the keyboard deselect.
- **Focused editor = text domain** (settled): while an inline title editor — rename or the new-card placeholder — is focused, board-scoped menu commands (Delete, New Card, Paste, Move, Style, …) disable via menu validation; text-domain chords route to the field as standard text ops — ⌘Z/⇧⌘Z are the editor's text undo (06-history-undo.md ▸ Undo routing), ⌘X/⌘C/⌘V/⌘A act on the text. The one board-command carve-out is **Open Card ⌘↩**, which stays enabled to commit the edit — placeholder or rename — and open the card window. Exits are otherwise unchanged: Return commits, Escape abandons; click-away splits by editor kind — a **rename commits** (focus loss = commit, matching the card window's title field in 05-card-window.md and the branch-switch parenthetical in 06-history-undo.md), while the **placeholder discards** per its rule above, the deliberate exception because nothing exists on disk yet.
- **Caret chords yield to any focused text control** (settled): Board ▸ Move Left/Move Right ⌘←/⌘→ and the width pair ⌥⌘←/⌥⌘→ disable via menu validation whenever *any* text control has keyboard focus — inline title editors, the board search field, board-popover fields (rename, git identity, remote), and card-window fields — because an enabled menu key equivalent fires before the field ever sees the key, and ⌘←/⌘→ are the standard line-start/end caret chords. Caret motion always wins in text (the Safari pattern: ⌘← is Back, yet moves the caret while a field is focused); the lane commands re-enable the moment focus returns to the board. This is a narrow, per-command broadening of the focused-editor rule, not a general one: board commands whose chords carry no text meaning keep their surface-specific dispatch — in particular the search field's board-commands-stay-enabled rule (Search below) — and the search field's explicitly ruled ⌘⌫ steal (File ▸ Delete, not delete-to-line-start) stands.
- **⌫** on a selection: delete — the plain-key synonym for File ▸ Delete ⌘⌫, staged by place like the menu item (see The map). Grammar, not a menu item: giving it a menu home would require a second "Delete"-titled item, which would collide for title-matched remapping (Configurable bindings). Inert while a title editor is focused, like every grammar key.
- The card window speaks the same grammar: **Return** in Preview enters Edit, **Escape** returns to Preview (05-card-window.md) — plain keys, not menu items.
- These plain-key behaviors are platform grammar (Finder's own Return/arrows aren't remappable either) and sit below the remapping mechanism, which handles modifier chords on menu items only — see Configurable bindings.

### The map — moved to the command Nexus

Every command is a menu item. The full inventory — every command and action, its default binding, applicable context, and customizability class — lives in **11-command-nexus.md**, the single source of truth for what the app can do; the command titles there are the stable strings the remapping mechanism keys on (Configurable bindings below). The rules below are the behavior behind those bindings and stay normative here.

- **⌥⌘↑/⌥⌘↓ sort within the lane** (the move-vs-jump question, resettled: *card* moves live on the ⌥⌘ chord, joining ⌥⌘←/⌥⌘→ lane width in a "⌥⌘ modifies" family; plain ⌥-arrows stay jumps; plain ⌘↑/⌘↓ are unassigned): the selected card(s) move one position within the lane — logical `order`, across interior masonry columns (10-accessibility.md's logical-order rule). A non-contiguous multi-selection **gathers on the first press**: the cards collect into a contiguous block anchored at the first selected card (first = lowest logical order; the rest follow in preserved relative order), and subsequent presses move the block one position. **Cards never change lanes by ⌘-arrow** (settled): inter-lane movement is drag or Cut/Paste (the clipboard rules above), so ⌥⌘↑/⌥⌘↓ disable when a card selection spans lanes and ⌘←/⌘→ are inert on card selections. With a **lane** selected, ⌘←/⌘→ move the lane one slot — closing 10-accessibility.md's lane-move defect — and ⌥⌘↑/⌥⌘↓ are inert.
- **⌫/⌘⌫ delete** (resettled 2026-07-28; lanes rejoined 2026-07-29): on cards *and lanes*, a move into the trash (`.trash/`, top position — 03-board-ui.md; a lane travels subtree-intact, `kind: lane` stamped when absent, no dialog — recoverable now, so nothing needs confirming); on a **trash** selection the same chord deletes **permanently** (one Delete vocabulary, staged by place — confirmation per 03's recoverability rule, a lane's alert counting its cards, a mixed trash selection's alert counting both kinds). Selection moves to the deleted item's successor sibling, Finder-style (next card in the lane, next lane on the board; the last sibling's predecessor otherwise; empty container = nothing selected) — repeated ⌫ walks down a lane. **In the trash the successor walk is kind-blind** (ruled 2026-07-31): the next row of either kind, in the same all-rows order plain arrows walk — a successor is a fresh singleton selection, so the landing violates no grammar, and repeated ⌘⌫ empties a mixed trash without dead-ends, each delete confirm-gated per its kind. Deliberate deletes pick a successor; *external* vanishing never does (02-architecture.md's reload-survival rule: the selection just shrinks). **Put Back is retired with the tombstone model** (resettled 2026-07-28): File ▸ Delete is the chord's only owner — no twin menu items, no shared-equivalent routing; restore is drag-out or ⌘X/⌘V (The trash below). Plain ⌫ performs the same delete as fixed grammar (see Grammar above) — there is no Edit ▸ Delete item, so the two Delete-titled homes never collide for title-matched remapping.
- **Select All**: all visible cards on the board — filter-respecting, like every surface (Search below). **On the active trash side it selects the trash** (resettled 2026-07-28): with the trash visible and a non-empty trash selection, Select All selects all visible trash cards; in every other state, all visible live cards — the container boundary decides which "all" is meant (The trash below).
- **The contract's one carve-out is configuration** (settled; containers re-ruled 2026-07-31 — the popover/sheet split — and **re-ruled back 2026-08-07**): form-like configuration keeps exactly one home per control, and that home is the **board popover** — rename, styling, branch display and *switching*, branch *creation*, add git, commit identity, ahead/behind with Pull/Push, the status badges; its keyboard path is Board Info (⌘I) plus Tab-reachable controls (10-accessibility.md's Full Keyboard Access). *(For a week, setup lived in a board settings sheet reached by Board ▸ Board Settings…; the split's mechanical argument — setup flows fire confirmation alerts, run inline network probes, and accept drag-in key import, acts that want a surface a stray click can't dismiss — did not survive the cost of a second validated surface for controls a user could otherwise reach directly. 03-board-ui.md ▸ Board settings sheet carries the retirement, and 07-sync-collab.md's credential and SSH surfaces are where the argument gets its next hearing.)* Recurring remote *operations* stay under the contract: Board ▸ Pull and Board ▸ Push are menu items (no default chord, remappable; validation enables them only on remote-backed boards — 07-sync-collab.md).
- **⌘N target rule** (settled): with a card selected, the new card is created in that card's lane, immediately after it (paste-anchor consistency); with a lane selected, appended at its bottom (Return consistency); **a multi-selection anchors at its last member in flatten order** (settled — lane `order`, then card `order`, the multi-drag order; the same anchor serves paste): creation follows the last selected card, or appends to the last selected lane; with nothing selected — or a **trash** selection, which never anchors creation — the **last-active lane** — the lane that most recently held selection or a creation in this window session — falling back to the first lane. Title editor focused; same placeholder/abandon semantics as Return-creation. **Zero-lane board** (hand-made, or every lane deleted): card creation and card paste have no target — New Card, Return-creation, and Paste with a *card* payload disable via menu validation until a lane exists. New Lane (⇧⌘N) is one way in; Paste with a **lane** payload is the other — it stays enabled and lands at the board's right end (the lane-paste rule above), so cross-board structure transfer never needs a lane to exist first.

### The trash, keyboard-first (resettled 2026-07-28 — the materialized trash)

The trash lane (03-board-ui.md ▸ Trash — cards and lanes moved into `<root>/.trash/`; lanes rejoined 2026-07-29 as opaque-unit rows) speaks the board's ordinary keyboard language when shown; hidden, it is invisible to every gesture — and **hiding it clears a trash selection** (nothing invisible stays selected, so the toggle-off drops the selection rather than leave commands enabled against rows nobody can see). Trash cards are ordinary cards; a trashed lane is one opaque row (title + card count) — the old liveness machinery stays retired: no ancestor walks, no entry-vs-universe split, one container boundary plus the board's own kind rule. Rules:

- **Navigation**: the shown trash is the **last container for card navigation** — arrows walk into and out of it, and ⌥→ jumps to it; inside, plain arrows walk every row, card and lane row alike (navigation crosses kinds). The trash lane itself is never selectable *as a lane* (no lane op applies to it): with a lane selected, ←/→ and ⌥→ stop at the last real lane.
- **Dropping a live card — or lane — on the shown trash deletes it** (lanes extended 2026-07-29): the drag is the pointer's delete gesture — release moves the dragged item(s) into `.trash/`; a lane drag over the shown trash proposes the delete alongside its strip slots. The drop diverges from positional drops in one way: **the shadow always takes the topmost position** — honest, not arbitrary: every trash arrival stamps `modified` and the trash sorts newest-first by that stamp (03 ▸ Trash), so a fresh delete genuinely lands on top. The trash takes no drops while hidden, like every gesture. Cross-board arrivals and ⌥-copies refuse too (a transfer-and-delete compound and a copy-into-the-trash are operations the design doesn't name), and a refusal falls through to the strip retarget rather than cancelling the held drag. **A refusal arriving over a standing trash proposal withdraws it** (ruled 2026-08-06 — the stationary ⌥ flip made the state reachable without a mouse move): the fall-through's honest reading — the column declines to be a target, it does not cancel the drag the user is still holding — covers only promises the refusal leaves keepable: shadows standing in a lane keep drawing, and an ⌥-copy released over the column lands where they are. A standing proposal naming the trash itself is the one promise the refusal just broke — tombstone rows promising a delete the release will refuse — so it withdraws rather than holds: the drag goes proposal-less over the column (the foreign-reload rule's shape — the shadow withdraws, no proposal stands until the pointer reaches a live target, and a release with no valid proposal cancels, which now agrees with the empty picture). Lifting ⌥ re-asks at the same address (the stationary flip's re-read) and the trash's proposal returns.
- **Selection keeps one container boundary — and goes kind-blind inside the trash** (re-ruled 2026-07-31, superseding the lanes-rejoin pass's kind-homogeneous trash grammar): a selection never mixes trash items with board items, but *within* the trash cards and lane rows select together — clicks, ⇧-click ranges, ⇧-arrow extension, and the rubber band all sweep every row (the band's full-height backdrop covers both kinds), and Select All with a non-empty trash selection selects **all visible trash rows**. The live board keeps cards XOR lanes, and its Select All stays card-scoped, as everywhere. The guard moves to the exits (the mixed-payload drop refusal and ⌘C/⌘X validation below) — inside the trash the only verbs are Delete and the restore paths, so upstream homogeneity bought nothing the exits don't. ⇧-arrow extension still stops at the container boundary. Menu validation stays binary by container: Delete = move to trash on board selections, Delete = permanent on trash selections (03 ▸ Trash) — and Delete works on a mixed selection, the alert counting both kinds. An external move observed by reload re-resolves the selection by presence, as everywhere (02-architecture.md).
- **Within-trash moves are inert**: no move or paste ever targets the trash (deleting is ⌫/⌘⌫ or the drag above), and ⌥⌘↑/⌥⌘↓ are inert on trash rows — the trash's order is its arrival order, not a workspace to arrange.
- **Clipboard: the restore path.** ⌘C copies a trash card (a live copy lands wherever pasted — like copying out of Finder's Trash); **⌘X works** (resettled — it was disabled under the tombstone model): cut in the trash, paste is the keyboard-native restore, an ordinary folder move (10-accessibility.md's drag-free contract) — a card pastes into a lane, a trashed lane pastes after the anchor lane (the lane-paste rule above, verbatim). **⌘C and ⌘X validate against mixed selections** (ruled 2026-07-31, with kind-blind selection): the pasteboard's payload types are per-kind, so Cut and Copy grey out via ordinary menu validation while a trash selection mixes kinds — no failed gesture, no beep; the drag path's drop-time explanation (Drag-to-restore below) is where the rule teaches itself. **An item entering the trash voids its pending cut** (the deliberate-removal rule): a cut card — or lane — that gets deleted drops out of the pending cut, as under the old model.
- **Everything edit-shaped is disabled** on trash selections — Open Card, Rename, Style…, and lane width ops on lane rows; Finder file drops on trash rows are inert (03's no-editing-in-the-trash). Creation never anchors to the trash: ⌘N and paste with a trash selection fall back to their nothing-selected targets.
- **Drag-to-restore follows the locality model**: dropping a trash card into one of its own board's lanes — or a trashed lane row onto its own board's strip — is an ordinary move to the drop position. Dropped on *another* board it follows the copy default — a live copy lands there, the original stays in the source trash; ⌘-drag forces the true cross-board restore-move. **A mixed-kind drag never leaves the trash** (ruled 2026-07-31): pickup is allowed — the selection is legal — but every out-of-trash drop target refuses the mixed payload, and the release surfaces a notice explaining the rule ("Cards and lanes leave the trash separately — restore one kind at a time"); the refused drag ends like any refusal, rows staying put. Within-trash drops stay inert as above.

### Configurable bindings (settled)

Custom shortcuts are **system-native, with no in-app remapping UI**: macOS's App Shortcuts mechanism (System Settings ▸ Keyboard ▸ App Shortcuts, stored as `NSUserKeyEquivalents` in the app's defaults) remaps any menu item, and AppKit applies it automatically — menus always display the *effective* binding, so the menu bar is the self-documenting keyboard map. Because every board function is a menu item (the contract above), coverage is complete for all modifier-chord commands; the fixed grammar keys stay fixed by design. An in-app shortcut-recorder pane was considered and set aside as ceremony (../WISHLIST.md); the Help content carries one line teaching the System Settings path. Constraints this mechanism imposes, adopted as design rules:

- **Menu item titles are API.** The mechanism matches on exact titles — renaming a menu item orphans users' bindings. Titles change only with the deliberateness of a schema change.
- **Toggles keep one stable title** with a checkmark state — "Show Trash" stays "Show Trash" when checked, never becomes "Hide Trash". (Same for Edit Body and Raw Source.)
- **Undo/Redo are effectively not remappable** — NSUndoManager rewrites their titles dynamically ("Undo Move Card…"), which defeats title matching. Accepted; nobody remaps ⌘Z.
- **Two items may share a default chord when validation is mutually exclusive** (a pattern currently unused — Put Back's retirement removed its one instance) — AppKit fires the enabled one. Each keeps its own stable title, so remapping stays per-item. Corollary: no two menu items share a *title* either (titles are the remap key), which is why plain-⌫ delete is grammar rather than a second Delete item.

## Accessibility

**Stance (committed, 00-vision.md): accessibility is a requirement, not an afterthought.** The keyboard-first contract above is doing double duty as the drag-free operation guarantee — every function reachable without the mouse is the accessibility floor. The lane-move defect 10-accessibility.md named is closed by the map above (Move Left/Right on a selected lane). The full design — VoiceOver tree shape and logical traversal order over the masonry, clipboard as the drag-free card-move story, live-reload announcements, text scaling, visual accommodations, and verification — is **10-accessibility.md**.

## Search

- Search field invoked with ⌘F (the board toolbar's sole default item; removed from the toolbar, ⌘F surfaces it transiently — 03-board-ui.md ▸ Toolbar; in the **card window**, Edit ▸ Find is find-in-text instead — 05-card-window.md), live filter: cards whose title *and* body both miss the query animate out; case/diacritic-insensitive substring. Scope is **all card content the format makes meaningful** (re-ruled 2026-07-29, superseding title-plus-body-only): title + body today; **comment bodies join when comments ship** — via a search-owned transient comment index, never the snapshot: the first live-query keystroke kicks an async sweep of `comments/*/index.md` bodies (`.draft` and `comments/.trash/` excluded), kept fresh by the same FSEvents stream while a query is active and discarded when it clears — the board walk stays O(cards), 01's window-scoped read untouched; **attributes join as they activate** (title now; `labels` came alive 2026-08-09 — 01 § Frontmatter — but its search integration is deliberately unruled: labels stay unsearched until that pass happens; `assignees`/`due` remain reserved and inert). Attachment filenames stay unsearched. Scope options (content vs attributes, either/or) are WISHLIST #10.
- The filter is the single source of truth for "what's on the board": layout, drop zones, marquee, ranges, arrow nav, and lane count badges all read it. **A drop under an active filter counts in the rendered space** (ruled 2026-08-06, closing the divergence found 2026-08-01): the zones, the shadow, and the write all resolve through the same filtered list — the position the shadow shows is the landing the write performs (the shipped interim — zones and write counting the unfiltered lane while the slots rendered filtered — was self-consistent but named a position the user could not see; retired). The slot's meaning in the full order is its **visible anchor**: the dropped card enters immediately *after* the slot's visible predecessor — or immediately *before* its visible successor when the slot has none (top of the lane) — and a lane the query emptied appends at its true end; a multi-card drop enters in proposal order beside the same anchor. Hidden cards keep their ranks untouched, never displaced by a gesture that could not see them — and the anchor is what makes the gesture's meaning survive the query's clearing: when the filter lifts, the card sits exactly beside the card it was dropped against. The rendered space means everything rendered — the new-card placeholder occupies its slot for the zones exactly as it does for layout. Hidden cards leave the selection; creating a card clears the search — creation's carve-out exists because a brand-new card must not be born invisible, and it is **stated by mechanism, not by gesture** (settled): *any* user-initiated creation on the board clears the query — ⌘N, Return-creation, empty-space double-click, paste, and Finder file drops alike — while foreign/agent-filed cards keep riding the live filter (02-architecture.md's derived-result rule). **Rename deliberately gets no carve-out**: a rename committed during an active search re-runs the predicate like any edit — a title that stops matching animates the card out and drops it from the selection, exactly as an agent's edit would; the filter stays a pure predicate with one exception, not two. **Escape is staged** (settled): in a non-empty field it clears the query, focus staying in the field; in an empty field it returns focus to the board; with *board* focus and an active search, one press clears the search and the full board returns — search takes Escape before its clear-selection meaning, which applies only when no search is active. **A lane the query empties keeps its slot** (settled): lanes are never filtered out — an all-misses lane stays on the board at its width with a 0 badge (the count reads the filter, 03-board-ui.md); the search filters cards, and the board's structure is not a search result. **A leaving card stays input-reachable for its out-transition** (settled): marquee and arrow targets deregister when the ~0.28 s animate-out ends, so a card mid-departure is briefly reachable while already out of the selection — accepted: it is literally on screen for that span, and closing the window would teach three input sites a predicate the layout already applied. **An open inline rename survives the filter hiding its card** (settled): the editor is a surface the filter doesn't reach — it stays open and focused, commits by UUID wherever the card lives, Escape abandons; keystrokes are never silently discarded for a card that still exists (the dirty-buffer courtesy), and the vanish-discard rule stays reserved for true liveness flips. The typed-query path can't even occur — focusing the search field is focus loss, which commits the rename first — so the rule covers foreign edits that stop the card matching.
- **Dispatch while the search field is focused** (settled): the field is a *control*, not a content editor — the focused-editor lockdown (Grammar above) does not apply. Text-domain keys route to the field: ⌘A/⌘X/⌘C/⌘V act on the query, plain ⌫ edits the query and never reaches the board, horizontal arrows move the caret. **Every key with the field focused acts on the field — stock NSSearchField behavior, no pass-throughs** (settled): vertical arrows are caret movement, ⇧-arrows select query text, and **Return is a swallowed no-op** (the filter is live, there is nothing to submit — it never reaches the board's rename/create grammar). **Tab is the keep-filter path**: plain key-view traversal moves focus to the board with the query intact, and the whole board grammar (arrows, ⌥↑ escalation, Return, ⌘↩) then applies over the *filtered* board; ⌘F returns to the field. Board menu commands stay enabled and act on the board selection exactly as when the field is unfocused — ⌘N included (creating a card clears the search, above) — **except the caret-chord commands**: Move Left/Right ⌘←/⌘→ and the width pair ⌥⌘←/⌥⌘→ disable while the field is focused (Grammar above, caret-chords rule), so ⌘←/⌘→ stay line-start/end in the query even with a lane selected — and the Delete pair stays unambiguous by construction: plain ⌫ is query editing, ⌘⌫ is File ▸ Delete on the selection, and ⌘Z/⇧⌘Z are the field's own text undo, never git undo (06-history-undo.md ▸ Undo routing's control-class rule).

## Changes from Kanban

- Finder file drop on lane empty space (old item 49) is in scope from the start rather than a follow-up.
- **Clicking never edits**: the pathfinder's Finder-style slow-second-click inline rename is gone — Return (or the menu) renames, double-click only opens. One less timer, and no edit ever starts from a hesitant click.

## Open questions

None currently — the keyboard map is settled (⌥⌘↑/⌥⌘↓ within-lane sort, ⌘←/⌘→ lane moves, ⌥-arrows jump, creation trio, ⌘N target rule, system-native remapping); its inventory lives in 11-command-nexus.md, its behavior above.
