Trim, move and blank, and the decision they all three walked into: is the shot's
length authored, or derived from what is in it?
AUTHORED. `:frames` is the symbol's window — how long the shot IS — and the
occupied extent of its lanes is a different fact, read off the occurrences. A
command grows the window when the caller says `:grow-symbol` and NEVER shrinks
it, so blanking the end of a shot leaves a shot with empty frames at the end.
That is a true statement about what somebody authored, and the alternative is
deleting the last drawing and quietly shortening the film. `finish` had the
right behaviour by accident — `(apply max (:frames sym) ...)` — and now says
which number is which: `needed` is where the occurrences reach, `:frames` is
what was authored, and the only thing that makes the second follow the first is
a caller asking.
The three commands turned out to be one piece of geometry, which is `split`'s.
A `:span` is in the occurrence's OWN frames and `:time` says where those land in
the lane, so moving an edge of an exposure is ONE WRITE to `:span` and `:time`
and `:playback` are never touched. `local` and `edged` are the whole of it, and
split now goes through them too.
trim narrows one edge and moves nothing else. Lengthening is `extend-hold`,
which carries a ripple policy and a shot-length policy because it needs
them; letting trim grow as well would give one gesture two sets of
rules and a way to overlap its neighbour.
move one write to `:time :at`, and a destination that would overlap is
REFUSED rather than rippled. Moving a drawing and re-timing the ones
around it are different intentions, and a move that pushed the rest
would be the second wearing the first one's name. Clear the room first.
blank leaves a gap and does not close it. Wholly inside the range goes,
overlapping an end is trimmed to it, spanning the range is split — the
one case that needs an ID, and it asks for one instead of inventing it.
Because the source clock is untouched, trimming the front of a playing insert
starts it LATER INTO its animation rather than restarting it, which is the
difference between trimming and slipping and the reason they stay two commands.
The test samples the frames it kept and asserts they show what they showed.
Blanking leaves the drawings in the library. A lane does not own its content,
and a drawing whose last exposure is gone is still a drawing somebody made.
Overwrite is now `blank` then `place` and needs no policy argument of its own,
which is why it still is not one.
424 tests, 5,749 assertions. The browser flow trims an exposure at the playhead,
moves it into the gap that made, blanks it, and checks the shot is still as long
as it was authored.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Everything could only be added to the end, because `append` computed its own
position — the max end of the lane — and so had no opinion to state. Insert is
not a new command; it is the argument that function was missing. `:at` takes a
lane frame or `:end`, `:end` is the position where nothing has to move, and
appending stops being a separate operation from inserting. New, reused and
duplicated drawings all take it, because there was only ever one placement rule.
Placing ripples: occurrences at or after the position move later by the new
exposure's duration, and `:keep` against `:grow-symbol` still decides what
happens at the shot's end. OVERWRITE is deliberately not a policy argument yet.
Taking frames away from the occurrence already there is TRIMMING, and an
argument whose second value is unimplemented is worse than an argument that is
not there. A position strictly inside an existing exposure refuses and names
`split`, rather than splitting on the quiet: one command performing two is how
a command stops being predictable.
Then split, which turned out to cost almost nothing, and that is the
interesting part. The two pieces keep ONE `:time` and differ only in `:span`.
The right piece's own frames therefore carry on exactly where the left's
stopped, so its source clock, its keys and its corrections go on meaning what
they meant: a held drawing holds the same frame either side of the cut, and a
playing insert plays through it without a seam. There is no arithmetic on
in-points to get wrong, and no shot-length question, since the pieces occupy
the frames the one exposure occupied. The test samples every frame before and
after and asserts the picture is identical — for a hold, for an exposure with a
correction of its own, and for a playing insert.
That is not a clever split. It is `:span` being in the node's OWN coordinates,
which was decided long before there were lanes, paying for something it was not
designed for. The same property is why extending a hold leaves lane keys alone.
Both new commands act at the playhead, which needed `lane-frame` — the symbol's
frame as a frame of the lane's own time, nil through a stepped or looping lane
where one is not the other. Nil refuses; it does not snap to a nearby frame.
Two smaller things found while doing it. `placeable` promised "a whole lane
frame" in its refusal and then accepted 2.5, so both it and `split` now require
an integer, as `extend-hold` already did for its delta. And `lane-end` is
private: `:end` is the only way to ask for it.
401 tests, 5,612 assertions. The browser flow now splits an exposure at the
playhead and puts a drawing in the gap, and checks that six exposures are still
one row.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The model's whole claim is that content and its occurrences are different
things, and until now nothing in the editor could tell them apart: you could
make a drawing and time it, but not expose one drawing twice, and so never find
out whether an edit arrives in two places. That is the first proof obligation in
the lane model and it was the one the commands could not reach.
Three commands, and the distinctions between them are the point:
reuse another occurrence of the same drawing. A decision to share,
made on purpose, because sharing discovered later — when an edit
turns up somewhere you did not expect — is the bad version.
duplicate a copy of the drawing, appended, for when what is on screen is
the starting point for the next one.
make unique this occurrence gets a private copy; the others keep sharing.
The undo of reuse, and refused when nothing else uses the
drawing: a copy nobody asked for is a second identical symbol in
the library for no reason a person could see.
Duplicate copies the CONTENT and not the exposure. Its new occurrence is a plain
one-frame hold, not a copy of the source occurrence's transform or corrections,
because those belong to that use of the drawing — carrying them over would make
duplicating a drawing quietly duplicate the treatment of one exposure of it.
A copy is SHALLOW by default and keeps its references to other symbols, so a
head built out of reusable eyes still uses those eyes. `:deep? true` copies
everything it places with new ids throughout. The lane model asks for both and
says why: never promise decoupling while leaving the edited object shared, and
only the deep copy can keep that promise. `bring/symbols` already did the
reachability walk and the id remapping, so the deep copy is that function
pointed at its own clip.
`node/sources` was still being read as a SET at five call sites, each with a
comment about a lane that cuts between several drawings — the keyed source that
no longer exists. An occurrence names one symbol, so they now ask `node/source`,
and `placed-frame` answers with `:symbol` rather than `:of`, which was the last
echo of the retired field name.
To let the commands use `clip/free-id` and the copy machinery, the lane's own
validation moved from `domain/sequence` to `domain/symbol`, which is where it
belonged anyway: a sequence is the one composition rule a node map carries, and
it now sits beside the parent and stencil checks rather than in the namespace
that happens to build lanes. That also breaks the cycle — sequence can require
clip and bring, and nothing below it requires sequence. Preconditions still
check only the LANE's shape: refusing an exposure edit over an unrelated defect
elsewhere in the symbol would be this command answering for a part of the
document it never touches.
The cel strip gains reuse, duplicate and make unique, the last shown only where
the selected exposure actually shares its drawing. Drawing on twos is also now
under test: exposure length is the cadence, the lane's transform has its own
clock, and it still moves on every frame — stepping it would be the cel cadence
leaking into continuous motion.
397 tests, 5,561 assertions. `test/browser/sequence.mjs` drives the three new
commands through the real editor and checks that three exposures are still one
row.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A lane's drawings were going to be one instance whose source was a KEYED
channel: frame 0 says `:drawing-a`, frame 4 says `:drawing-b`, and the cels of
a row are that channel's keys. Two things followed from it, and both were
wrong.
The first is that playback meant whichever shape the channel happened to have.
A framed source played its symbol; a keyed source froze the selected frame.
So `node/placed-at` read animation out of storage, and adding an ordinary key
to a still turned it into an animation — the last-key bug, which was not a bug
in the code so much as the rule working as written. But WHICH drawing is used
and HOW time runs inside it are independent questions, and all four combinations
are ordinary: hold one drawing, play one animation, cut between held drawings,
cut between playing ones.
So an occurrence names one symbol in `:source {:symbol ...}` and says how its
source time advances in `:playback {:in :speed :end}` — `source = in + speed *
f`, a hold being speed 0, with `:stop`, `:hold` or `:loop` at the end named
rather than guessed. `node/placed-frame` samples it forwards, which works for
holds too, and `node/source-time` is the separate, invertible edit map, nil
where inversion is meaningless. The two were one function before, and a hold
had to lie about one of them.
The second is that a keyed source only looked necessary because an occurrence
was assumed to need a ROW. It does not. A lane is a group with `:layout
:sequence`, its occurrences are ordinary instances in the same flat node map,
and `timeline/rows` draws them as cel blocks on the lane's own row: twelve
exposures, one row, each cel still separately selectable and addressable. The
vertical growth that justified the keyed source is a presentation question, and
it is answered in the view.
`arthur.domain.sequence` holds the first commands over that shape — add lane,
append drawing, extend hold — each one history step, each refusing rather than
half-applying. Extending a hold leaves the lane's keys at their authored times,
because you are adjusting drawings underneath timed motion; a correction owned
by an occurrence travels with it. Ownership does that work, so no key needs a
flag saying what it follows. Ripple past the symbol's end is refused with the
frame count it would need, and `:extent :grow-symbol` is the caller saying yes.
`clip/blank` no longer carries `:subjects {} :features {} :groups {}`. Empty
maps write no leaf, so a blank document could not survive its own round trip —
`leaf/leaves` promises exactness and was the only honest side of that.
Documents are schema 3. A version 2 document is not read; nothing here converts
one. `docs/lane-model.md` is the design, and says which of its parts are built.
392 tests, 5,525 assertions, and `test/browser/sequence.mjs` drives the editor
through create, hold, explicit overflow and undo.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>