arthur/docs/lane-is-a-view-plan.md

# A lane is a view

Plan, 2026-10-01, written at `2dc5735`. It undoes the lane model as a thing in
the document and keeps what it was for. Build on what is there and tear out
half of it.

## The decision

> A lane is a view over a symbol with sequential, non-overlapping children.

Nothing in the document is a lane. There is no lane type, no lane group, no
`:layout :sequence`, no lane commands and no lane validation. The word
survives in exactly two places: the UI, where a symbol can be DRAWN as a lane,
and the drag handling that re-spans a symbol's children while it is being
drawn that way.

The display model goes back to a row per symbol. A symbol in lane mode draws
its children as blocks on its own single row; expanded, they are rows like
anything else. Everything else is an ordinary row that expands into what it
places.

## What a lane was, and what each part becomes

| was | becomes |
| --- | --- |
| a group node with `:layout :sequence` | nothing — the symbol is the container |
| `node/lane?` | a view question: is this symbol drawn in lane mode |
| `symbol/lane-clips nodes lane-id` | the children of a symbol, sorted by `node/placed-span` |
| `symbol/lane-problems` | `symbol/overlaps`, a diagnostic the write path calls |
| `lane/lane-frame` | `clip/source-time` — one clock instead of two |
| `domain/lane.cljs` | re-based onto `domain/span.cljs`: re-spanning a symbol's children |
| `clip/lane-node`, the born-with lane | gone; a symbol is born empty again |
| `::ui/new-lane`, `::ui/adopt-in-lane`, lane renaming | gone, gone, and ordinary node renaming |

`lane.cljs`'s fourteen commands are not deleted — they are what "endpoint drag
overlap handling" means, and they already do the right arithmetic. What
changes is their subject: every one of them currently takes a host symbol AND
a lane id and asks `lane-clips nodes lane-id`; each takes a symbol and asks
for its children. `extend-hold`, `resize-out`, `resize-in`, `roll`, `blank`,
`place-symbol`, `adopt`, `append-drawing`, `reuse-drawing`,
`duplicate-drawing`, `overwrite-drawing`, `make-unique`. `span/finish` is
already the one commit path and stays exactly as it is.

Put them in `span.cljs`, which already owns "one write to one node's span" and
`finish`. The sequence operations are the same subject — re-spanning children
— and keeping them apart was a consequence of lanes existing.

## Children in lane mode never overlap

This is an invariant, not a condition to check for and report. Placement
claims time: anything placed, moved or grown over occupied time TRIMS the
extents it lands on — trimming the incumbent, removing one wholly covered, or
splitting one it lands inside — so the result has no overlap because the
operation that could have made one did not. That is `blank` followed by a
non-rippling placement, which is what `overwrite-drawing` already composes.

Enforced at the boundary, which already exists: `span/finish` is the single
commit path for every one of these commands, it validates before it returns,
and it refuses rather than half-applying. So `finish` gains the overlap check
for a symbol in lane mode, and no command can commit one. An overlap that
appears anyway is a bug in a command, not a state to design around.

Keep the check as a named diagnostic — `symbol/overlaps`, taking a symbol and
returning the pairs — used three ways:

1. `span/finish` refuses when it would commit one.
2. The test suite asserts no command can produce one: a property over the
   commands in the style of `drawn` in `lane_test`, which samples rather than
   computing expected numbers by hand.
3. A document that somehow arrives holding one still LOADS — a display hint
   must never be able to stop a document loading — and the timeline draws it
   visibly wrong with the status line saying so. Not `clip/problems`, which
   means the document will not load, and not `clip/conflicts`, which means a
   person has a decision to make. This is neither: it is a bug report.

Toggling lane mode ON for a symbol whose children already overlap is the one
place a person can ask for the impossible. Refuse it and say why, with the
`:required-frames` retry pattern offering to trim them into a sequence — the
domain reports what it would need, the UI offers one button.

Outside lane mode nothing is enforced, because overlapping children are what
compositing IS. An endpoint drag there is an ordinary span edit that may
overlap; the claim-time rule follows the mode.

## The two drag intentions

Unchanged from `docs/lane-nesting-notes.md`, and both kept:

- **Plain drag** of a clip body is temporal: it moves in time, within its
  symbol or into another symbol drawn as a lane, and it REPLACES — trimming,
  removing and splitting extents as needed so nothing overlaps.
- **Shift-drag** is structural: the dragged node goes INSIDE the symbol the
  clip under the pointer places, through `nest/move-node`, which preserves the
  world transform and the root timing. This must keep working for symbols
  contained in a lane, which is the case it exists for.

Overlap cannot distinguish them — dropping on occupied time already means
claiming it — so the modifier says which, and the label by the pointer says it
back. `nest/move-refusal` already answers before the drop.

## Where lane mode lives

A symbol is drawn as a lane because somebody said so, not because of what its
children happen to look like at this moment. Deriving it from "the children do
not currently overlap" means a symbol stops being a lane the moment anything
overlaps, and the rules that maintain non-overlap switch off exactly when they
are needed.

Two options:

1. **Editor state**, `[:ui :lane-mode #{sid}]`. Purest reading of "a lane is a
   view". But the drag rules follow the mode, so an unsaved, per-person toggle
   would decide whether dropping a symbol trims its neighbour or composites
   over it — the same gesture doing two different things to the document
   depending on something the document does not record.
2. **A display hint on the symbol**, e.g. `:display :lane`, saved like any
   other field (`clip-keys`, `leaf/leaves`, `leaf/clip` in the same commit).
   Still not a type: nothing in evaluation reads it, `symbol/problems` does
   not check it, and a symbol with it set behaves identically on the stage.

Recommended: 2. It is one field, it keeps editing rules reproducible between
people, and it does not make the symbol a different kind of thing. The thing
to hold the line on is that nothing outside the timeline, and the commit
path's overlap check, is allowed to read it.

## Tear out the held cel

A held cel is a 1-frame symbol shown for many frames. A 1-frame symbol with
`:end :loop`, lengthened, is the same picture by a different route — and the
second route is a case the model already has, so keeping the first one is
keeping a special case for free.

**What is already true**, so that nothing has to move: `:span` is on the node,
in its own frames; `:time` (`:at`, `:rate`) is on the node; looping is on the
node. The SYMBOL owns only `:frames`, the authored window. So looping and span
are instance properties already, and this change is about deleting a mode, not
relocating a field.

**What has to be decided and collapsed:**

- There are two spellings of looping — `:time :loop?` and `:playback :end
  :loop` — and both are read, in `node/placed-frame` and in
  `nest/audio-tracks`. Keep one. `:playback {:in :speed :end}` already says
  what happens at the ends, so `:end :loop` is the one to keep and
  `:time :loop?` is the one to delete.
- `:playback :speed 0` stops being produced. Make it illegal in
  `node/problems` rather than legal-but-unused, so a frozen clock has exactly
  one spelling: a 1-frame loop.
- `lane/extend-hold` exists only because holds were special — it refuses
  anything whose speed is not 0 and then edits a span. Once a hold is a loop,
  lengthening one IS `resize-out`, and the command collapses into it.
- `cel` survives as the word for the creation policy — a new empty symbol is
  one frame — but stops naming a playback mode.

**What it buys, and this is the point:** one rule for nesting, which settles
the refusal that blocks shift-to-reparent today. `nest/inside` currently has
no `:time` for a hold, for `:end :hold`, or for a loop, and so refuses all
three. The general rule that covers all of them: **resolve the move with the
destination's map at the CURRENT frame — the affine piece the current frame
falls in.**

- A loop of length L is affine within the period the current frame is in.
  Timing is preserved inside that period and repeats after it, which is what
  looping means.
- A 1-frame loop — the ex-hold — has a period of length 1, so the map within
  it is trivially invertible and lands the moved node on frame 0, aligned to
  the current frame. That is exactly the answer `docs/lane-nesting-notes.md`
  argues for from first principles, arrived at here as an instance of the
  general rule instead of a special case.
- `:end :hold` is affine in the played part and frozen in the tail, which the
  same sentence covers.

**The trap, which must be handled in the same change.** `nest/audio-tracks`
expands a loop into one walk PER PERIOD:

    periods (range (floor (/ (to-local source lo) length))
                   (ceil  (/ (to-local source hi) length)))

Today a held cel is skipped entirely — `(pos? speed)` is the guard, and the
comment says a visual freeze does not emit a sustained audio sample. Turn
every drawing into a 1-frame loop and that guard stops firing: a drawing held
for 120 frames becomes 120 recursive walks, and any sound inside it is emitted
120 times. That is both a wrong mix and a performance cliff on the most common
node in the document. Required with this change: a cheap `symbol/audible?`
precheck so a source with no audio anywhere inside it is never period-expanded,
and a cap or a different formulation for the ones that are.

Also worth knowing before the change: `ui/timeline`'s own docstring already
says a looping instance draws only its first pass. With every drawing a loop,
that sentence now describes every drawing — harmless, since one pass of a
1-frame symbol is the whole of it, but the docstring should stop sounding like
a limitation.

**Dropping into a 1-frame symbol.** The window is authored and crops what it
holds, so a 10-frame symbol dropped into a 1-frame drawing shows its frame 0
and nothing else. That is consistent — `:frames` is the shot length and
`:extent :grow-symbol` is the opt-in — but it is probably not what somebody
dragging means. Offer the growth through the `:required-frames` retry the
model already uses: the command reports what it would need, the UI offers one
button.

## Order of work

Each step compiles, passes `npm test`, and leaves the editor usable.

1. **Row per symbol.** In `ui/timeline.cljs`, delete `portal`, the `::portal`
   hint row, the `under?` lineage predicate and the `chosen` argument; emit a
   row for a clip whose parent is a lane instead of skipping it. Keep the
   `:cels` blocks for the collapsed row, and keep `inside-rows` — including
   its `:unmapped?` branch, which is what makes a held drawing's contents
   reachable at all.
2. **Lane mode as a hint.** Add the field and the toggle, draw a symbol's
   children as blocks when it is set and as rows when it is not, and move the
   lane-row drag handling onto it. Both display paths now exist and nothing in
   the domain has changed.
3. **Re-base the commands.** Move `lane.cljs` into `span.cljs`, replacing
   `(lane-clips nodes lane-id)` with the symbol's children and dropping the
   `lane-id` argument. `frontend/test/arthur/domain/lane_test.cljs` is the
   proof: its fixtures should change and its assertions should not, and any
   assertion that has to change is a behaviour change worth noticing.
4. **Move the invariant.** `symbol/lane-problems` becomes `symbol/overlaps`,
   called by `span/finish` for a symbol in lane mode, plus the property test
   that no command can produce an overlap.
5. **Delete the rest.** `node/lane?`, `symbol/lane-clips`, `clip/lane-node`,
   `::ui/new-lane`, `::ui/adopt-in-lane`, the lane branch of
   `::ui/new-symbol`, lane renaming, `aimed-lane`, and the
   `:lane?`/`sound-lane?` row flags. Rename what is left so the word does not
   appear outside the timeline.
6. **Audio falls out.** An audio node is already a parent-less child of a
   symbol, which is exactly the new shape — so the audio-in-lane rules added
   in `2dc5735` (`holds-other?`, the mixed-lane refusal, the `in-lane` filter
   in `sound-rows`) delete rather than migrate. A symbol drawn as a lane whose
   children are sounds is an audio lane, and that is the whole of it.
7. **Shift-to-reparent stays** as it is: `nest/move-node` and
   `nest/move-refusal` never knew about lanes.

## What must not be lost

All of this was broken at some point today and is now proved; each has a test
to keep.

- A held clip's contents are reachable from the root timeline, with no keys
  and no draggable edges — `source-time` is nil for a hold, and the walk used
  to stop there.
- Double-clicking a clip opens its symbol as a tab, and the editor survives
  it: `symbol/lineage` must not report a cycle for an id the symbol does not
  hold, and opening a symbol must drop a selection pointing into the one being
  left.
- Selection waits for pointer-up, so a press does not re-draw the timeline out
  from under the gesture it is starting.
- A drop never silently deletes what it lands on.
- A sound is drawn once, not twice.

## Open questions

1. **Is lane mode a property of the symbol or of the instance placing it?** A
   symbol placed twice would be drawn the same way in both places under the
   first reading. That is probably right, and worth saying out loud.
2. **Does a lane row's edge drag trim the placing instance's span, or ripple
   the children?** Same handle, two commands; the row is now an instance, so
   it has a span of its own for the first time.
3. **Does tearing out the held cel come before or after the lane work?** It
   is independent of it — `nest` never knew about lanes — and it is what makes
   shift-to-reparent work on the thing people would actually drag onto. Doing
   it first means the lane work lands on a model with one playback mode fewer;
   doing it after means two changes to `lane_test`'s fixtures instead of one.