How to Grow a Status Bar

Issued in two settings; the figures serve both.

STEP I

Notice what you check

Begin with the itch. You have handed the typing to agents — at present you are overseeing seven of them, a number you may drag — and taken up a new occupation, which is glancing. The glance that interrupts the sentence you were writing has a name in the trade, the flinch, and one cause: somewhere out of sight, an agent may have stopped to ask you something, and the only way to know is to go look. A stopped window looks exactly like a busy one.

For one morning, count your flinches and mend nothing. The figure below is a fleet left alone. It has been running since you arrived, and it does not stop when you scroll away.

FIT THE FIRST

The Flinch

Count first the flinches of the morn
(seven shells you cannot see),
and mend not one you find;
the lack you cannot say aloud
is the lack you cannot bind.
The shells run on when you look off
(the figure does the same),
and every ask that goes unmet sits waiting, with your name.

FIG. 1. — Seven agents, unherded. Since you began reading, 0 of them have stopped to ask for something. You did not see which.

What all of this rations is your attention, which by default is spent blind. The whole apparatus of this manual comes to four lines of text at the bottom of a screen.

STEP II

Ask for a line

When you know what you keep checking, describe it to one of the agents already in your employ. “I keep checking which of you is waiting on me. Put it at the bottom where I can see it.” The agent edits a configuration file you have never loved, reloads it, and the line exists. If it is wrong, say so; it becomes less wrong. At no point does anyone consult a chapter on syntax, and that is the part that would have read as fiction three years ago.

The bar below starts empty. The asks beside it are ours, in the words we used. Make all four.

FIT THE SECOND

The Asking

Then speak the wish, and speak it small:
“who waits on me, and where?”
Count forty seconds by the clock,
and lo — the line is there.
And christen what you grow (write here:
, if you please);
for names that say what watchers do
grow stale — the nonsense keeps.
Then ask for keys: the snick, that jumps
to whichever waited first;
the beckon’s lettered card of panes;
the glean, that picks the purse.

$ — the work, whatever it is, goes on up here —

— nothing here yet; the bar is listening —

FIG. 2. — Nothing to say yet. Its names and its waiting will come from Fig. 1; the two figures share a fleet.

STEP III

Name what you grow

By the fourth ask you will own several small scripts that watch things for you. The trade calls such a script a grebble, and grebbles need names. A descriptive name — check-agents.sh — collides with the world, which is full of things that check agents. An invented word can be searched for years later without false friends, said on a walk, and outgrown without going stale.

Coin yours now, before you need it. Say it once out loud to be sure it fits the mouth, then write it here: — the manual uses it from here on.

The rest of this manual’s coinages are gathered in the glossary at the end. None of them existed before they were needed.

STEP IV

Let it watch, so you can stop

Hooks turn the bar from furniture into staff. Every agent worth employing will announce the moments of its turn — began, stopped to ask, finished — once those announcements are wired up. You ask the agents to do the wiring; they build their own reporting, and nobody remarks on it. Each announcement snibs one fact onto the window it came from, and the bar adds arithmetic.

The arithmetic earns its keep. Below is one window waiting on you; the knob is how long you have left it. Past thirty minutes the wait stops being urgent and becomes lorn: filed out of the queue, renamed after its task, so the tab can say what you were doing when you wander back.

FIT THE THIRD

The Keeping

Let every turn report its turn;
let ledgers hold the day;
and keep one murble, caged to read,
that cannot touch nor stray.
Go rummage when a Tuesday strays—
the store gives back the thread,
with the very spell that wakes it
from the middle, not the head.
Then prune the lines that no one reads,
as hedges want the knife—
till the quiet at the bottom of the glass
is worth four minutes of your life.

the window tab

2:web ●

its entry in the queue

● waiting: artifactland:web 0s

the bar’s opinion

noticed, surely, any second

0s2m5m30m — lorn45m

FIG. 3. — Neglect, measured. The tab and the queue always agree; they read the same arithmetic.

STEP V

Ask for keys, too

Lines show; keys move. Two are worth growing early. The first takes you to the window that has waited longest — press it again for the next, until the thrunch is empty. Keepers call the jump a snick, for the sound it does not make. The second, the beckon, throws up a lettered card of every agent window across every session; one letter and you are there. The snick when you owe answers, the beckon when you know whom you want.

A third key works without changing windows at all: the glean lifts paths, addresses, and commit hashes out of the scrollback and into your clipboard, most recent first. The mouse is a fine instrument; the text you want is already on the screen.

FIG. 4. — The two keys. The snick takes the oldest wait first, then unseen ✓s; the beckon letters every pane and waits for one keypress.

lately in the scrollback

FIG. 5. — The glean, sifting the last five hundred lines. The pick lands in the clipboard; the mouse never hears about it.

STEP VI

Let it remember

Everything on a bar evaporates at the end of the day, and with it every question you might have asked later: which project starved, who asked most, what Thursday cost. The remedy is one line of plain text per change, appended to a file, kept for good. Under a megabyte a day; no pruning.

This page keeps such a ledger. It opened when you arrived and has been filling ever since — your flinches, your asks, the ripening of Fig. 3 under your hand. You will recognize the events; you caused them.

FIG. 6. — The page’s ledger of your reading, so far. Yours reads much the same, except the agents are real and the money is yours.

One difference: this page’s ledger forgets you when you close the tab. Yours needn’t — a year of these lines answers questions you have not thought to ask yet.

STEP VII

Ask it where Tuesday went

A ledger you can only append to answers slowly. Feed it, along with the agents’ own transcripts, into one small database, and it starts answering questions: which sessions touched the parser, what the week cost, where that Tuesday conversation went. Keepers call the asking a rummage. Each answer carries the command that resumes the session it names, so a found thread can be picked up mid-sentence, days later.

The jar below holds a few sessions from our own store. Try auth bug, deploy, or poem.

The rummage of the third fit. Ask it for auth bug, deploy, or poem:

$ rummage "

FIG. 7. — The rummage. Every hit ends in the command that picks the thread back up.

STEP VIII

Let it speak, but not act

Once the ledger is long, you will want it read to you, and here is the one place a model belongs in the arrangement. The terms of employment are strict: it may read, it may write prose, it may touch nothing. A model kept on these terms is a murble. Ours reads the ledger each morning and sets a small front page, every number gathered by ordinary queries before the murble comes anywhere near the typewriter. A wrong front page costs a shrug, and the terms were chosen so a shrug is the worst case.

This page keeps a murble too. It has one source, Fig. 6, and one power, typesetting. Ask it for your morning page:

The murble of the third fit, at your service. It has read nothing but Fig. 6, and can do nothing but set type:

STEP IX

Keep going

There is no step ten; step two repeats for as long as you keep the trade. Each line you grow shows you the next lack. Keepers grow the tide if they sail, the oven if they bake, the build only when it breaks; one grew the last sentence spoken in the house, and unfixed it after a week, which is also allowed. Prune as freely as you plant. A bar that only gets longer is a hedge nobody loves.

Before you go, the customary review. The list fills itself in, as lists should:

[ ]Adjusted the fleet to your circumstances (Fig. 1)
[ ]Flinched — left the page and came back (Fig. 1)
[ ]Asked for a line and watched it arrive (Fig. 2)
[ ]Coined a word of your own
[ ]Let a wait ripen to lorn (Fig. 3)
[ ]Snicked or beckoned across the fleet (Fig. 4)
[ ]Gleaned a token from the scrollback (Fig. 5)
[ ]Rummaged for a lost Tuesday (Fig. 7)
[ ]Woke the murble and read your morning page

The list is patient; the figures are still running.

APPENDIX

Words used in this manual

thrimblen.: The hour at which one begins checking instead of working. Arrives earlier each year; see flinch.
flinchn.: A glance at a window that did not ask for one. The unit of unmanaged attention. Counted in Fig. 1.
snibv.: To fasten one small fact where it can be seen — as a hook snibs waiting onto a window. From the old word for latching a door, which is the right size of act.
grebblen.: Any small script that watches a thing so that you need not. A well-kept workspace accumulates grebbles the way a garden accumulates stakes and string.
grebblev.: To install a grebble (n.).
grebblen., yours: Your first watcher, named in the second fit. Definition pending; it will mean whatever it watches, and after a while slightly more.
thrunchn.: The queue of agents waiting on you, sorted by how sorry you should feel. A healthy thrunch is empty; an honest one rarely is.
lornadj.: Of a wait: old enough to have stopped being a question. Lorn windows are filed, renamed, and kept. See Fig. 3.
snickv.: To jump, by one keypress, to the window that has waited longest. Named for the sound it does not make.
beckonn.: A lettered card of every agent window, across every session. One letter takes you there. For when you know whom you seek.
gleanv.: To lift a path, address, or hash from the scrollback into the clipboard, most recent first. The mouse is not consulted.
rummagen.: The asking of questions of the store — sessions, transcripts, costs. Answers arrive with the command that resumes them.
murblen.: A model kept where it can read but not touch. Employed for prose, denied verbs.
the quietn.: The state of a bar with nothing urgent on it. The purpose of the entire arrangement, experienced for perhaps four minutes a day.
manualn.: A document that checks itself; see the list above.

And when the thrunch has drained to nought,
and every glyph has gone to grey,
the bar will hold the shape of you—
a long way before, and a long way behind.

Prepared by one person and a changing number of agents, in the workspace it describes; the bar reported on the writing of each figure as the figure was written. Nothing on this page can write to anything. Several things on it can read you, and say so. Cost of preparation: about what a hardcover costs. If your terminal cannot yet do the things shown here, the terminal is not the unwilling party.

FINIS · SET IN IM FELL ENGLISH, EB GARAMOND & VICTOR MONO · THE FIGURES ARE STILL RUNNING