Deploying a VM meant answering a dozen questions in a row, never seeing the
whole of one's choices, and starting over to revisit an answer. The first
question is now which interface to use — TUI form or the classic prompts —
defaulting to whatever TODO > Configuration says.
The form shows every setting at once with a plan that recomputes on each
change: names, resources, and the two collisions marked as they arise (a
defined VM is skipped, an orphan qcow2 will make deploy_qemu fail). F2 edits
one VM, F3 previews the commands, F5 deploys, F6/F7/F8 select all / main
versions / none.
Function keys rather than ctrl+letter: ctrl+p is Textual's command palette and
silently swallowed the shortcut, and a bare letter is eaten by whichever input
has focus.
Both interfaces go through _qemu_deploy_parts_for, so the same choices produce
the same command by construction — and a test now drives the CLI prompts and
the form to the same state and compares the argv, which is what keeps them
from drifting.
Nothing privileged or networked runs inside the form. Every virsh call in this
codebase goes through sudo, and a password prompt while Textual owns the
terminal would wreck the display; the domain list and the remote branches are
fetched before the app starts and arrive as plain data.
The progress view is optional (preference: CLI output stays the default, since
it is the easiest to copy from). It gives one collapsible block per VM,
expanded while running, folded on success — and left OPEN on failure, which is
the part worth reading. « c » copies the selected log, « C » all of them.
On copying from a TUI over SSH: copy_to_clipboard emits OSC 52, which the
LOCAL terminal emulator interprets, so it does reach the workstation's
clipboard. Two caveats are handled: the payload is capped at 100 kB keeping
the TAIL (some terminals truncate long OSC 52), and the notification says a
compatible terminal is required — macOS Terminal.app has none, tmux needs
set-clipboard on.
Verified: pure logic (profiles, per-VM overrides surviving a profile change,
totals, statuses) by direct calls; the form headless via run_test — default
selection, F6/F7/F8, profile switch, and the orphan guard demanding a second
F5; parity CLI/TUI on identical argv; the progress view on three fake jobs,
with the failure staying open and the clipboard filled. The semaphore bounding
concurrency was measured: four 0.35 s jobs take 1.63 s at 1 and 0.58 s at 4 —
without it, « 4 in parallel » launched every VM at once.
Also removed a duplicated @staticmethod on _qemu_install_dir, harmless since
Python 3.10 but misleading.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Mathieu Benoit
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