v0.1.19 — Terminal lockup fix

Released 2026-05-09. macOS Apple Silicon DMG signed + notarized; Windows + Linux ship via CI. Install from codenow.pro/download .

Apple Silicon only. The Intel Mac (x64) build did not ship in this release because the macos-13 CI runner pool was clogged at tag time. Intel users on v0.1.18 will not auto-update; the v0.1.20 release will restore Intel coverage. Apple Silicon (M1 / M2 / M3 / M4) Macs auto-update normally.

This is a critical bugfix release focused entirely on a single problem that beta testers reported as the most frustrating thing about CodeNow: the embedded terminal would silently stop accepting keystrokes after a flood of output and only a full window reload (Cmd+R) recovered — destroying scrollback and the active project state with it.

What was wrong

Every chunk of output from a child process (claude tool result, long compile output, big test run, verbose CLI) was sent across the Electron IPC boundary as a separate message. A single 200KB tool result from claude could fan out into hundreds of tiny IPC sends inside ~200ms. The renderer event loop drowned serializing messages and thrashing the xterm.js GPU atlas. Keystroke handlers (term.onData) live on the same event loop and could not be scheduled, so the terminal looked locked even though the underlying shell was fine. Beta testers hit this consistently when running claude or large npm test invocations and had to reload the window to recover.

Four-part fix

1. Frame-batched PTY → IPC drain (main process)

node-pty chunks now coalesce for ~16ms (one animation frame) or until 64KB before dispatching a single IPC message. Cuts IPC traffic by roughly 100× on a typical claude tool result. Implemented in src/main.js around the ipcMain.handle('terminal-create') handler. Buffers are per-pty, keyed by (projectPath, tabId), with a clean shutdown path that flushes on exit.

2. Write-buffer backpressure (renderer ↔ main)

xterm.write(data, callback) now reports completion. The renderer counts pending writes; when the count crosses 32, it calls a new terminal-pause IPC. The main process pauses the drain (buffers keep accumulating in main, not in the renderer). When pending drops to 8 the renderer fires terminal-resume and the buffered output flushes. Without this, even with frame-batching, a sustained 5MB+ output blast could still wedge the renderer.

3. Focus recovery on mousedown

xterm routes keystrokes through a hidden <textarea> that loses its input attachment when modals, notifications, or Cmd+Tab steal focus. The terminal would still appear focused but silently swallow keystrokes. Each terminal wrapper now re-focuses xterm on mousedown (deferred via setTimeout(0) so the natural focus event from the click settles first).

4. Cmd+Shift+T — Reset Active Terminal (recovery hatch)

For the rare case where backpressure + focus recovery aren’t enough, Cmd+Shift+T disposes the active xterm instance and rebuilds it in the same wrapper without killing the underlying pty. You lose scrollback for that tab; the shell session and any buffered output survive and stream into the fresh xterm on resume. A small toast confirms the reset.

CI hardening (shipping alongside the fix)

Three pre-existing CI breaks were unblocked as part of this release:

• Smoke CI lockfile. .github/workflows/smoke.yml ran npm ci against a gitignored package-lock.json, so smoke had been failing at dependency install on every push for weeks. Lockfiles are now committed for the root + tools/{smoke,demo,screenshots}/.
• Smoke runtime stage. npm ci --ignore-scripts was skipping not just node-pty’s electron-rebuild but also Electron’s own postinstall, which broke electron.launch in the runtime stage. Dropped --ignore-scripts. v0.1.19 is the first green smoke run since v0.1.15.
• Release CI artifact-quota dependency. The release pipeline used actions/upload-artifact → actions/download-artifact → release attach, and the artifact storage quota was hit during v0.1.19 builds. Replaced the upload+download dance with softprops/action-gh-release running directly inside each matrix job. The action is idempotent on the same tag — the first job creates the release with auto-generated notes; subsequent jobs append their files. Quota can no longer block a release.
• Codesign identity-count parser. security find-identity -v -p codesigning | tail -1 | grep -oE '^[0-9]+' was anchored to column 1, but the summary line is 1 valid identities found. with leading whitespace, so the defensive parser was reporting 0 identities even when the cert was correctly imported. Drop the ^ anchor.

Auto-updater behavior

Existing v0.1.18 users on Apple Silicon Mac, Windows, and Linux will receive an auto-update notification within ~4 hours of next launch. The auto-update path uses latest-mac.yml / latest.yml / latest-linux.yml published as GitHub Release assets, all of which shipped correctly with v0.1.19.

Intel Mac users on v0.1.18 will not receive an update — latest-mac.yml only references arm64.zip. They’ll catch up on v0.1.20.

Known follow-ups (v0.1.20)

• Restore Intel Mac (x64) build. The macos-13 runner stuck-queue problem isn’t new; we’ll either give the runner a longer queue timeout or build x64 on an arm64 runner with --cross if electron-builder supports it cleanly.
• Fix the pre-existing voice.deferred-to-integrations smoke test. It’s red but predates the v0.1.10 voice deferral, so it’s testing behavior we deliberately removed. Either delete the test or update the assertion to match the deferred-to-integrations message.
• Move artifact deletion into a scheduled cleanup workflow. Even with the release CI no longer using upload-artifact, the smoke workflow still does. Daily artifact cleanup keeps the quota healthy without manual gh api -X DELETE runs.