Tasteful apps should only perform side-effects through 'window'
arguments rather than the 'curses' module directly. It's ok however to
read constants like curses.A_NORMAL or curses.stdscr().
There are some limitations, unfortunately. Ncurses wasn't designed with
testability in mind. For example, there's no way to curs_set or
assume_default_colors without the 'curses' module. Oh well.
I'd already dropped the variant without a filename. But even the variant
with a filename is very easy to use in a way that is confusing to use in
the presence of sandboxing:
* call io.lines()
* Sandboxing saves an error, io.lines() returns nil
* Caller (usually a loop) raises an error.
* We show the error and not the sandboxing failure.
* Worse, there's no way to adjust permissions from within Teliva,
because we can't ever get to that menu while there's an error.
Best solution I can come up with: encourage a separate step for
translating filename to file handle. That way it's more obvious that we
need to check for errors.
In each session, Teliva has to bootstrap a trusted channel with the
computer owner while running arbitrarily untrusted code. So let's get
really, really precise about what the trusted channel consists of:
- the bottom-most row of screen containing the menu
- the keystrokes the owner types in
- ncurses COLOR_PAIR slots 254 (menu) and 255 (error)
One reason the menu colors are important: we don't want people to get
used to apps that hide the menu colors by setting default
foreground/background to invisible and then drawing their own menu one
row up.
The error COLOR_PAIR I don't see any reason to carve out right now, but
it seems like a good idea for Teliva the framework to not get into the
habit of apps doing some things for it.
I'm not sure how realistic all this is (I feel quite ill-equipped to
think about security), but it seems worthwhile to err on the side of
paranoia. Teliva will be paranoid so people don't have to be.
It turns out Lua has been providing us this information all along! I'd
just not created the space on screen to show it. Make it persist better.
Kilo now no longer tracks its own status messages, which is a regression
in a rare condition.
One old drawback now has a new look. Before, we loaded definitions in
order, so global definitions had to exist before other global
definitions that used them. See window and grid in life.tlv. Now we load
definitions in reverse order, so initialization needs to change. Worse,
if we update window, we need to edit grid just to fix the order.
This implies that we can't yet optimize away bindings where there are no
new changes.
Kartik K. Agaram