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Journey Stage 1a — open a directory, on one path

Status: framing, rev 6 — APPROVED at rev 5; rev 6 records corrections found during implementation. Serves COHERENCE.md §2 (the golden product journey), §19 (coherence acceptance tests), §20 Priority 1.

0. Revision history

rev 1 (2026-07-26) — first framing. Scouted against main @ d400f30.
rev 2 (2026-07-26) — review round 1. Q#JR2 withdrawn (its ground truth was false); destination pinning added; the resolver chain restructured around append-only hook registration; ResolvedTarget typed; display_file's contract specified; the GPU-framing supersession named.
rev 3 (2026-07-26) — review round 2. Two blockers, two contract gaps:
- Fail-closed was not failure-atomic (§4.4). dired mutates handle state — claim, listing, prev, paint — before it ever attempts display, so rev 2's "does nothing" left a hidden buffer and could corrupt an existing handle's prev. Per the review's decision, 1a now carries the destination-scope substrate: a commit_to primitive that revalidates and enters the captured frontend's scope before any dired mutation, so the whole post-await commit — prev capture, claim, paint, display, seat — executes against the captured destination or not at all.
- Expected-buffer validation (Q#JR14): the destination carries the buffer it was requested against, so a user who replaces the bootstrap buffer mid-listing is not overwritten by stale launch intent. Rev 2's window-only pin said launch intent wins; it should not, and B2's "before the user can act" was false (§8).
- Acceptance 6 was still vacuous, and the blanket "each fails with the change reverted" rule cannot hold for preservation guards. §6 is split into new-behavior acceptances and preservation pins, each pin naming the targeted mutation that falsifies it (§6.0).
- Hook error policy specified (Q#JR15): in a short-circuit hook a raise and a false both yield proceed = false (hook.rs:299-323); only HookOutcome.errors distinguishes them. An error now stops the chain and suppresses the fallback.
- The fallback slot is described honestly as an unowned singleton (§0.5), not an "ownership-carrying registration".
rev 4 (2026-07-26) — review round 3. Three substrate details and one inverted bite mutation:
- InteractiveCommandOrigin was the wrong mechanism, twice over (§2.11). It does not scope the APIs rev 3 claimed — no-arg pmacs.window.buffer() reads core.active_buffer_id() directly (mod.rs:12547) and move_to_line mutates the core's ambient active window (mod.rs:12703) — so prev capture and cursor seating stayed ambient. And it is authenticated interactive-command authority: entering it would make dired's paint satisfy the pre-edit unfold guard (mod.rs:1391), invoke_interactive's rotation (:5400), and terminal command context (:8515). Rev 4 uses a separate scoped frontend override that also swaps core.active_frontend, and commit_to does not touch the interactive origin (Q#JR14e).
- dest becomes nonconstructible userdata (Q#JR14d). As a table it is shared across hook listeners, so an earlier listener could mutate the destination and decline — redirecting later listeners or dired — and any Lua could fabricate a valid triple.
- Preflight was missing replaceability (Q#JR14f). Exact display also refuses a window dedicated to another buffer (editor_core.rs:3566), so a live destination holding its expected buffer could still refuse after dired claimed and painted — rev 2's hidden-buffer failure through another door.
- N8's falsifier was inverted (§6.1). Both a claim and a raise give proceed == false, so keying the fallback on proceed alone is correct; errors decides the extra report, not the fallback.
rev 5 (2026-07-26) — review round 4. The remaining predicate input and acceptance details:
- Replaceability now names the incoming buffer (Q#JR14f). The shared predicate takes Option<BufferId> and serves all three existing consumers: exact display passes its requested buffer, probe_display_target passes its existing-buffer result, and commit_to passes None because dired's replacement does not exist yet. Thus a destination dedicated to its still-current bootstrap buffer is refused before dired mutates anything.
- N6c is executable: the first listener catches the userdata mutation rejection and declines, the second verifies the token stayed unchanged and declines, and only the fallback commits.
- The dired accessor spelling, revision heading, and Stage 2 ledger claim are corrected.
rev 6 (2026-07-26) — corrections found while implementing, not a new design round. Four, all confirmed against the tree:
- Q#JR3 was false. replace_active_buffer does not drop the startup scratch buffer; its body is one switch_active_buffer call, which reassigns aw.buffer_id and removes nothing. The claim came from that function's own doc comment (editor.rs:1071), which has been wrong for as long as it has existed, and rev 5 propagated it into §2.2, §3, P4, and the decision list without checking the body. Corrected in all four places; the stale comment is corrected in this PR too, since this PR would otherwise add more false references to it. Actually removing the stale scratch is separate work — buffer-lifetime changes have their own consequences (what else holds the id, what C-x b lists) and are not smuggled into a directory-open stage.
- The daemon bootstrap could report the wrong buffer (§4.5). The directory arm captured dest.buffer, ran the resolver chain synchronously, then returned the captured id — so a handler that opened something synchronously (through commit_to, the supported way) had already replaced the window's buffer, and the reply would pair one buffer's snapshot with another's identity. The early return also skipped the post-hook revalidation this framing claimed stayed active. Rev 6 decides: report what the window actually holds after the dispatch, and rehome through non_side_target exactly as the file arm does.
- N11 tested neither RET nor self-insert. It called display_file and buf:insert directly, so it stayed green with dired's RET binding, its entry dispatch, and the editor's self-insert path all broken — most of what "the journey works" means. Both gestures are now dispatched as real keys.
- P7 was vacuous and is removed, not weakened. Q#JR12 has nothing to pin: run computes had_file = file.is_some() and a directory path is Some like any other, so suppression is structural and the named mutation would require inventing the branch first. The rev 5 test additionally never armed restore and hard-coded had_file, so it asserted nothing about run. Q#JR12 is downgraded to an observation.

0.5. Coherence impact (`COHERENCE.md` §20, required since #163)

Journey steps. §20's first-named arc; 1a takes the broken half of step 3. After 1a, pmacs . opens the directory. Steps 4 and 6–12 do not change grade. §2's verdict table and §20 Priority 1's "State: broken at step 3" line are rewritten in this PR per §25.
Interaction islands: adds none, removes one. No new keymap, mode, or modal surface; the directory arm routes into #165's dired buffer — the "must not invent a second directory surface" constraint. The unification (§3) removes an island: startup and the daemon bootstrap resolve paths through two independently-written implementations today.
Config registry. Adds no keys. The directory fallback is a function slot, not a setting — ConfigValue is four scalars and a handler is none of them (the reason terminal profiles could not be settings, #173).
Ownership, stated honestly (rev 3). That slot is an unowned singleton: last writer wins, no owning package, no SourceLocation, no removal lifecycle, and it does not appear in any inspection surface. That is a real §13 gap and this framing does not dress it up — §20 Priority 3 is deliberately deferred, and 1a is not the place to invent ownership machinery for one slot. Named migration: when Priority 3 lands registration ownership and pmacs.hook.remove, the slot becomes an ordinary lowest-priority hook subscription carrying its owner, and this primitive is deleted rather than extended.
Background-work attribution (§9). No new JobKind variant, no new PendingJob field; the listing uses pmacs.fs.read_dir, whose kind #165 added. Neutral.
Frontend parity (§16). Both frontends get the behavior from the same primitive. One asymmetry ships knowingly: the GPU path displays its pre-existing bootstrap buffer until the listing settles (§8 B2).
New substrate (rev 3, revised rev 4–5). commit_to (§4.4) is a general fix for a general problem — every post-await pmacs.window.* call in the tree acts on the ambient frontend by documented design (dired.lua:68-73). 1a introduces it for one caller and does not migrate the others; that migration is named as deferred rather than smuggled in. It adds a scoped frontend override distinct from InteractiveCommandOrigin (§2.11), deliberately: a background continuation gets destination scope without acquiring interactive-command authority, which keeps the "programmatic vs interactive" distinction the unfold guard, command boundaries, and the terminal surface all depend on.

1. What Stage 1a ships

pmacs . opens the directory, on the local TUI path and the daemon/GPU bootstrap path, routed into #165's dired buffer.
One path-resolution primitive — EditorState::open adopts EditorCore::resolve_target_buffer wholesale.
A scoped-destination commit primitive (§4.4) so an async open lands where it was requested, or nowhere.
The first cross-subsystem journey acceptance suite (§19).

Not in 1a — Stage 1b: a compile keybinding and cargo build/test defaults from the existing ProjectKind::Cargo, LSP spawn-failure guidance (§1.2), a welcome buffer.

2. Ground truth (scouted 2026-07-26, `main` @ `d400f30`; re-verified rev 4)

2.1 `pmacs .` still exits 1, and why

load_file (src/file_io.rs:81) does File::open — which succeeds on a directory — then read_to_end, returning EISDIR. Not ErrorKind::NotFound, so every NotFound arm is skipped and the error propagates; main prints and exits (src/main.rs:400-403).

2.2 There are two path-open implementations, not one

resolve_target_buffer (editor_core.rs:885) documents itself as "One primitive, so two path-normalization, dedup, and hook transactions cannot drift apart." Callers: display_file (window_panel.rs:402) and the daemon bootstrap (daemon.rs:1641). Local startup is not one of them — EditorState::open (editor.rs:757) hand-writes the same shape.

	`EditorState::open`	`resolve_target_buffer`
Stored buffer path	normalized — `set_buffer_path` normalizes internally (`editor_core.rs:810-822`)	normalized — same setter
Displayed name	`path.display()` raw (`editor.rs:772`)	`path.display()` raw
`NotFound` arm	empty path-backed buffer, `[new file]`	identical
Dedup	none	`find_buffer_for_path`
Window install	`replace_active_buffer` — switches the ACTIVE window (`editor.rs:797`). It does not drop the startup scratch (rev 6): its body is one `switch_active_buffer` call, which reassigns `aw.buffer_id` and removes nothing. The doc comment claiming otherwise was wrong before this stage and is corrected in this PR	none; caller installs
Error type	`io::Error`, bare	`String`, prefixed `cannot open {path}:`

The two agree on every observable except the error prefix and the window install. Rev 1 claimed a raw-vs-normalized split and built a decision, a bet, and an acceptance on it; all three were withdrawn in rev 2. Rev 3 draws the further consequence the review identified: because the implementations already agree, no equivalence assertion can prove the unification happened — such a test passes on the pre-image. §6.0 restructures the acceptance list around that.

The unification's value is therefore (a) the directory arm reaching startup once rather than being written twice, and (b) closing drift the primitive was created to prevent and did not. Not a behavior fix.

2.3 dired creates its own buffer and refuses adoption

claim_handle (dired.lua:486) creates the buffer, applies the read-only intercept, set_round_trip_input, and the dired major mode. Its comment is explicit that finding a buffer by name is not adoption. Handles are pathless. No Lua buffer.set_name / set_file_path exists; dired Stage 2 (PR #171 §5) is scoped to add one.

2.4 The listing is async; the bootstrap reply is not

read_listing (dired.lua:462) awaits pmacs.fs.read_dir and its comment says "Must run inside pmacs.async". The daemon bootstrap is one synchronous block: open_initial_target (daemon.rs:1624) → initial_target_snapshot (:1823) → InitialTargetResult::Opened (:1888), with the GPU frontend blocking on the reply before creating its window (pmacs-gpu/src/attach.rs:551).

tick_async resuming a coroutine in the frame its result arrives does not bound the listing to one frame — the worker must still finish. tests/dired_acceptance.rs:103's pump drives until parked-coroutine and pending-job counts both reach zero: "nothing dired does is observable until this returns."

2.5 Post-await, dired acts on the ambient frontend — by design

dired.lua:68-73: "pmacs.window.* calls made after the await act for the ambient active frontend, since interactive origin does not survive the tick boundary; and pmacs.editor.move_to_line acts on the ambient buffer, which is why every post-await re-seat is guarded."

Correct for an interactive C-x d. Wrong for a startup open that must land in a specific frontend's specific window.

And the ambient reach is wider than display. open_directory (dired.lua:607-655) after the await, in order:

read_listing — the await;
handle_for_path(canonical) / claim_handle(canonical) — creates a buffer, applies intercept/mode, registers a handle;
assigns entries, errors, sort_mode;
handle.prev = pmacs.window.buffer() — reads the ambient buffer;
paint(handle) — mutates the buffer;
display(handle, opts, departed) — the first call that could refuse;
seat_cursor — move_to_line on the ambient buffer;
kill_departed.

lookup_window refuses a foreign window id (window_panel.rs:202-212), but only at step 6. Rev 2's "fails closed, does nothing" was false: steps 2–5 have already run. A refusal leaves a hidden dired buffer and a registered handle, and step 4 can capture an unrelated frontend's buffer as prev. §4.4 fixes this by revalidating and scoping before step 2.

2.6 Subscribers exist before the hook fires — but ordering is fixed

EditorState::new() loads the builtin runtime (dired at editor.rs:539) then user init.lua (:609, cfg(not(test))). HookRegistry::add appends (hook.rs:240); no prepend, no priority, no removal (COHERENCE.md §13 names pmacs.hook.remove's absence as a Priority 3 prerequisite). A builtin subscriber always runs before any user subscriber, forever.

2.7 Short-circuit cannot distinguish a claim from a crash

run_short_circuit (hook.rs:299-323) returns proceed: false for a literal false return and for a raising callback; only HookOutcome.errors (non-empty in the second case) tells them apart. A resolver chain that keys only on proceed treats a broken user callback as a successful claim. Q#JR15 decides the policy.

2.8 `open_initial_target` reasserts after hooks

It re-checks the buffer exists (daemon.rs:1665-1670) then reinstalls it into the origin document window, rehoming if a hook closed it (:1673-1690). §4.5's design does not fight this.

2.9 This deliberately supersedes part of the GPU initial-target framing

docs/gpu-initial-target-framing.md Q#GT6 (:278) lists IsADirectory among initial-target failures; its acceptance 10 (:550) requires "a directory/permission-denied target returns a specific failure before ready/window creation". 1a supersedes the directory half only. Permission-denied, invalid path bytes, session teardown, and the "existing daemon remains connectable" clause keep their contract. The superseded assertions are amended in that framing in this PR, per §25.

2.10 `display_file`'s directory failure is load-bearing today

builtin/commands/default.lua:724 wraps display_file in a pcall whose comment says "only a real failure (a directory, a permission error) reaches here", pinned by find_file_accepting_a_directory_reports_instead_of_raising (tests/find_file_acceptance.rs:235). §4.6 answers to it.

2.11 There is a scope mechanism, and it is the wrong one

acting_frontend (window_panel.rs:46-50) reads InteractiveCommandOrigin app data, falling back to core.active_frontend_key(); InteractiveCommandOrigin::enter(fid) (editor.rs:63-69) returns an RAII guard. Rev 3 proposed reusing it. Two independent reasons it cannot be:

(a) It does not scope what rev 3 claimed. Only the window-panel bindings consult acting_frontend. Two of dired's post-await steps do not go through it at all:

no-arg pmacs.window.buffer() — step 4's prev capture — reads core.active_buffer_id() directly (mod.rs:12547). Its comment is explicit that this is deliberate and infallible, and states the assumption it rests on: "dispatch sets active_frontend to the acting frontend before running a command, so the two agree on every real path."
pmacs.editor.move_to_line — step 7's cursor seating — is cc.borrow_mut().move_to_line(line) on the core's ambient active window (mod.rs:12703).

So entering the interactive origin would scope display and leave prev capture and seating ambient — precisely the two steps §2.5 identifies as corrupting.

(b) It is authenticated user-command authority, and a startup continuation must not impersonate one. InteractiveCommandOrigin is what distinguishes a user command's edit from a plugin's or the data API's. Three consumers would be misled:

the pre-edit unfold guard (mod.rs:1385-1400), whose doc calls it "the scoped authority that distinguishes a user command's edit from a plugin's or the data API's programmatic one" — dired's paint would satisfy it and unfold at the edit site;
invoke_interactive's command-boundary rotation (:5400), which raises without it and would silently succeed with it;
terminal_command_frontend / active_terminal_view_key (:8515, :8527), which treat its presence as "an interactive frontend context".

Q#JR14e therefore introduces a separate override. Note that the window.buffer() comment above is not an obstacle but a specification: swapping core.active_frontend for the scope's extent is exactly what makes its stated assumption true for a continuation, restoring the invariant rather than working around it.

3. The unification (Q#JR1)

EditorState::open becomes a thin caller of resolve_target_buffer, keeping replace_active_buffer (which switches the active window, Q#JR3 as corrected in rev 6 — it does not destroy the old scratch, and never did) and keeping its "fire the hook after the core borrow ends" structure (editor.rs:786-795) — listeners re-enter pmacs.editor.* and re-borrow the core (Q#JR1a).

Q#JR4 — startup errors gain the cannot open {path}: prefix. pmacs /root/secret names the file, which today's bare message does not. This is the only user-visible change from the unification (§2.2).

Q#JR12 (downgraded to an observation, rev 6) — a directory argument suppresses desktop restore, on Q#DS7's reasoning that a positional argument means "open this" rather than "restore my session". This needs no work and cannot be pinned: run computes had_file = file.is_some() (editor.rs:3152), and a directory path is Some like any other, so there is no directory-specific branch that could get it wrong. Rev 5 carried an acceptance for it; that test never armed restore and hard-coded had_file, asserting nothing, and is removed rather than repaired.

4. The directory arm, the resolver, and the destination

4.1 Q#JR5 — a typed result

pub enum ResolvedTarget {
    Buffer { id: BufferId, fire: HookKind },
    Directory { path: PathBuf },   // normalized: absolute, ~-expanded, lexically clean
}

Rev 1's (Option<BufferId>, HookKind) admitted states that cannot occur. resolve_target_buffer checks path.is_dir() ahead of the load.

Q#JR8 — the Directory variant carries an explicitly normalized path. It is not free: normalization lives inside set_buffer_path, and this arm creates no buffer, so nothing would normalize anything and the local caller would still hold ".". Same lesson as the Lean 4 arc's URI affinity — a handler keying state by path must never receive ".".

Q#JR5b — editor_core::HookKind and hook::HookKind are unrelated types sharing a name; both are written path-qualified in every file this PR touches, and window_panel.rs:37's bare import is changed to match.

Q#JR6 — Rust creates no buffer for a directory. A placeholder needs reaping, is reinstalled by §2.8's reassert, and — if dired adopted it — would drag in dired Stage 2's rename prerequisite (§2.3).

4.2 Where the directory arm is consumed

EditorState::open and open_initial_target dispatch the resolver chain. display_file does not (§4.6).

4.3 Q#JR7 — a user-only hook, then a replaceable fallback

Given §2.6, "a package subscribes ahead of dired" is unreachable. So the two roles are split:

The chain. path.open-directory, kind = "short-circuit", fired first. Returning false claims the directory and stops the fan-out. No builtin subscribes — the rule that makes "user code runs first" true under append-only registration, stated in the hook's own description.

The fallback. If unclaimed, the arm calls the directory handler — a function slot defaulted by dired.lua:

pmacs.path.set_directory_handler(function(path, dest)
  open_async(path, { dest = dest }, nil, "dired")
end)

Users replace it, chain it (capture the previous value first), or disable it (set_directory_handler(nil)), which is what makes acceptance 10's unclaimed path reachable. It is an unowned singleton slot, with the honest accounting and named migration in §0.5.

Q#JR15 (new) — a raising callback stops the chain and suppresses the fallback. §2.7 shows proceed alone cannot distinguish a raise from a claim. Policy: inspect HookOutcome.errors; when non-empty, report through *errors* and pmacs.editor.set_status, and do not run the fallback. Rationale: this preserves the existing short-circuit contract (a raising buffer.before-save callback already vetoes the save), and running the fallback after a user's resolver crashed would open dired on a directory the user's code may have been mid-way through handling. The cost — a broken user callback disables directory opening until fixed — is visible, reported through two surfaces, and preferable to silently ignoring the user's resolver.

Deferred, named: hook priority/prepend is the general fix for §2.6 and belongs with pmacs.hook.remove in Priority 3. When it lands, the fallback becomes an ordinary lowest-priority subscription.

4.4 Q#JR14 (rev 5) — the scoped-destination commit

The blocker rev 2 missed: §2.5 shows dired mutates handle state at steps 2–5 and only reaches a refusable call at step 6. "Fails closed, does nothing" was false — a refusal left a hidden buffer, a registered handle, and a prev captured from whichever frontend happened to be ambient. Per the review's decision, 1a carries the substrate fix.

Q#JR14d — the destination is an opaque capability, not a table. dest is nonconstructible userdata, created only by Rust, holding three private ids:

field (private)	source	purpose
frontend	local: `FrontendId::LOCAL`; bootstrap: the attaching `frontend_id`	the scope to commit in
window	local: the active window; bootstrap: `origin_window` (`daemon.rs:1637`)	where the listing goes
buffer	the buffer that window holds at capture time	stale-intent detection

A table would be wrong in two ways, both reachable: the same dest is passed to every hook listener in turn, so an earlier listener could mutate it and then decline — redirecting later listeners or the fallback — and any Lua could fabricate a plausible triple and call commit_to directly. Userdata makes both unrepresentable rather than merely discouraged.

The only accessor is read-only dest:window(), which dired needs for its exact display{window = …} target. commit_to accepts only this userdata and revalidates its private contents itself; it never trusts a caller-supplied id.

Q#JR14e — a separate scoped frontend override, not the interactive origin. §2.11 gives both reasons. Rev 4 adds a distinct app-data override with resolution order:

acting_frontend  =  scoped override  →  interactive origin  →  ambient

Its RAII guard also swaps core.active_frontend and restores it on drop, which is what covers the core-ambient APIs acting_frontend never sees (window.buffer() no-arg, move_to_line). commit_to does not enter InteractiveCommandOrigin, so a startup continuation never acquires interactive-command authority.

The primitive. pmacs.window.commit_to(dest, fn):

Preflight, before running anything — the destination's frontend has a registered view; its window is live in that view's layout; the window still holds the captured buffer (Q#JR14c); and the window is replaceable (Q#JR14f).
On any failure, returns false, reason without calling fn — so nothing is claimed, painted, or captured.
On success, enters the scoped override for the dynamic extent of fn and calls it. Inside, display{window = …}, no-arg window.buffer(), move_to_line, and every other ambient primitive resolve against the captured destination — which is why a frontend option on display alone would have been insufficient.

Q#JR14f — preflight must establish replaceability, through the same predicate every exact-target probe and display uses. Exact display refuses a window that is dedicated unless it already shows the incoming buffer (editor_core.rs:3566). The distinction is load-bearing here: dest.buffer is the captured bootstrap buffer, not dired's future buffer. Passing it as the incoming buffer would approve a window dedicated to that bootstrap buffer; dired would then claim and paint its different buffer, and exact display would refuse afterward — rev 2's hidden-buffer failure through another door.

The eligibility test is therefore extracted once, with the semantic input incoming: Option<BufferId>:

caller	input	dedicated-window result
`display_buffer` exact-target arm	`Some(request.buffer_id)`	eligible only when already showing that buffer
`probe_display_target`	its existing `Option<BufferId>`	preserves today's load-before-placement probe contract
`commit_to` preflight	`None`	always ineligible — the replacement does not exist yet

probe_display_target already carries the correct Option<BufferId> shape (editor_core.rs:3470-3483), so leaving it on a private copy while sharing only the other two would preserve the same drift this extraction exists to remove. Core unit coverage pins the three decisive rows: dedicated + Some(current) is eligible; dedicated + Some(other) is refused; dedicated + None is refused.

Q#JR14b — fn must not await. The scope is an RAII guard on the Rust stack; a yield inside it would let the guard's extent and the coroutine's suspension diverge, restoring the override while the continuation is still parked. commit_to sets a flag that Handle:await checks and raises on, naming the rule. Enforced, not documented — pinned by N6.

Atomicity, stated precisely. commit_to is atomic against destination-precondition failure: if any preflight check fails, no callback runs and nothing is mutated. It is not a transaction over the callback — if fn raises halfway through, commit_to restores the scope and propagates, but whatever fn already mutated stays mutated. Rolling that back would require dired to make its claim/paint sequence undoable, which is a dired change well beyond 1a. What 1a guarantees is that the destination checks happen before the first mutation, which is the failure the review identified.

dired's change. open_directory keeps read_listing (the await) outside, then performs steps 2–8 inside a single commit_to callback, displaying with { window = dest:window() } rather than the ambient switch_buffer. On a false return it reports through pmacs.editor.set_status and returns, having mutated nothing.

Q#JR14c — stale intent loses to the user. If the destination window now holds a different buffer than at capture, the request is stale and fails closed. Rev 2's window-only pin said launch intent overwrites whatever the user did meanwhile; that was wrong, and it rested on B2's "before the user can act", which §2.4 disproves — a large directory takes many frames and the user can act in every one of them. The user's action is newer information than the launch argument.

What this buys, stated as the review framed it: competing frontend activity no longer turns a valid startup request into a nondeterministic no-op. A live, unchanged destination receives its listing regardless of what other frontends did meanwhile. Fail-closed is reserved for a destination that is genuinely dead or stale.

Deferred, named: migrating dired's other post-await paths (C-x d, tree descent/ascent, refresh) and every other ambient post-await pmacs.window.* call in the tree onto commit_to. 1a introduces the primitive for the startup path and does not sweep; the sweep is its own PR with its own acceptance, and this framing does not pretend the general problem is solved.

4.5 Q#JR9 — what the bootstrap reply names, and what it shows

open_initial_target on a Directory installs nothing: it dispatches the resolver, then replies Opened { buffer_id } naming whatever the destination window holds once that dispatch returns — re-read, not the id captured beforehand (Q#JR9b, rev 6).

The distinction is not academic. The chain runs synchronously. dired's handler defers, because its listing must await; a user's resolver is under no such obligation, and one that opens something synchronously through commit_to — the supported way to do it — has already replaced the window's buffer by the time the reply is built. Reporting the captured id would pair one buffer's snapshot with another's identity, and the frontend would render a document nobody asked for.

Re-reading also subsumes the case where a hook closed the window, so this arm rehomes through non_side_target exactly as the file arm's reassert does, rather than returning early and skipping that check — which rev 5's implementation did while this section claimed the revalidation stayed active.

Absent a synchronous claimant the re-read yields the buffer the window already held, which is the ordinary case.

That buffer is not necessarily *scratch*. build_fresh_frontend_view clones LOCAL's primary document buffer (daemon.rs:2997) — M10.9 made attaching frontends share LOCAL's buffer so overlays fire; the bottom-panel arc narrowed it to the primary document buffer so a TUI panel could not become a new frontend's document. If LOCAL holds a real document, pmacs --gpu . briefly displays and snapshots that unrelated document.

Decision: accept and document. A bootstrap placeholder re-creates everything Q#JR6 rejected to fix a transient, and the session genuinely is showing LOCAL's document — the same thing a no-argument --gpu attach shows. Acceptance N5 pins it with a deliberately non-scratch LOCAL primary so it is observed rather than assumed.

4.6 Q#JR13 — `display_file` keeps its directory error

display_file does not dispatch the resolver. On ResolvedTarget::Directory it raises:

the message names the path and the directory reason (an improvement on the raw EISDIR text, and the only user-visible change here);
the active buffer, window layout, and selected window are unchanged — nothing created, nothing switched;
find_file_accepting_a_directory_reports_instead_of_raising passes unmodified.

display_file is "put this file in a window", not a CLI router. Routing it into dired would silently change C-x C-f on a directory, in a PR about the CLI, through a pcall arm whose comment guarantees the opposite.

Deferred, named: Emacs's find-file does open dired on a directory, and that is reasonable eventual behavior. It is a find-file UX decision with its own acceptance, belonging to the dired arc or 1b. When taken it is a small change at default.lua:724, and the pinned test above is what gets deliberately rewritten.

5. The journey acceptance suite (§19)

New: tests/journey_acceptance.rs, seeded with steps 2 (launch unconfigured), 3 (open a real project), and 5 (edit immediately), driving the real startup entry point — a directory arm with no production caller passes every direct-call test. Steps 6–12 enter as later stages make them real; the file is a ratchet.

Every dired-dependent assertion pumps to quiescence using dired_acceptance.rs:103's idiom (parked coroutines and pending jobs at zero), never a fixed frame count (§2.4).

6. Acceptance

6.0 Two kinds of pin, and why the distinction matters

Rev 2 asserted that every acceptance "fails with the change reverted". The review is right that this cannot hold for preservation guards — and rev 2's acceptance 6 was the proof: because both implementations already agree on every observable (§2.2), an equivalence assertion passes on the pre-image. Behavioral equivalence cannot demonstrate structural reuse. The list is therefore split, and each preservation pin names the targeted mutation it is bite-tested against:

(N) New-behavior acceptances — must fail on full revert.
(P) Preservation pins — legitimately green on the pre-image; falsified by a named targeted mutation, not by revert.

That local startup reaches the new directory behavior is proven by N1, not by any equivalence assertion — which is also why rev 2's acceptance 6 is removed rather than recast: it proved nothing N1 does not.

6.1 New-behavior acceptances (N)

N1 pmacs . in a project directory exits 0 and, after pumping to quiescence, the active buffer is dired's, listing that directory. Today: exit 1.
N2 Daemon/GPU bootstrap with a directory initial target receives InitialTargetResult::Opened, not Failed, and after quiescence the document window shows the dired buffer. Supersedes the GPU framing's acceptance 10 for directories (§2.9).
N3 pmacs . on an unreadable directory reports through dired's status path and leaves the session running — no exit 1, no half-built buffer.
N4 — delivery despite competing frontends (the blocker's positive half). Two registered frontends; a directory bootstrap for frontend A; frontend B dispatches unrelated activity (buffer switch, window focus) while the listing is in flight. After quiescence the listing is in A's captured window, and B's active buffer and window are unchanged. Falsified by reverting commit_to to the ambient switch_buffer.
N5 Bootstrap with a deliberately non-scratch LOCAL primary document buffer: the reply's buffer_id is that buffer, and after quiescence the window shows dired (Q#JR9, §4.5).
N6 — commit_to scopes and restores, on every exit path. Three cases, each asserting that both the scoped override and core.active_frontend return to their prior values: (a) fn returns normally; (b) fn raises; (c) fn awaits and is refused (Q#JR14b). Case (c) additionally asserts the raise names the rule. Rev 3 checked only the interactive origin's restoration on the success path, which §2.11 shows is neither the right value nor enough paths. Falsified by dropping the flag, or by restoring on success only.
N6b — commit_to refuses a forged destination. A Lua-constructed table with plausible frontend/window/buffer fields is rejected as a type error, and userdata cannot be constructed from Lua (Q#JR14d). Falsified by accepting a table.
N6c — a declining listener cannot redirect the destination. Two listeners: the first receives dest, attempts mutation inside pcall, observes the read-only rejection, and declines; the second verifies dest:window() still names the original window and also declines; then the fallback commits there (Q#JR14d). Falsified by passing a shared, mutable table.
N7 — the resolver chain. path.open-directory is short-circuit and first-claimant-wins, exercised through an ordinary user-registered listener (no builtin subscribes, §4.3): two listeners, the first returns false, the second must not run, and the fallback must not run. Falsified by all-must-succeed or accumulate.
N8 — a raising callback suppresses the fallback and is reported (Q#JR15). A listener that raises: the fallback does not run, the directory does not open, and the failure reaches both *errors* and the status line. Falsifier, corrected in rev 4: keying the fallback on proceed alone is already correct for suppression — §2.7 shows a raise gives proceed == false just as a claim does. errors decides the report, not the fallback. So N8 is falsified by either (a) running the fallback when errors is non-empty — i.e. treating a raise as a decline — or (b) mutating the short-circuit outcome so a raise yields proceed = true. Rev 3 named the inverse mutation, which does not falsify anything.
N9 The hook and the handler receive a canonical absolute path — firing on . from a known cwd delivers that cwd, not "." (Q#JR8).
N10 With the handler slot cleared and no listener claiming, pmacs . exits 0, leaves the bootstrap buffer in place, and sets a status naming the path (Q#JR10).
N11 pmacs . → dired lists → RET on a listed file visits it → a self-insert lands in that file's buffer. (Rev 1 self-inserted into the dired buffer, whose intercept rejects every edit, dired.lua:506.)

6.2 Preservation pins (P), each with its falsifying mutation

P1 — precondition failure is atomic (the blocker's negative half). Three destination failures, each asserted the same way — after quiescence the buffer count is unchanged, no dired buffer or handle exists for that path, no window's buffer changed, and a status names the failure:
1. dead — the destination window was closed;
2. stale — its buffer was replaced (Q#JR14c);
3. ineligible — it is dedicated to its still-current captured buffer, but dired's incoming replacement does not exist yet (Q#JR14f, completed rev 5). This is the case a preflight that mistakenly passes dest.buffer as the incoming buffer approves and display then refuses after dired has claimed and painted. Mutation: move the preflight from before claim_handle to after paint — rev 2's design. P1 fails on all three; rev 2's acceptance 3b passes. Second mutation, for case 3 specifically: pass Some(dest.buffer) instead of None to the shared eligibility predicate while keeping liveness and stale-buffer validation. Only case 3 fails — which is the point of separating it.
P2 — stale intent loses (Q#JR14c). The user replaces the destination window's buffer while the listing is in flight; their buffer survives and dired does not overwrite it. Mutation: drop dest.buffer from revalidation (rev 2's window-only pin). P2 fails.
P3 — dired's existing handles are not corrupted. With a dired buffer already open in another frontend, a failed startup open leaves that handle's prev, entries, and cursor untouched. Mutation: restore the ambient handle.prev = pmacs.window.buffer() outside the scope (§2.5 step 4).
P4 — the startup scratch is still dropped (Q#JR3). EditorState::open leaves exactly one buffer. Mutation: replace replace_active_buffer with a bare install_buffer_in_window.
P5 — the NotFound arm survives the refactor. A nonexistent path yields an empty path-backed buffer with [new file] and fires no hook. Mutation: delete the NotFound arm from resolve_target_buffer.
P6 — display_file keeps its contract (Q#JR13). It raises on a directory naming path and reason; active buffer, layout, and selected window unchanged; find_file_accepting_a_directory_reports_instead_of_raising passes unmodified. Mutation: route display_file into the resolver chain.
P7 — REMOVED in rev 6. Q#JR12 is structural: run computes had_file = file.is_some() and a directory path is Some like any other, so there is no directory-specific branch to break and the named mutation would have to invent one first. Rev 5's test never armed restore and hard-coded had_file, so it could not fail against any implementation. Removed rather than repaired — a green test that cannot fail reads as coverage.
P8 — startup errors name the file (Q#JR4). A non-NotFound, non-directory failure produces a message containing cannot open and the path. (Legitimately N-shaped for the prefix, P-shaped for the failure itself; listed here because the failure behavior is preserved and only the message changes.)

scripts/bite runs over the new suite. A VACUOUS report on any N is a blocker; each P's named mutation is run as its bite check, since revert cannot falsify it.

7. Deferred (named)

Migrating the rest of the tree onto commit_to (§4.4) — dired's other post-await paths and every other ambient post-await pmacs.window.* call. Its own PR, its own acceptance.
Hook priority / prepend, with pmacs.hook.remove, in §20 Priority 3 — at which point the fallback slot becomes an ordinary lowest-priority subscription and §0.5's unowned-singleton gap closes.
True adoption (option B). Rust creates the buffer, dired adopts — one buffer, no transient — but it needs dired Stage 2's rename / clear-path capability (§2.3). Dired Stage 3; Q#JR6 does not block it.
The bootstrap transient (§4.5, §8 B2).
C-x C-f on a directory opening dired (§4.6).
Multiple path arguments (main.rs:227, :232, :240).
pmacs . opening a panel rather than the document window.
Stage 1b and the rest of §20 Priority 1.

8. Bets

B1 — "one thing opens a directory" holds. If a picker and dired should both run, short-circuit is wrong and the hook must become a resolver returning a target.
B2 (corrected twice) — the bootstrap transient is acceptable. The window shows its pre-existing buffer until the listing settles — not "one frame" (rev 1), and not "before the user can act" (rev 2): §2.4 disproves the bound and Q#JR14c is the consequence — the user can act, so stale intent must lose. The bet is only that the transient is visually acceptable at process start.
B3 — withdrawn (rev 2). There was no path-normalization change.
B4 — failing closed on a genuinely dead or stale destination is better than guessing. Narrowed in rev 3: it applies only after revalidation says the destination is gone, not to any competing activity (N4).
B5 — commit_to's no-await rule is livable. Every commit step dired performs after the listing is synchronous today, so the rule costs nothing here. If a future handler genuinely needs to await mid-commit, the primitive needs a re-entrant design and this bet is what will have failed.
B6 (rev 5) — extracting the eligibility predicate is behavior-preserving. Q#JR14f shares one predicate between commit_to's preflight, probe_display_target, and display_buffer's exact-target arm rather than writing a third copy. The bet is that the two existing callers' behavior survives the extraction unchanged — core unit tests pin the Option<BufferId> matrix, and bottom_panel_stage1_acceptance catches placement-level drift, which is why it is in the gate list. The alternative has no extraction risk and a certain cost: a future eligibility rule added to one copy reopens Q#JR14f's exact hole. Taking the risk tests can catch over drift they cannot.

9. Gates

cargo fmt --check
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets -- -D warnings    # own step
cargo test --lib
cargo test --lib --features crdt
cargo test --test journey_acceptance
cargo test --test dired_acceptance
cargo test --test find_file_acceptance                   # P6, unmodified
cargo test --test gpu_initial_target_acceptance          # §2.9 supersession
cargo test --test theme_faces_acceptance                 # EditorState::open caller
cargo test --test m4_acceptance -- --skip basedpyright   # 4 open() callers
cargo test --test bottom_panel_stage1_acceptance         # commit_to touches display
PMACS_REQUIRE_GPU=1 cargo test -p pmacs-gpu
cargo test --workspace -- --skip basedpyright
git diff --check

m4_acceptance and theme_faces_acceptance call EditorState::open directly (§2.2) — the unification's blast radius. find_file_acceptance and gpu_initial_target_acceptance encode contracts this PR preserves (§4.6) and supersedes (§2.9). bottom_panel_stage1_acceptance is included because commit_to scopes the frontend that display's placement policy resolves against and Q#JR14f extracts the exact-target eligibility rule that suite already pins.

10. Sequencing

1a implements after PR #177 merges. #177 touches src/daemon.rs and src/editor.rs; §2.8's reassert logic sits next to its census work. #179 also touches src/editor.rs.

No dired code is in flight — #169 and #171 are docs-only and no open PR touches builtin/runtime/dired.lua (verified 2026-07-26). 1a's dired change (a handler registration, plus wrapping open_directory's post-await commit in commit_to) does not collide with dired Stage 2, which is unapproved for implementation. The commit_to wrap is a larger dired change than rev 2's, touching the body Stage 2's rename work also touches.

Rev 5 — decided: 1a stays ahead of dired Stage 2. Stage 2 is not in implementation, and the scoped commit boundary gives it a better shape to build on than it would have had — a rename transaction across five path owners is exactly the kind of multi-step commit that wants a validated, scoped destination rather than ambient state. Obligation this creates: when 1a lands, dired Stage 2 re-scouts and revises its framing around commit_to before implementation; that revision is a prerequisite of Stage 2's branch, recorded here and in docs/active-work.md so it is not discovered late.

11. Numbered decisions

Q#JR1 EditorState::open adopts resolve_target_buffer wholesale.
Q#JR1a The hook fires outside the core borrow.
Q#JR2 Withdrawn (rev 2) — its premise was false.
Q#JR3 (corrected rev 6) Startup keeps using replace_active_buffer, which switches the active window — not because it drops the old scratch (it does not, and never did) but because an install_buffer_in_window elsewhere would load the file while leaving the user looking at scratch. Removing the stale scratch buffer is separate work.
Q#JR4 Startup errors gain the cannot open {path}: prefix.
Q#JR5 resolve_target_buffer returns a typed ResolvedTarget.
Q#JR5b Both HookKind types are written path-qualified.
Q#JR6 Rust creates no buffer for a directory.
Q#JR7 path.open-directory is a short-circuit user-only chain; builtins do not subscribe; dired is a replaceable fallback slot.
Q#JR8 ResolvedTarget::Directory carries an explicitly normalized path.
Q#JR9 The bootstrap reply names the destination window's buffer — absent a synchronous claimant, LOCAL's primary document buffer, not necessarily scratch. Accepted and documented.
Q#JR9b (rev 6) That id is re-read after the dispatch, and the arm rehomes through non_side_target rather than returning early: a synchronous resolver may already have replaced the buffer.
Q#JR10 An unclaimed directory with the handler cleared exits 0 with a status message.
Q#JR12 (observation, rev 6) A directory argument suppresses desktop restore structurally, via had_file = file.is_some(). No work, no pin.
Q#JR13 display_file keeps its directory-is-an-error contract.
Q#JR14 The destination {frontend, window, buffer} is captured at resolve time; commit_to preflights and scopes the entire post-await commit.
Q#JR14b A commit_to callback must not await; enforced, not documented.
Q#JR14c Stale intent loses to the user: a replaced destination buffer fails closed.
Q#JR14d dest is nonconstructible userdata with a read-only window() accessor — not a table a listener can mutate or Lua can forge.
Q#JR14e A separate scoped frontend override, resolved ahead of the interactive origin and also swapping core.active_frontend. commit_to never enters InteractiveCommandOrigin.
Q#JR14f Preflight establishes replaceability via the same Option<BufferId> eligibility predicate used by probe_display_target and display_buffer; commit_to passes None because its replacement does not exist yet.
Q#JR15 A raising resolver callback stops the chain and suppresses the fallback, reported through *errors* and the status line.

12. Branch and PR plan

One feature, one branch, one PR: journey-stage1a-directory-open.

Commit this framing.
Unification (§3) + P4, P5, P7, P8.
ResolvedTarget + the directory arm + the resolver chain, fallback slot, and error policy (§4.1–4.3) + N7, N8, N9, N10; display_file's preserved contract (§4.6) + P6.
The scoped frontend override + the shared eligibility predicate (Q#JR14e, Q#JR14f), then commit_to and the opaque destination (§4.4) + N4, N6, N6b, N6c, P1, P2, P3. The override and the predicate extraction land first as separable core changes: both are testable without dired, and the predicate's Some(current) / Some(other) / None unit matrix plus bottom_panel_stage1_acceptance must prove the extraction behavior-preserving before anything depends on it.
tests/journey_acceptance.rs (§5) + N1, N2, N3, N5, N11.
COHERENCE.md §2 verdict table and §20 Priority 1 rewritten per §25; docs/gpu-initial-target-framing.md Q#GT6 + acceptance 10 amended for the superseded directory case (§2.9); docs/agent-handoff.md §1 and docs/active-work.md updated.

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