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GUI zoom — QoL Stage 2

Status: revision 4 — proposed, awaiting approval. Q#Z1 approved as (c) (configured base, None preserved) and Q#Z2 as additive. Revision 4 fixes a self-contradiction in §5a1: the specified parser ^(%d+)$ rejects the newline-terminated format specified beside it. Whole-file ^(%d+)\n$, with a verified case table and a valid-restore witness. Revision 3 added the contract details a second pass asked for: §1 and §7 no longer claim a keybinding this stage does not ship, §3.1 bounds and quantizes both settings, and §5a1 defines the persisted format and what corrupted state does. Revision 2 answered four review findings that revision 1 got wrong or left out: Z3 was not implementable as written (§4), Z4 had no working restore seam (§5), every size write silently clears a configured family (§5a), and reset/precedence semantics were unspecified (§5b). Reported from daily-driver use alongside Stage 1: Ctrl +/- has no effect whatsoever in the GPU frontend. Stage 1 (#219) fixed what zoom did to the TUI; this stage is the other half — making the GUI zoom at all.

Most of this already exists, which is why it is a short stage. It is not, however, a trivial one: relative zoom needs a starting point, and the daemon is deliberately built never to know one (§3).

1. What is already built

The whole mechanism ships today and is exercised by tests:

piece	where	state
Scale that drives everything	`FontMetrics { scale, advance_ratio }`, `pmacs-gpu/src/main.rs:129`+	code size, line height, status band, divider, menu rows, minibuffer dropdown, gutter advance all derive from it
Daemon-side preference	`src/font_pref.rs` — family + `size_centi_px` + monotonic `epoch`	written by `pmacs.gpu.set_font`, read per-frame by the producer
Wire relay	`InstanceMessage::FontFacts`, protocol v17	bufferless; v16 peers get none
Frontend application	`apply_font_facts`, `pmacs-gpu/src/main.rs:8132`	one transaction: validate, resolve family, re-metric all seven buffers, reshape at retained scroll, re-follow caret
Getter	`pmacs.gpu.font()`	fresh table, `size` in logical px, key absent when unset
Validation	`600..=7200` centi-px (6.0–72.0 px), checked at both ends	Lua range-check is UX; the frontend re-checks because it is wire input

There is even a byte-identity test that (None, None) reproduces the never-set frame exactly.

So this stage adds no rendering work. It adds commands, a starting point, and remembering — and deliberately no default keybindings, per Q#Z3 (§4): the keymap cannot express "GPU frontends only", and neither a protocol variant nor a rushed keymap change is worth a default chord.

2. Q#Z1 — where does a relative zoom start? (the real question)

src/font_pref.rs is explicit:

"The daemon relays a PREFERENCE: it never learns metrics, advances, or what resolves (the no-pixels invariant); the frontend owns resolution and every pixel consequence."

And size_centi_px: None is a real state, not an absence — "the frontend's built-in default", which Q#TH7 established must never be inferred from silence.

Zoom-in is current + step. On a fresh session current is None, and the daemon cannot ask what the frontend resolved. Three ways out:

(a) Hard-code the frontend's default (16.0) as the origin. One line, and it puts a pixel constant on the daemon side — the exact thing the no-pixels invariant forbids. It also silently breaks for any frontend whose default differs, which is the situation the invariant exists to allow.
(b) Always send an explicit size, sourced from a config setting defaulting to 16.0. Simple, but it destroys the None state for everyone: a user who never zooms now gets an explicit size, the frontend's own default query never runs, and Q#F5's always-shipped all-default baseline stops being reachable.
(c) A configured base, with None preserved until the user actually zooms. ui.gpu-font-size-base (logical px, default 16.0) is the documented origin for the first zoom step. Until a zoom happens the preference stays None and the frontend's default is used exactly as today.

Recommendation: (c). It is the only one where the daemon still infers nothing — the base is a user-facing preference about zooming, not the daemon guessing a frontend metric. A user whose frontend default is not 16.0 changes one setting, which is a real answer rather than a broken assumption. And the untouched path is byte-identical to today, so the existing (None, None) identity test keeps its meaning.

Q#Z1 — DECIDED: (c), on review.

3. Q#Z2 — step shape

Additive (+1.0 px) or multiplicative (×1.1)?

DECIDED: additive, on review — via ui.gpu-zoom-step (logical px, default 1.0).

3.1 Both settings are validated, and the bounds are not cosmetic

The registry validates at define time (min/max, as autosave.interval-ms does), so both settings are constrained rather than checked at use:

setting	bounds	why
`ui.gpu-font-size-base`	6.00 – 72.00 logical px	exactly the wire range (`600..=7200` centi-px). A base outside it could never be sent, so the first zoom step would fail from a value the user was allowed to set
`ui.gpu-zoom-step`	0.01 – 66.00 logical px, strictly positive	see below

The step's lower bound is the quantizer. validate_font_size range-checks the original value and then rounds to the nearest hundredth, so a step below 0.01 quantizes to zero — "zoom in" would do nothing, forever, with no error anywhere. 0.01 is one centi-pixel, the smallest representable step.

Zero and negative are excluded for a stronger reason than tidiness. A negative step inverts the commands: gpu.zoom-in would shrink. That is not a malfunction the user can diagnose from the outside — the command does something coherent, just the opposite of its name.

The upper bound is the range span (72.00 − 6.00). A step larger than the whole domain can only ever clamp or be rejected, so permitting it buys a setting that cannot be used.

These bounds are what make the round-trip claim true. "n steps in, then n steps out, returns to exactly the starting value" holds because the step is centi-pixel representable and addition is exact in that domain — provided no clamp occurred, which is why §6 requires an out-of-range zoom to leave the preference unmutated rather than pinning it to the boundary. Pinning would silently break the round trip at the edges, which is precisely where a user is most likely to be stepping back and forth. The domain is integer hundredths of a pixel over 6.0..=72.0 — a small, bounded, quantized range where additive steps are predictable and land on round numbers. Multiplicative stepping accumulates rounding through the quantizer and makes "two in, two out" fail to return to where you started, which is the property users actually notice.

4. Q#Z3 — keys. Revision 1 was not implementable

Revision 1 said "do not install the binding on a non-GPU frontend." There is no such thing. keymap_stack::Scope is exactly Buffer(BufferId) | Mode(String) | Global, and neither resolve() nor keymap_tree receives any frontend identity or capability. A global binding is global — it would capture C-+ / C-- in the TUI, which is the outcome §4 claimed to avoid.

So there are three real options, and none is free:

(A) Capability-aware keymap resolution. Teach Scope — or resolve()'s inputs — about the requesting frontend. Correct and general, and it would serve every later frontend-specific binding. But it touches the keymap core, every resolve call site, and the Lua bind surface. That is its own lane, not a step inside a zoom lane.
(B) A new FrontendEvent for it. Narrow and direct, but it is a protocol addition — schema bump and negotiation — which §8 explicitly scopes out, and which buys a keybinding rather than a capability.
(C) Ship commands now; bind later. gpu.zoom-in / -out / -reset exist and work from M-x and from init.lua, where a user who runs the GPU can bind them themselves in one line. No core change, no protocol change, no half-built capability.

Recommendation: (C), with (A) recorded as the follow-on it implies. The value the report asked for is zoom working at all; the default keybinding is the smaller half, and buying it with either a protocol variant or a rushed keymap change trades a large permanent surface for a small convenience. (A) is the right eventual answer — "this binding applies to frontends with capability X" is a question this project will keep asking — and it deserves its own framing rather than being smuggled in here.

What must NOT happen is a global binding plus a command that reports "not applicable" in the TUI. That is the Q#P3 fall-through lesson and #217's flat-panel TAB finding: capturing a key to deliver an apology removes a working behaviour — and here the working behaviour is the terminal's own zoom, which is exactly what the user is pressing the key for.

Tempting and rejected: "terminals swallow C-+ anyway, so a global binding is harmless in practice." Most do. Relying on most is how a binding becomes a bug report from whoever runs the terminal that doesn't.

5. Q#Z4 — remembering it, and the seam revision 1 did not have

The config registry has no write-back — settings are declared, not saved. The project's remembered-state mechanism is pmacs.state.read / write / available (docs/persistence-framing.md), used by saveplace and recentf. The split is the right one:

pmacs.config — what you declared: base size, step.
pmacs.state — what you arrived at: the current zoom level.

5.1 Reading at module load is inert, and revision 1 assumed it was not

EditorState::new() / open() load the builtins and run init.lua. install_state_dirs() runs after that — src/editor.rs:3838 on the local path, src/daemon.rs:480 on the daemon path. A pmacs.state.read at Lua module load therefore returns nothing, always.

saveplace and recentf never hit this because both read lazily, inside functions called long after startup (recentf.lua:27 in load_list, saveplace.lua:33 behind its available() guard). Zoom cannot be lazy: its whole purpose is to apply with no user action, before the first frame the GPU paints. It is this project's first eager state consumer, which is why the seam has to be named rather than assumed.

5.2 The seam

Restore must run after install_state_dirs() on both startup paths. Neither existing post-install hook qualifies: restore_desktop_if_armed is local-only by design (Q#DS9 keeps desktop restore out of the daemon, which has a layout per attached frontend and none at construction).

Recommendation: restore inside install_state_dirs() itself, at its end. Both paths already call it, exactly once, and it is by definition the moment state becomes readable — so the restore cannot be ordered wrongly and cannot be forgotten by a future third startup path. The alternative, a new call added beside both existing call sites, is two places a fourth path can miss.

This must be tested against production ordering, not a direct call. A test that calls the restore helper itself proves nothing about when it runs — the same shape as the prepare_startup note at src/editor.rs:3820, where splitting the sequence was what kept a deleted call from leaving every direct-call test green while shipping nothing. The witness asserts that a state file written before startup is reflected in pmacs.gpu.font() after the real startup sequence.

5a. Every size write must preserve the family

pmacs.gpu.set_font replaces both fields unconditionally (src/lua_bindings/mod.rs: pref.family = family; pref.size_centi_px = size_centi_px;). So set_font { size = 18 } silently clears a configured family — a user with family = "Iosevka" in init.lua loses it the first time they zoom, and gets it back only by restarting.

Zoom must therefore read the current family via pmacs.gpu.font() and pass it back with every write. Pinned by a custom-family → zoom → FontFacts case asserting the relayed message still carries the family. This is a property of the setter's whole-message semantics, not a zoom bug, and the test belongs with zoom because zoom is what makes it reachable.

5a1. The persisted format, and what corrupted state does

Format, following saveplace and recentf rather than inventing one: a single line of plain text holding the size in centi-pixels as decimal digits, newline-terminated.

Centi-pixels, not logical px, because that is the wire unit and the already-quantized one — writing 18.0 would reintroduce a float-parsing step and a second place for rounding to disagree with validate_font_size.

No version prefix. The existing state files carry none, and a single integer has no forward-compatibility question that a prefix would answer; a future format change can be detected by the strict parse below failing, which lands in exactly the same handling as corruption.

Only the size is persisted. Not the family — that is declared config, and §5b's precedence rule applies to size alone.

Validity is two checks, both required:

Strict whole-file parse: ^(%d+)\n$ against the entire file contents, not against a line pulled out of it.

Revision 2 specified ^(%d+)$, which contradicts the newline-terminated format two paragraphs above it: in Lua, $ anchors to end-of-subject, so ("1800\n"):match("^(%d+)$") is nil and the parser would reject every file it had itself written.

Borrowing saveplace's gmatch("([^\n]+)") line iterator fixes that but introduces a different hole — it happily returns the first line of a multi-line file, so trailing garbage would be accepted silently. That is tolerable for recentf, where each line is an independent entry and skipping a bad one loses one path. It is not tolerable here, where the file is one value and extra content means the file is not what we wrote.

Whole-file matching closes both, verified against Lua 5.4:

contents	`^(%d+)$`	`^(%d+)\n$`
`"1800\n"` — what we write	nil ✗	`1800` ✓
`"1800"` — no trailing newline	`1800`	nil ✓
`"1800\n1900\n"` — multi-line	nil	nil ✓
`"18.0\n"` — decimal	nil	nil ✓
`" 1800\n"` — leading space	nil	nil ✓
`"\n"` — empty	nil	nil ✓

The multi-line case needs no separate line-count check: the trailing $ after \n already requires the file to end there.

Range: the parsed value is within 600..=7200. A syntactically fine but out-of-range number — a hand-edited file, or a file written by a future version with a wider range — must never reach set_font, which would reject the whole message and leave the user with neither the saved zoom nor an explanation.

Malformed, out-of-range, empty, or multi-line state is treated as absent. Startup proceeds exactly as if nothing had been saved: the init.lua size applies if there is one, otherwise None.

Silently, and deliberately so. It matches the precedent — both existing consumers skip unparseable lines without comment — and the failure is already self-evident and self-healing: the user sees their zoom did not restore, and the next zoom rewrites the file correctly. A startup diagnostic for a recoverable, self-announcing condition is noise on every launch for a problem that fixes itself on the next keystroke.

The corrupt file is not rewritten on read. It is left alone until the next successful zoom overwrites it, so a user who wants to look at what went wrong still can. Truncating it at startup would destroy the only evidence of a bug we would then have no way to reproduce.

5b. Reset, clearing, and precedence

Revision 1 left all three unspecified. As recommended in review:

Reset returns size to None, not to ui.gpu-font-size-base. None is the real "frontend's own default" state (Q#F5/Q#TH7); the base is only the origin for the first step. Resetting to the base would send an explicit size that merely happens to equal the default, making the untouched state unreachable once a user has ever zoomed — and quietly breaking the (None, None) identity property.
Reset clears the saved zoom state, so it does not resurrect on the next launch. A reset that leaves the state file behind means "reset until restart", which is not what the word says.
Valid saved state wins over an init.lua size. The saved value is a later, deliberate user action; the init value is the standing default it was chosen against. This is the same precedence saveplace already applies — a remembered position overrides where opening the file would otherwise land.
The family is retained throughout, per §5a: precedence applies to size only, and an init.lua family is never overridden by restored zoom state, because zoom state does not carry one.

6. Verification

No binding is installed at all (Q#Z3 = C), so the witness is that C-+ / C-- resolve to nothing in a default TUI session — the terminal's own zoom is left alone.
Restore runs at the production seam. Asserted through the real startup sequence, not by calling the helper directly: a state file written beforehand must be visible in pmacs.gpu.font() afterwards, on both the local and daemon paths.
A zoom preserves a configured family — custom family → zoom → the relayed FontFacts still carries it (§5a).
Reset returns None, not the base, and clears the saved state; a subsequent launch is back to the frontend's own default.
Saved state beats an init.lua size, and never its family.
Config bounds are enforced at define — a zero, negative, or sub-centi-pixel step is refused by the registry, not discovered as a zoom that does nothing or runs backwards (§3.1).
A valid newline-terminated file restores. "1800\n" — exactly the bytes the writer produces — must round-trip through the real startup sequence. This is the case revision 2's own parser would have rejected, so it is asserted rather than assumed.
Malformed, out-of-range, empty, multi-line, and missing-trailing-newline saved state each behave as absent, and the file is left intact for inspection (§5a1). The multi-line case is pinned specifically: it is the one a line-iterator parser would have accepted.
The round trip holds only where no clamp occurred, so the out-of-range case asserts the preference is left unmutated rather than pinned to the boundary.
Zoom from the untouched state uses the configured base, not a hardcoded 16.0 — bitten by changing the base and asserting the first step follows it.
Clamping at both ends of 6.0..=72.0 reports rather than silently pinning, and a zoom that would leave the range does not mutate the preference at all (the apply_font_facts whole-message rejection precedent).
n steps in then n steps out returns to the exact starting value — the property that fails under multiplicative stepping and the reason Q#Z2 recommends additive.
The untouched path stays byte-identical: with no zoom performed, the existing (None, None) identity test must still hold.
Persistence round-trips, and writes nothing when pmacs.state.available is false.

7. Coherence impact (§20 requirement)

Concern served: COHERENCE.md §16, Productize the Semantic Frontend Architecture, which names frontend-specific typography in its own list of properties the semantic protocol should make visible as a product advantage. A GPU frontend that cannot change its own type size is that concern under-delivered.

No scorecard change. Row 16 reads Strong (COHERENCE.md:112); this neither earns nor forfeits it — it uses the mechanism the row already credits. Per §25 the row moves only with a PR that changes what it asserts.

Journey steps touched: none.
Interaction islands added: none, and no keybinding either. Revision 1 said "an ordinary global keymap binding, scoped by frontend capability"; no such scoping exists (§4), so this stage ships commands only, reachable from M-x and bindable by the user in init.lua. Capability-aware binding is deferred to its own framing and named in §8.
Config registry: yes, two settings — ui.gpu-font-size-base and ui.gpu-zoom-step. This is the "place for GUI settings" the report asked for; it already exists and this stage is its next adopter.
Background-work attribution: none.

8. Not in scope

Long lines (Stage 3). Capability-aware keymap resolution — Q#Z3's option (A), which this stage defers rather than half-builds, and which should be its own framing because it decides how every future frontend-specific binding is expressed. A default keybinding for zoom, which waits on it. Per-buffer or per-window zoom — this is one global preference, as font_pref already is. Family selection, which set_font already exposes and no one has asked to bind. Any change to FontFacts, the protocol, or apply_font_facts — this stage drives the existing mechanism and adds nothing to the wire. Config write-back, which does not exist and which Q#Z4 deliberately routes around rather than inventing.

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