mirador: Instructions file for Claude Code

CLAUDE.md — working notes for mirador

Context for anyone (human or agent) picking this repo up cold. Design rationale that belongs to users lives in README.md and CONTRIBUTING.md; this file is the stuff you would otherwise have to reverse-engineer from the diff.

There was a HANDOFF.md alongside this carrying the perishable half — where work stopped, what was waiting on a decision. Its open items are all either done or folded in below, so it has been deleted as it asked to be. Write another the same way if you hand off mid-flight, and delete it the same way.

What this is

A personal information dashboard for the terminal, in Rust + ratatui. Clock, weather, tasks, and live system metrics in a config-driven grid. MIT licensed. Repo: github.com/jchultarsky/mirador. Owner: Julian Chultarsky.

A mirador is a lookout — the tower you climb to see everything at once.

Known name collision, accepted knowingly: Project Mirador, the IIIF image viewer. Raised before the name was chosen; not a reason to revisit it.

The one-line pitch that shapes every decision

A tab you leave open all day and come back to. That constrains more than it sounds like it does: no ambient blinking, no shimmering graphs, no doomscroll hooks, calm by default so that not calm is legible at a glance.

Commands

cargo test                                    # all fast, no network, no fixtures
cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings     # must be silent
cargo fmt --all -- --check                    # must be silent
RUSTDOCFLAGS="-D warnings" \
  cargo doc --no-deps --document-private-items  # CI runs this; it caught a
                                                # broken intra-doc link that
                                                # the other three did not
cargo run -- --print-config > /tmp/m.toml     # scratch config to experiment on
cargo run -- --config /tmp/m.toml

The bar is zero warnings and zero errors across all four. Running only the first three is how a red build reached main: rustdoc rejects a link to a cfg(test) item, and nothing else notices.