TUI attachments live in the composer, not above the status bar

[OutThisLife]

Summary

Attachments in the TUI behaved nothing like pastes. Attaching an image printed a 📎 Attached image: shot.png · 1920x1080 · ~1.2k tok line somewhere above the status bar and left the composer untouched, so the only evidence of the attachment lived outside the input you were editing — and sometimes text appeared in the composer anyway, from a remainder field that got spliced in on its own with no visible cause.

A collapsed paste and an attached image are the same idea: a [[ … ]] marker sitting in the input line that stands in for a payload resolved at submit. This models both as one ComposerToken with one expander, so attachments get paste's ergonomics for free.

Before / after

	before	after
where it shows	notice line above the status bar	[[ Image 1 ]] inline at the cursor
composer after attach	unchanged (or a stray remainder insert)	token where you were typing
how to unattach	nothing — it rides along	delete the token
position in the turn	stapled to the front	wherever the token sits
edit / select / backspace	n/a	ordinary characters, works for free

Every attach path now lands in the same place:

path	before	after
drag-drop	sys() notice + maybe a stray insert	token at cursor + caption
clipboard, bracketed	📎 Image #2 attached from clipboard	token at cursor
clipboard, hotkey	same notice	token at cursor
/image <path>	notice, then setInput(remainder)	token appended to current input
/paste	notice	token appended to current input
non-image file drop	detected file: X activity row	path rewritten in place, silent

Notes

• Deleting the token is how you unattach. updateInput is the one choke point every keystroke passes through, so syncTokens reconciles there and fires image.detach for anything erased. That also fixes a stale image riding along on the next unrelated turn.
• Image tokens expand to nothing — the gateway already holds the file in attached_images. The expander eats one adjacent space so a token removed mid-sentence doesn't leave a gap.
• Indices are never reused after a delete, or two different files would resolve to one label.
• Tokens and the input line get refs alongside state: paste-then-immediately-Enter submits before React re-renders, and the submit path has to see the token that was just added.
• attachedImageNotice and imageTokenMeta have no callers left and are gone.

Test plan

• npx tsc --noEmit clean
• npx eslint clean on every touched file
• 15 unit tests in __tests__/attachments.test.ts — expansion ordering, image-token elision without double spaces, index allocation after deletes, drop detection
• Full TUI suite: 1422 passed. The 24 failures (syntax, subscriptionOverlay, createGatewayEventHandler, ink-backpressure) reproduce identically on a clean origin/main worktree and touch nothing in this diff — 0 added failures.
• Manual: drag-drop an image, confirm [[ Image 1 ]] at the cursor and no notice
• Manual: backspace the token, confirm the image does not reach the next turn
• Manual: /paste with a screenshot, then Enter immediately — token must resolve

[github-actions]

૮ >ﻌ< ა ci review

_{ran on 22af266}

ℹ️ Info

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