feat(ui): copy the flow or the map as an image, for a PR comment or a README (CG-55)

"Copy image" and "Download SVG" on the Flow strip's header and in the Map's
side panel. The image is the distribution loop: a flow pasted into a review, a
map pasted into a README, read by somebody with no viewer open.

The exporter serialises the LAYOUT OBJECT rather than scraping the DOM — no
html-to-image, no foreignObject, no new dependency. buildFlowLayout and
buildMapLayout already compute every rectangle, port and curve before a
component renders, so the image and the screen come from one piece of
arithmetic and cannot drift apart, and the whole exporter is a pure function a
test runs with no browser. Output is presentation-only SVG (rect, line, path,
polygon, text, tspan, clipPath) — no script, no external reference, no data:
URL — which is what GitHub's sanitiser accepts in a README.

Light theme is forced whatever the viewer is set to: a dark strip on GitHub's
white comment background reads as a mistake, not a preference. 24px of paper
around the drawing, a caption naming the path or the root at the bottom left,
a CodeGraph mark at the bottom right.

Fonts travel as family stacks, not bytes (spec). An SVG loaded as an image may
not fetch a webfont, so a raster falls back to the platform's own monospace —
every fallback in the stack advances at ~0.6em like IBM Plex Mono, so the code
grid survives and only the letterforms change. Text is truncated
arithmetically with an ellipsis and clipped as well, so a wider fallback
cannot spill a source line out of a card.

`scale` multiplies only the root width/height while the viewBox stays in CSS
pixels, so the raster draws an image whose intrinsic size is already 2x
instead of upscaling a 1x bitmap. The clipboard write uses the ClipboardItem
promise form (Safari discards the gesture across an await) and falls back to
downloading the PNG, saying which happened rather than claiming a copy it did
not make.

Measured on this repo: execute -> rowToFileRecord (8 hops) exports 3690x253
CSS px, 491 kB PNG at 2x / 38 kB SVG; the 16-module map reproduces the canvas
exactly — 16 boxes, 52 links, 9 layer rules, both band labels, and with
src/index.ts selected 15 links and 4 dimmed boxes.
This commit is contained in:
Colby McHenry
2026-08-27 05:41:34 -05:00
parent 94f4e287e6
commit 8ac0138940
12 changed files with 1837 additions and 1 deletions
+1
View File
@@ -350,6 +350,7 @@ What you get on that screen:
- **Ask for a path.** Type "how does execute reach getFile" (or `execute -> getFile`) and you get the **flow**: one card per hop, each opened at the line that makes the next call. Hops that no static edge records — a callback, an interface dispatch, a React re-render — are drawn dashed and name where the handler was wired. "Read as flow" turns a walk you did by hand into the same strip.
- **And when the path runs out, it says where.** A flow that doesn't get there ends in "Where the graph stops": the kind of dispatch that ended it (a computed member call, a `getattr`, a reflective invoke, a message bus), its line, the key when the source spells one out, and a shortlist of what could be on the other side — plus the name-only matches CodeGraph refused to follow, with their confidence. Nothing is guessed, and a flow that does connect never shows it.
- **The map**: the whole project at module granularity, laid out from the graph with dependencies pointing down — never drawn by hand, and the same picture every time. Cycles are listed rather than straightened away.
- **Take the picture with you.** A flow strip or a map can be copied as an image straight into a pull-request comment, or saved as an SVG for a README — always in the light theme, whichever one you are reading in, with a caption saying what the picture is. The SVG is real text, so it stays sharp at any size and the names in it are selectable.
- **It keeps up.** Save a file and a banner appears within about a third of a second saying the index hasn't caught up yet — and the screen switches to the file's current source rather than a body sliced at lines it no longer has. When something re-indexes, whatever is on screen refetches itself and says "Index updated · reloaded". A symbol that moved because you added a line above it is followed, not lost. Nothing polls: the viewer watches, and if it loses touch with the server it retries a few times and then says so instead of hammering it.
Options: `--port <n>` to pin a port (without it the viewer takes 4747, or the next free one),