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experiment(tui): HERMES_TUI_INLINE flag to skip AlternateScreen

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Adds a gate so we can A/B test whether bypassing the alt-screen +
viewport constraint lets the terminal's native scrollback beat our
virtualization on scroll perf.

Result: definitively NO.  Inline mode is 40x worse on every metric
that moves, because AlternateScreen is what constrains the ScrollBox
to the viewport height.  Without it, the ScrollBox grows to contain
every child of the transcript and every frame re-renders all 1100
messages.

Profile under hold-wheel_up (1106-msg session, 30Hz for 6s):

  metric                    fullscreen       inline       delta
  patches_total              28,864         1,111,574     +3751%
  writeBytes_total           42 KB          1.6 MB        +3881%
  fps_throughput             15.8 fps       1.75 fps      -89%
  frames                     179            18            -90%
  gap_p50_ms                 17 (~60fps)    726 (~1fps)   +4170%
  yoga_p99                   34 ms          405 ms        +1083%
  renderer_p99               14 ms          169 ms        +1062%
  flickers                   0              5 offscreen   —

This is actually the cleanest data we've gotten so far:

  * AlternateScreen is LOAD-BEARING for perf — its viewport height
    constraint is what lets useVirtualHistory's culling work.  No
    constraint → ScrollBox grows unbounded → every fiber mounts.

  * The outer terminal (Cursor's xterm.js) parsed 1.6 MB of ANSI in
    under 10 seconds with drain p99 = 8.83 ms and 0 backpressure
    frames.  Our terminal-write hypothesis from last session was
    wrong: the bottleneck is React + Yoga, not the wire.

  * Doing proper inline mode (non-virtualized transcript in
    scrollback, composer pinned below) is not a flag flip — it's a
    different UI architecture.  Leaving this flag in so anyone
    re-running the experiment gets the same numbers, but not
    building the architecture until we're sure the perf win is
    worth the UX loss (it probably isn't — the fullscreen + virt
    path is the one we should optimize, not replace).

Keeping the flag as an experiment gate.  Flip HERMES_TUI_INLINE=1
and run scripts/profile-tui.py --compare to reproduce.
This commit is contained in:
Brooklyn Nicholson 2026-04-26 17:11:49 -05:00
parent 8d2b08342c
commit 9a46feb9bd
2 changed files with 30 additions and 3 deletions
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22
ui-tui/src/components/appLayout.tsx
View file

@ -1,11 +1,12 @@
import { AlternateScreen, Box, NoSelect, ScrollBox, Text } from '@hermes/ink'
import { useStore } from '@nanostores/react'
import { memo } from 'react'
import { Fragment, memo } from 'react'
import { useGateway } from '../app/gatewayContext.js'
import type { AppLayoutProps } from '../app/interfaces.js'
import { $isBlocked, $overlayState, patchOverlayState } from '../app/overlayStore.js'
import { $uiState } from '../app/uiStore.js'
import { INLINE_MODE } from '../config/env.js'
import { PLACEHOLDER } from '../content/placeholders.js'
import { inputVisualHeight, stableComposerColumns } from '../lib/inputMetrics.js'
import { PerfPane } from '../lib/perfPane.js'
@ -244,8 +245,23 @@ export const AppLayout = memo(function AppLayout({
}: AppLayoutProps) {
const overlay = useStore($overlayState)
// Inline mode: skip <AlternateScreen> so the TUI renders into the
// primary buffer and the terminal's native scrollback can capture rows
// that scroll off the top. Mouse tracking is still enabled via
// AlternateScreen when the wrapper is on; in inline mode we leave it
// to the host terminal, which typically does wheel → scrollback.
//
// `Fragment` (via alias so the JSX stays legible) drops the alt-screen
// constraint while keeping the inner layout identical. Content height
// will then follow flex-column growth, which means the ScrollBox below
// grows beyond the viewport — the terminal's primary buffer scrolls
// old rows off the top into native scrollback. Composer + progress
// stay at the bottom via normal flow (they're the last siblings).
const Shell = INLINE_MODE ? Fragment : AlternateScreen
const shellProps = INLINE_MODE ? {} : { mouseTracking }
return (
<AlternateScreen mouseTracking={mouseTracking}>
<Shell {...shellProps}>
<Box flexDirection="column" flexGrow={1}>
<Box flexDirection="row" flexGrow={1}>
{overlay.agents ? (
@ -277,6 +293,6 @@ export const AppLayout = memo(function AppLayout({
</>
)}
</Box>
</AlternateScreen>
</Shell>
)
})