Sessions with no cwd — or whose folder can't be promoted to a project (the
bare home dir, a deleted workspace, HERMES state) — were dropped from the
project tree entirely, so the grouped sidebar silently showed fewer chats
than flat Recents. Collect them into a synthetic `__no_project__` node at
the head of the list. It carries one lane purely to hold the rows, and is
omitted when empty so a project-less install stays blank.
The name-based sibling probe can't reach every dead worktree: a dir renamed away
from its repo's prefix (`hermes-salvage-drafts` next to `hermes-agent`) shares
nothing to trim back to, and a scratch dir under /tmp was never a worktree at
all. Those fall through to the path-only heuristic, which reports the cwd as its
own repo root, and Tier 2 promotes it to a top-level project — one that can't be
opened and can only be dismissed by hand.
Gate auto-project promotion on the directory still existing, threaded in as an
injected predicate to keep the builder pure. The guard keys on the directory,
not on git-ness, so a plain non-git folder that's still on disk keeps its
project; callers that can't stat (remote backends) omit it and keep every
candidate. A stale persisted `git_repo_root` gets the same treatment, so a
deleted repo can't resurrect from the recorded value alone.
`_probe_sibling_worktree` recovers a deleted `<repo>-<suffix>` worktree by
trimming its name back to a sibling that still resolves, but it only trimmed
the LEAF segment. A session's cwd is usually a subdir of the worktree
(`<repo>-<suffix>/apps/desktop`), whose basename shares nothing with the repo,
so the probe no-oped and the dead path fell through to the path-only heuristic
— which minted it as its own main repo root, and then as a top-level project.
Walk the ancestors, deepest first, with the probe budget shared across the whole
walk so a deeply nested cwd can't fan out into a probe storm.
Addresses @teknium1's review of #61950:
- The desktop live overlay (workspace-groups.ts) matched cwd membership
case-sensitively, so a fresh mixed-case/separator Windows session missed
its explicit/auto project until the next backend tree refresh. Mirror the
backend identity (isWindowsPath/comparisonSegments/pathKey) in isPathUnder,
liveSessionProjectId, and overlayRepoLanes lane matching. Comparison-only —
emitted ids/labels keep their spelling. POSIX stays case-sensitive.
- Backend _is_windows_path missed root-relative `\wsl.localhost\...` (single
leading backslash), leaving that historical spelling case-sensitive. Classify
any backslash-rooted path as Windows.
Tests: WSL-spelling collapse + explicit-project precedence (project_tree),
Windows/WSL live-overlay membership + POSIX case-sensitivity (workspace-groups).
