read a session as a terminal, a split, or a conversation

An agent session is two things at once. It is a shell with a process in it. It is also a conversation you are having with an agent. A terminal only ever shows you the first one. So the conversation reaches you wrapped in spinners, redraws and box-drawing characters, and the part you wanted scrolls past at the speed the agent writes.

crystl gives the window three ways to show the same session. They sit in the shard bar as a three-segment pill: terminal, split, and chat. Terminal is the default, unchanged. Split puts the conversation in a dock beside the terminal. That is the view that shows you the two are one session. Chat hands the whole shard area to the conversation, at the same size as your terminal text, because it is standing where the terminal stood.

Wide windows get long lines, and that is the cost of giving chat the full width. The measure was capped at 720 points, then 900, then three quarters of the window. Every one of them read as a narrow strip. So the caps are gone.

The mode belongs to the window, not to one shard. Set it once and every shard you click honors it. You never have to work out which mode this tab is in. Cmd + Y flips between the terminal and whichever chat mode you used last. Live in fullscreen and fullscreen is what comes back; live in the dock and you get the dock. The mode survives a restart.

What makes this safe is that chat mode unmounts the terminal's view and nothing else. The pty, the terminal engine and the cell store stay live and keep eating every byte. crystl screen and crystl watch go on answering from the real grid, at the size the window is now. That holds the whole time you are in chat. Flip back and you mount a view onto state that never paused. Nothing is rebuilt and no scrollback is lost.