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path: root/docs/superpowers/specs/2026-08-13-rule-builder-design.md
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12 daysfix(rules): keep the text-mode toggle reachableDanilo M.1-2/+15
Ticking "Edit as text" was a one-way trip: the only way back to the rows was closing the dialog and reopening it. The checkbox was parented to the builder widget and sat on the match row, and switching to text mode hides that widget, so the toggle disappeared along with the rows it governs. Move it to the query row, which is visible in both modes. The existing tests all passed against this, because they drove the toggle through setChecked and then asserted on the checked STATE. A hidden checkbox reports its state perfectly well, so every one of those assertions held while the widget was unreachable. The new test asks the question that matters, whether the toggle would be on screen, and it uses isVisibleTo since nothing is isVisible on a dialog that was never shown. Worth recording how close the mutation check came to endorsing this too. Reparenting the checkbox alone left it in the query row's layout, so it stayed visible and the test still passed. Only restoring the full shipped shape, parent and layout together, reproduced the fault and failed the test. A mutation that does not reproduce the original bug proves nothing about the test that is meant to catch it. The spec's layout sketch carried the same error and is corrected, with the reason, so the next reader does not reintroduce it.
12 daysdocs: correct the claim that a paren-bearing value is unrepresentableDanilo M.1-5/+16
The spec listed from:(((( among the queries the parser must reject, and the plan's Task 6 asserted that rejection. Probing the built parser shows it accepts the query as a From row whose value is the literal text, and compiles it back byte for byte. That is correct behaviour, not a leak in the strictness rule. notmuch reads those parens as characters to search for rather than as grouping, so the query is meaningful and the row displaying it tells the truth. Rejecting it would buy nothing and would push a representable rule into text mode. The distinction the documents were missing: a parenthesis inside a VALUE is not a shape question at all, only a parenthesis in grouping position is. Restate both documents accordingly, and replace the assertion with a round-trip one, which is the property that actually matters here.
12 daysdocs: record items 75-78 and design the rule builderDanilo M.1-0/+368
The standing backlog reconciliation found four unrecorded entries in the user's notes, all fallout from item 44's rules dialog now that it is in daily use: the window forgets its geometry and column widths (75), every field is free text (76), a rule cannot be previewed against the thread list (77), and there is no way to build a rule from something visible in a message (78). Each cause is verified in the code rather than copied from the note. Item 76 then went through a brainstorming pass and has a design. The shape is Thunderbird's filter window, which the user supplied as the reference: field and operator dropdowns, +/- buttons per row, an all/any radio, and a separate "but not" block. The structural point is that Thunderbird owns its filter format and this project does not. The storage is a notmuch query string shared with mailctl and executed by the post-new hook, so the builder is a view over a string rather than a store. That decides the rest: the stored format is untouched and this stays a single-repo change; a query the builder cannot represent still opens, saves and runs, in a text mode every rule carries; and the string is rewritten only when the rows actually changed, compared against the parsed value rather than tracked with a dirty flag, which Qt sets during programmatic population. Measured against the seventeen rules in the live store, sixteen are flat and one nests an or group inside an and chain, which is what the exclusion block exists for. The parser is strict by design: it recognises a query whole or rejects it whole, because a lenient parser that salvages what it understands is how a not clause gets dropped and a filter silently widens.