Text Windows

Give a stream its own window so the traffic you care about stops scrolling past in the middle of a fight.

What it’s for

GemStone sends far more than room descriptions down the wire. Thoughts, deaths, logons, ESP, bounty updates, society chatter, and your own combat all arrive as separate streams — and by default most of them stack into one column with everything else. The result is familiar: a death message you wanted to read gets three lines of swing-and-miss on top of it before your eye lands on it.

A text window is one scrollable pane bound to one or more of those streams. Point a window at death and death messages go there and only there. Point one at a Lich script’s own stream id and you have a purpose-built readout for that script. Your story text gets quieter, and the things you were squinting for get a place to sit still.

This is also how custom windows work. There is no separate widget for “a window for my script” — a custom window is a text window subscribed to whatever stream id the script pushes.

Set it up

.addwindow thoughts text 0 0 40 10

Common setups

A quiet death log you can actually read back

Deaths matter and they’re easy to miss. Give them a window with timestamps so you can tell whether that was thirty seconds ago or twenty minutes.

In the GUI: Windows ▸ ➕ Custom window… ▸ Text, then right-click it ▸ Window ▸ set Streams to death and Buffer lines to 500. Open Window ▸ Advanced and tick Timestamps, then tick Timestamp at line start so the time leads each line and the names stay aligned down the left.

In the TUI: .addwindow deaths text 80 0 40 8, then .editwindow deaths, put death in Streams, tick timestamps, Ctrl+S.

You’ll see: a short column of death notices, each stamped with its time, sitting still while your main window scrolls.

A bounty window that stops eating a third of your screen

Bounty text is verbose. Compact rewrites it into 1-4 lines, which turns a paragraph into a glanceable objective.

Make a text window subscribed to bounty, then right-click ▸ Window ▸ Advanced ▸ tick Compact.

You’ll see: your current task condensed to a few lines — and the change applies to the bounty already on screen, not only the next update.

⚠️ Compact only affects the bounty stream. It is not a general blank-line remover or a whitespace trimmer. Ticking it on a thoughts or combat window changes nothing at all, which looks like a broken checkbox but is the flag correctly doing nothing outside its one job.

Tips & gotchas

A window that subscribes to a stream always wins. Stream routing has a strict order: a subscribed window first, then a [streams.routes] entry, then the fallback window, then main as a last resort. So adding a stream to a window’s Streams field is all it takes — you never also have to write a route.

Routes only decide where an unsubscribed stream goes. Set one when you want a stream discarded, forced to main, or parked in a window that isn’t subscribed to it. To see the whole picture at once, open the Streams panel — Editors ▸ Streams & Custom Windows, or type .streams. It lists every known stream with its effective destination and lets you change it in place.

⚠️ A route pointing at a window that doesn’t exist does not create one. Windows are never auto-created or auto-opened to satisfy a route; the stream quietly falls through to your fallback window instead. If a route seems ignored, check the window name still exists.

A hidden window still fills its buffer. Hiding is presentation only — text routed to a hidden window accumulates and is waiting when you show it again. That’s the difference between Hide and Delete.

⚠️ .deletewindow truly removes a window in both desktop frontends; .hidewindow only hides it. There is no GUI-versus-TUI asymmetry here. Delete stashes the window so Windows ▸ ↩ Restore deleted… can bring it back with its streams intact, and both frontends refuse to remove your only main-feed window.

⚠️ In the Terminal (TUI), Ctrl+C copies your selection — it does not quit. In the Desktop GUI the same combination quits. Leave the TUI with .quit or .exit.

Word wrap is not purely cosmetic here. For a text window the Appearance ▸ Text ▸ Word wrap checkbox writes to the shared layout definition, so it travels with the window into the TUI and into layout.toml. Most other Appearance settings are GUI-only.

Per-window timestamp settings override the global one. ui.timestamp_position sets the default for everything; a window that has its own Timestamp at line start state ignores it. Change the global in Settings and a window you’ve already customized will not follow.

Scrolling: PageUp / PageDown move a 20-line page in the focused TUI window, Alt+PageUp / Alt+PageDown move a single line, and the mouse wheel scrolls whatever is under the cursor in both desktop frontends. A window auto-scrolls with new text unless you have scrolled back, so reading history doesn’t get yanked out from under you.

See also

• Tabbed Text — several streams sharing one window, with unread badges
• Build a hunting layout — placing and saving a full screen
• Desktop GUI — the Windows catalog and the full right-click menu
• Terminal (TUI) — .editwindow, title-bar dragging, resize handles
• layout.toml — every window field and its default

[[windows]]
name = "deaths"
widget_type = "text"
streams = ["death"]
row = 0
col = 80
rows = 8
cols = 40
buffer_size = 500
show_timestamps = true
timestamp_position = "start"

[streams]
fallback = "main"

[streams.routes]
bounty = "window:bounty"
ambients = "discard"
loot = "main"