Demo coverage and recording

The demo gallery is a set of short, focused recordings. The hero clip is a quick tour; each feature clip stands on its own.

Feature and history audit

Reviewed against 9bbba42 (September 13, 2026 working baseline):

• 957f2b3 (August 22) last refreshed the demo content: discovery, external completions, help, object pipelines, and interactive queries.
• e13c0b1 (September 11) changed startup only, adding Hide/Show around activation and replacing a hard-coded checkout path. It still used a two-second delay. MP4 intermediates are ignored by Git, so both media formats need regeneration when the tapes change.
• The sole later commit, 9bbba42, enabled Unicode tables, a table pager, and full tracebacks by default. The new pager requires updated tape input.
• Comparing only e13c0b1..HEAD would miss the feature gap. Content review uses git log 957f2b3..HEAD as well as the current commands and docs.

Feature	August demo coverage	Updated coverage	Relevant commits
Command discovery, external completion, help	Present	Refreshed hero, external, and help clips	957f2b3, 9bbba42
Query clauses, fields, operators, values, connectors	Present	Query clip uses readable comma spacing and module projection	bf22df9, 0e0680a, 347d77f
Tables, JSONL, grouping, aggregates, grep	Present	Bounded output, current Unicode default, double and Markdown styles	6404a4c, 9bbba42
File imports and schema-aware completion	Missing	File clip: TSV header completion, numeric filter, grouped count/average	affe21c, 8f20b87, 0b7c470
Pipeline contracts and compatible command completion	Missing	Contracts clip: recordifiers after TSV output	69a0870, a221f23, 61046b6, 4744e83
Static field validation and inferred types	Missing	Contracts clip: typo diagnostic, corrected pipeline, get-shape	e020dd3, ca8b4bc
Module composition, provenance, precedence, Git state	Text only	Modules clip: devbox + gitshelf, ranked modules and command ownership	a91a7fa, ac2d584, 3043897, 870b021, 41758ef
Reversible line transforms	Missing	Transforms clip: opt-in selector, preview, automatic inverse	874cad7

Some features still have no dedicated recording. These are deliberate coverage gaps, not claims that every current feature appears in the gallery:

Feature	Where to explore it / why no clip
SSH invocation and remote sessions	bu invoke-command --help, bu enter-remote-session --help; a useful demonstration needs a configured SSH host (b118a3f, 732415f, 15aa7d0)
Context origins and consumption logging	Context variables; requires a project configuration and consuming command (a714c8f)
Runtime contract warnings and full tracebacks	Structured output, bu get-config; diagnostics are best shown alongside an intentional failure (8af2a78, 650d3bf)
Module requirements, caching, deferred compatibility probes	Module examples and activation code; primarily startup behavior (92aa4f3, 38627b5)
Nested multiselect parsing, site hooks, capability resolution	Command-author APIs; need source walkthroughs (329301e, b37a85a, b01dc20)
Command shadowing, config/keybinding provenance	Inspect get-command, get-config, get-key-binding; the module clip shows ownership but does not manufacture a collision
File metadata, tree-sitter tokenization, command authoring	Existing highlights and guides; outside this refresh’s focused pipeline/module clips

Regenerate

Install VHS with Wait support (recordings verified with 0.11.0), ttyd, ffmpeg, jq, fzf, and less. Build the Fig specs with the repository’s ./setup before recording the external-completion clips. VHS also needs a working Chromium installation.

From the repository root:

docs/render_demos.sh                         # all docs/demo*.tape
docs/render_demos.sh docs/demo-files.tape     # one clip

The renderer validates tapes before recording and converts MP4 to GIF with ffmpeg. Commit GIFs and tape sources together; MP4s are ignored intermediates. New docs/demo-*.tape files are discovered automatically.

Every tape imports style.tape first, applying display settings and hiding capture before any per-clip environment directives. Then setup.tape sources setup.sh and waits for the final clean prompt before Show. Activation, configuration, and screen clearing are outside captured frames: there is no estimated number of seconds to trim afterward. Check the first frame of both MP4 and GIF after rendering.

The setup discards inherited BU_* exports, uses a temporary output/cache directory, disables the command cache to pick up the current checkout, and uses preset:less-quit so small tables stay visible while long ones page. Activation diagnostics are retained until rendering ends and printed if VHS fails. The module and transform clips opt into their extra setup with tape environment variables; Alt+T is not a default binding.

services.tsv is a small, checked-in dataset so file queries produce useful results on any host. services.json contains the same records with numeric latency values for avg (TSV imports retain string values). No network service is required.

When editing interactions, check that fzf selections insert the intended token, allow enough time for the menu to open, and explicitly exit pagers before typing the next command. Inspect the first frame, each menu and result, and the final frame. Run the demonstrated commands as smoke checks; do not run the full BashTab test suite for a documentation refresh.

The help clip redirects stderr for --help: the current autohelp example formatter emits a dispatch warning when resolving an absolute script path, even for commands with a Dispatch: source header. This recording shows the generated stdout page; it does not fix that diagnostic. Pipeline clips use small filtered result sets to avoid existing broken-pipe diagnostics from early termination of a large command stream.