feat(ui): shell progress spinner, and the zsh bugs found on the way

[MCamner]

Three commits. The first is the feature that was asked for; the other two are bugs the same shell split kept producing.

1. ui_spinner — the shell surface had no progress primitive

mq-agent has wrapped slow work in console.status since it grew rich panels. A grep across all 213 shell files found two hits for a spinner, both false: ASCII art containing the word SPINNER, and watch.sh hiding the cursor. So every menu that shelled out to gh (~0.75s per call, measured), ollama (tens of seconds) or a test run simply went quiet — and a quiet terminal reads as a hang.

repos="$(ui_spinner "Hämtar dina repos från GitHub" gh repo list --limit 1000 ...)"

Three design decisions worth reviewing:

It gates on /dev/tty, not on stdout being a terminal. The first version used the existing mq_wants_plain_output check, which would have silently disabled the spinner in exactly the shape shell callers use — out="$(slow_command)". Frames go to /dev/tty, so stdout is irrelevant. Locked by step 6 (GOT:captured).

The cursor is left visible on purpose. Hiding it means restoring it, and the only reliable restore is an INT/TERM trap — which gitlaunch.sh:840 and mq-git-menu.sh:137 already use to put a repo back on its base branch. Clobbering that trades a cosmetic win for a real one.

Two limits follow from backgrounding the wrapped command, both documented: it cannot wrap something that prompts on stdin, and variables it sets do not reach the caller.

Wired into the GitHub repo picker as the first call site, which also fixes a silent failure there: an empty gh result used to fall through to fzf with nothing to pick from.

2. mqobsidian menu option 3 was broken under zsh

get_mqobsidian_manifest_path:2: BASH_SOURCE[0]: parameter not set
resolve_view_relative_path:3: command not found: jq
[mqobsidian][error] Requested view key is not defined in views.json: roadmap-doc

Three error lines, two bugs, both zsh.

bin/mqlaunch is bash, so command mode (mqlaunch obsidian doctor) resolved the manifest fine while the interactive menu — terminal/launchers/mqlaunch.sh, which is #!/bin/zsh — could not. Reading BASH_SOURCE inside a function made the split invisible until someone used the menu. Now resolved at source time: inside a zsh function even $0 is no help, it holds the function name.

The jq error was not a PATH problem on the machine — jq was installed at two locations, both on PATH. Instrumenting the guard printed PATH= empty. assert_view_target_exists declared local path, and in zsh $path is a special array tied to $PATH, so PATH was blank for its whole call tree, including the jq that reads the manifest. doctor_mqobsidian_views had both traps on one line (local root key rel type path status=0) — $status is read-only in zsh — so the doctor also worked from bash and died from the menu.

Worth noting separately: neither fault mentioned itself. The operator was told the view key was undefined. It is defined. jq is now checked up front and named.

3. The last unguarded BASH_SOURCE

dev_repo_path had the same pattern in a fallback branch that only runs with BASE_DIR unset. Latent rather than live, since the launcher always sets it — a reason to guard it, not to leave it.

Verification

$ tools/scripts/test-all.sh
[PASS] Shell lint passed at warning severity (196 files)
[PASS] All selftest checks passed.

Two new test files plus a step added to the dev-menu suite, all registered in tests/manifest.tsv and test-all.sh:

• ui-spinner-smoke.sh — 8 steps, including a pty step (a spinner that is merely safe is a spinner that never animates) and a zsh step, since background jobs plus wait are exactly the kind of construct that diverges between shells
• mqobsidian-manifest-shell-parity-smoke.sh — 8 steps; step 6 also greps the consumer lib to stop local path / local status coming back
• dev-menu-smoke.sh step 7 — resolves under bash and zsh with BASE_DIR unset

Driven for real, not just tested:

$ printf '9\n3\nx\n' | MQOBS_OPENER=echo zsh terminal/launchers/mqlaunch.sh
[mqobsidian] Opening roadmap-doc → /Users/mansys/mqobsidian/docs/roadmap-token-reduction.md

The spinner against live gh in a pty: 10 frames drawn, line erased, 26 repos captured, exit 0.

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