[Bug]: Split panes in one tab share a single sidebar agent-row name that flips to whichever pane was clicked last

[pythonstrup]

Operating system

macOS

Orca version

v1.4.160-rc.2

Details

Short summary:
When one terminal tab holds two split panes running separate agent sessions, both sidebar agent rows show the same conversation name, and that name flips to whichever pane was clicked last. The two sessions are indistinguishable in the sidebar.

What happened?

Sidebar agent rows are rendered per pane, but they resolve their label from tab-level state. tab.title deliberately tracks only the focused pane, so every row in a split tab renders the focused pane's title, and clicking the other split relabels both rows.

Screenshots of the same two rows, before and after clicking the second pane:

After clicking pane A	After clicking pane B
● ✳ Linear … 23h ● ✳ Linear … 22m	● ✳ Redis Look-aside … 23h ● ✳ Redis Look-aside … 22m

How can we reproduce it?

1. Open a terminal tab and start an agent (e.g. Claude Code). Let it work long enough to set a task title via OSC.
2. Split the pane and start a second agent with unrelated work in the new split.
3. Look at the two agent rows for that tab in the left sidebar — both carry the same name.
4. Click the other split. Both rows relabel to that pane's title.

Root cause

Introduced by #9989, which labels sidebar and dashboard agent rows with conversation names. Its design note states "There is no additional preference: row identity consistently follows tab identity" — split panes were not considered, and they are the case where one tab holds several independent sessions.

• src/renderer/src/components/dashboard/use-agent-row-conversation-name.ts looks the tab up by agent.tab.id and returns getAgentRowConversationName(tab, …). The pane is never part of the lookup, so all rows in a tab resolve to one string.
• src/renderer/src/components/terminal-pane/pty-connection.ts only propagates the focused pane's OSC title to tab.title (intentional — otherwise two agents in splits make the tab title flicker), and src/renderer/src/components/terminal-pane/use-terminal-pane-lifecycle.ts re-syncs tab.title from the newly focused pane on every focus change. That is what makes the shared label flip on click.

Per-pane titles already exist in state (runtimePaneTitlesByTabId[tabId][paneId], the layout snapshot's titlesByLeafId, and AgentStatusEntry.terminalTitle); the row resolver simply does not consult them.

Anything else that might help:

• Restarting Orca does not cause this, but it makes it visible immediately: tab.title is persisted, so after a restart both rows already share whichever pane was focused at quit.
• The dashboard pop-out board has the same defect through build-dashboard-snapshot.ts, which mirrors the hook.
• Tab-owned names (customTitle, quickCommandLabel) sharing across splits is correct — those are names the user gave the tab. Only the live title needs to be per pane.
• Separate follow-up, not covered here: generatedTitle is also tab-scoped, so with auto-generated titles enabled both splits still share the first-written name. That value does not change on click, so it is not this symptom.

[pythonstrup]

Correction on the root cause, and a follow-up worth tracking separately.

The fix in #11070 changed. The first attempt routed rows through AgentStatusEntry.terminalTitle, on the assumption that it carries the pane's live OSC title. It does not. On the local path the title is resolved as:

layout.titlesByLeafId[leafId] ?? tab.title      // useIpcEvents.ts, resolvePaneKey

and titlesByLeafId holds user-assigned pane names, not live titles (src/shared/types.ts: "User-assigned pane titles, keyed by stable layout leaf UUID"; the only writers are the pane-rename shortcut, its removal path, and a synthetic-title cleanup). Live OSC titles go to runtimePaneTitlesByTabId and, for the focused pane only, to tab.title.

Which path runs depends on who owns agent status: shouldOwnAgentStatusInRenderer = runtimeEnvironmentId !== null, so the renderer path — the one that does read the live per-pane map — only runs for remote-runtime panes. Local Claude Code hooks take the main-process path above. For an ordinary local split with no manual pane rename, entry.terminalTitle collapses to tab.title, so that fix was a no-op for the reported case. It has been reverted in the branch.

What #11070 does now: a tab whose layout root is a split node no longer lends its live title to any row, so each row keeps its own per-pane label instead of all of them showing (and swapping to) the focused pane's title. Tab-owned names — customTitle, quickCommandLabel, generatedTitle — still apply to every row in the tab, since the user gave those to the tab and they do not flip on focus.

Follow-ups this does not cover, all sharing the same root cause (pane-scoped rows reading tab-scoped state):

1. No leaf-keyed live pane title exists. The only live per-pane map is keyed by ephemeral numeric pane ids while rows are keyed by tabId:leafId, so split rows can show a label but not a real title. Adding a leaf-keyed channel unblocks items 2 and 3 as well.
2. User-assigned pane names never reach agent rows. Renaming a split pane updates the pane header and persists, but the sidebar row for that pane keeps showing the tab's name.
3. Hook-less split agents (title-derived rows) fall back to their agent label.

Also noted while tracing this: runtimePaneTitlesByTabId is never re-seeded from the restored layout at boot, so title-derived rows collapse to one row per tab until each pane re-emits a title. Seeding it naively would push stale titles through classifyTitleActivity and resurrect dead "working" agents into smart-sort, so it needs its own staleness gate.