Make each tool act where it says it does, and nowhere else

[ibrahimweng]

The tools were right about what they do and wrong about where. Measured tool by tool against surface by surface, three things were wrong.

The curve lanes were a hole in the whole tool system

The handler that routes a press to its tool stepped aside for a curve lane, on the reasoning that opening one is about what you can see rather than what you are editing. The curve editor then asks only whether the pen is held, and treats everything else as "add a point and drag it".

So on a layer with its curves open, a drag did this:

tool	before	after
hand	wrote a point into the automation	pans
zoom	wrote a point	zooms
cut	wrote a point	says there is nothing there to cut
range	wrote a point	draws a stretch of time
move	drew a point ✓	unchanged
pen	drew a curve ✓	unchanged

Panning across an open layer silently edited the piece. A tool that quietly edits while doing its own job is worse than one that does nothing.

The picture was outside the tools altogether

It fit the stage and that was the only size it had, so a tool called Hand could not move it — there was nowhere to move it to.

The picture now has a zoom: click to go in around the point you clicked, alt to come out, 100% to 1600%. The hand drags it about. A chip in the corner says how far in you are and takes you back to Fit; it is not there at all at Fit, where it would be saying nothing. The pan is clamped so the picture can never be pulled off its own frame, and it returns to Fit for a new clip or when the picture moves into its floating window — the transform rides on the video element, which is lent to that window rather than copied into it.

Cut, Range and Pen say they are about the timeline rather than doing nothing at all.

The layer column claimed a rename it was not going to do

It works under every tool, the way a track header does in an edit suite, and that stays. What it must not do is claim otherwise: it was showing a text caret over every layer name while the hand or the blade was held.

The keyboard

Arming record took every letter, when only six are claimed twice (T, H, J, K, L, S). C, V, Z and P are not drum pads, so arming meant giving up four tools to a conflict they were never in — reaching for the blade with record on did nothing and said nothing about why. A clash is settled where there is one.

Checking

Fourteen new browser tests in test/browser/tool-scope.spec.ts, each a tool crossed with a place rather than a tool on its own. Every one was checked by putting its fault back into the code and watching it fail; all five injected faults were caught by exactly the tests that name them.

Writing them found two more, both fixed here:

• the pan was clamped against the stage box rather than the video's, and the stage carries fourteen pixels of padding, so the picture could be dragged that far off an edge
• zooming back out never quite reached Fit: 2.56 divided by 1.6 twice is 1.0000000000000002 rather than 1, so the picture stayed invisibly magnified and the Fit chip stayed on screen with nothing left to do

data-tool and the alt state moved from the timeline root to the shell, since the stage is not inside the timeline and cannot read an attribute that is. The existing cursor tests confirm nothing regressed.

55 browser tests pass (41 existing + 14 new), 199 unit tests, build clean.

Also updated because they had stopped being true: the Hand and Zoom descriptions in the tool strip, and the help panel, which listed five tools with no Pen and described both as timeline-only.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01Ux1kydvUkLRoMbHp82ofDi

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Generated by Claude Code

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
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