# Agent Note: The composer's two text layers share one scrollport

Status: implemented

English | [中文](2026-07-31-composer-text-layers-share-one-scrollport.zh.md)

## Problem

The composer paints its text in two stacked layers ([InputBar](../../../../packages/client/ui-conversation/src/client/skeleton/InputBar.tsx)): the `<textarea>` owns the value, the selection, and the caret but renders its own glyphs `color: transparent`, and every visible character is painted by the `[data-input-backdrop]` div beneath it, which also carries the claim-token highlight, the chips, and the ghost hint. That split is what makes chips and highlights possible at all — a textarea cannot style a range of its own text. The draft box is capped at 14 lines, so past the cap something has to scroll.

Two layers with two scroll offsets fail in two stages, and this change is the second one.

The first was static. The backdrop is `position: absolute; inset: 0; overflow: hidden` — clipped, not scrolled — and nothing in the browser links its offset to the textarea's, so past the cap the caret moved and the words stayed frozen at line 1. Below the cap that is invisible, because both layers rest at 0; the defect was exactly as old as the cap and hid behind the resting state that every screenshot captured. It was fixed by mirroring the textarea's `scrollTop` onto the backdrop from a `scroll` listener, and that made the two layers agree **at rest**.

The second is what a user then reported: swiping quickly from the top of a long draft throws the caret up out of its own text, as though it carried momentum, and it settles back a moment later. The mirror is the cause. A wheel gesture scrolls the textarea on the compositor, off the main thread; the `scroll` event that drives the assignment is dispatched afterwards, so for the frames in between the caret sits at the new offset and every glyph sits at the old one. Measured on a standalone harness of the same geometry, moving the offset 200px and reading the caret's distance to its own glyphs before the task ends: chromium 203px, firefox 202px, WebKit 203px of separation, settling to the fixed line-box constant (3/2/3) a frame or two later. Every engine, every gesture, proportional to how fast the user scrolls.

No listener can close that gap, because the gap is the definition of a listener: it runs after the thing it reacts to. Anything that keeps two boxes equal in JavaScript is a frame behind a compositor that moves one of them without asking.

## Decision

One scrolling box, holding both layers.

`[data-input-scroll]` is the composer's only scrollport and carries the 14-line cap. Inside it, the auto-grow stack is as tall as the **whole** draft — the hidden mirror div is in normal flow and no longer capped, so it sizes the stack to the full text — and the backdrop and textarea ride that height absolutely. The textarea is `overflow: hidden` with no scrollable overflow of its own; it can no longer hold an offset at all.

The browser then applies one offset to both layers, in the same frame, on the same compositor. The caret is bound to its glyphs by construction rather than by upkeep: there is no code to run, no event to wait for, and no state that can be one frame stale. The wheel-chaining handler stays, retargeted from the textarea to the scrollport, and remains the only listener on the box.

Safari's native text control has one engine exception: deleting across a soft-wrap threshold can retain the former line layout after the mirror shrinks. The [Safari soft-wrap recovery](2026-08-13-safari-textarea-soft-wrap-reflow.md) restores the zero-overflow invariant before paint without changing the one-scrollport design.

Two things the previous mechanism needed are gone with it:

**The backdrop's trailing-line sentinel.** It existed to keep the two boxes' scroll extents equal — a textarea reserves a line box for the caret after a final newline while `white-space: pre-wrap` collapses a text node's trailing newline, so a draft ending in a newline made the backdrop one line shorter and clamped the mirrored offset a line above the caret. With one scrollport the backdrop's own extent decides nothing: the mirror div sizes the stack for both layers, both start at the same top, and a layer whose content ends earlier simply paints nothing on the last line. The shape is worth keeping in mind rather than the mechanism: it is the one that measured 628 against 652 when the two boxes had to agree on a height.

**The wrap-width premise.** All three layers now resolve their width inside the scrollport, so a scrollbar that consumes layout space costs them the same width by construction. This closes the divergence the superseded note recorded as open and unfixable by any property: WebKit reserved gutter space for the `overflow-y: auto` textarea and not for the `overflow: hidden` layers beside it, laying the textarea out 768 against 776 — worth 2 to 5 wrapped lines on a long draft, i.e. glyphs under the wrong caret on the one engine where it was observable. Measured on the harness after the change, all three layers report one width on all three engines Playwright ships.

**Edits the composer performs itself now ask for the reveal.** Paste and cut suppress the native edit — the machine owns the draft and the undo log — and restore the caret with `setSelectionRange`, which reveals nothing: measured in chromium and WebKit, pasting a long block leaves the view where it was while the caret sits at the end of what was pasted. That defect predates this change (Firefox happened to reveal it, in the old geometry only) and is fixed here because one scrollport is what finally makes the reveal ours to perform. The two restores share one helper that measures the caret against the hidden mirror — same draft, same metrics, same wrap width, so a Range collapsed at the caret's index reports where the caret is without a caret API — and scrolls the minimum that brings it inside, which is what the browser does for typing.

One shape needs a rule of its own, because the engines disagree about it: a caret straight after a newline sits on a line with nothing on it to measure, which is where a trailing-newline draft ends. chromium returns **no client rects at all** for the collapsed position — an all-zero box, which would send the reveal the wrong way — firefox reports the line above, and WebKit the right one. The helper therefore measures the newline the caret just left, whose box is the line it came from, and steps one line down; all three then land on the same offset (649 of 652, with the caret's line at 315 inside the 336px box). A non-collapsed Range over that newline returns a real rectangle on all three engines even when the draft ends in consecutive newlines, so each trailing blank line composes with the same rule.

Revealing the caret is the one thing that now depends on the browser rather than on us: with no offset of its own, the textarea's scroll-into-view has to walk up to the scrollport. It does, on every engine measured — typing at the draft's end brings the scrollport to the caret (625, 626 and 628 of a 628px maximum in chromium, firefox and WebKit), walking the caret back up with `ArrowUp` scrolls back to it, and typing after scrolling away returns to it.

## Alternatives considered

**Mirror `scrollTop` onto the backdrop from a `scroll` listener.** The superseded decision, and correct at rest: it is what made a long draft scrollable at all. Rejected now because it cannot be correct in motion — it is a main-thread reaction to a compositor-thread fact — and because it needed two premises to stay true that the single scrollport does not need at all (equal extents, equal wrap widths), each of which had already failed once.

**Translate the backdrop with `transform: translateY(-scrollTop)` instead of assigning an offset.** Same lag: still main-thread, still driven by the same event. It additionally papers over extent divergence rather than making the layers agree, so a mismatch resurfaces the moment anything measures the backdrop.

**Drive the backdrop from a scroll-driven animation (`animation-timeline: scroll()`).** This would run the coupling on the compositor and genuinely eliminate the lag while keeping two boxes. Rejected on support: Safari does not implement it and Firefox has only recently, so the composer would keep the reported defect on the engines that lack it, and the fallback path would be the mechanism being replaced.

**Scroll both layers from JavaScript, with the textarea `overflow: hidden` and a wheel handler assigning both offsets in one task.** No divergence during wheel gestures, since nothing scrolls without us. Rejected because it replaces native scrolling — momentum, trackpad rubber-banding, scrollbar dragging, keyboard scrolling — with a hand-written approximation, and the caret-reveal path (the browser setting the textarea's own offset) still lands asynchronously.

**Keep the cap on the mirror and just wrap today's structure in a scroller.** The layers would stay window-sized, not draft-sized: `inset: 0` on an absolutely positioned child resolves against the scrollport's padding box, not its scrollable overflow area, so both layers would scroll away from the content that is supposed to be underneath them. The stack has to be the full draft height for the arrangement to mean anything.

**Give the backdrop `overflow: auto` and let it scroll itself.** It would then have an offset of its own to keep in step, which is the same problem plus a second scrollbar painted over the input. The backdrop is a projection of the textarea, not an independently navigable surface.

**Drop the backdrop and style the textarea's own text.** This removes the layer split and the whole class of desync with it. Rejected because it is not implementable: a textarea renders one uniform text run, so the claim-token highlight, the chips, and the ghost hint — the reasons the backdrop exists — have no way to be expressed. Losing them to fix scrolling trades a bounded defect for a feature deletion.

**Render the draft in a `contenteditable` div.** One element, one offset, styleable ranges. Rejected as far out of proportion: `contenteditable` would put IME composition, undo/redo, selection semantics, and paste normalization back on us, all of which the textarea plus the input machine currently handle, and the machine already owns an undo log that assumes a textarea's value semantics.

**`scrollbar-gutter: stable` on all three layers.** Tried and reverted while the textarea was the scroller: WebKit applied it to `overflow-y: auto` and not to `overflow: hidden`, leaving the same 8px gap unclosed while costing every chromium user 8px of text column. Moot now — the layers share a containing block, so there is nothing to reserve.

**`scrollbar-width: none` on the scrolling layer.** Would equalize widths by hiding the thumb. Rejected: the composer deliberately shows one once the draft passes the cap — `.card` binds the l2 scrollbar tokens for exactly that — and it is the only affordance saying a long draft continues below.

## Consequences

- The caret cannot leave its glyphs. The browser scrolls one box, so the separation between where the textarea puts a line and where the backdrop paints it is a fixed line-box constant at every offset, mid-gesture included. The scenario measures exactly that number.
- The scrollbar moved from the textarea to the scrollport — the same visual place, one box out. The `.card` l2 token binding still inherits down to it.
- Chips, claim-token highlights, and text-ref marks stay aligned with their glyphs while scrolled, because they are positioned inside the backdrop and move with it. The decoration walk is unchanged apart from the dropped sentinel.
- On Firefox and WebKit, clicking into a composer whose draft overflows the cap now also scrolls the conversation transcript to its bottom: the caret's scroll-into-view walks past the composer's scrollport up to the transcript scrollport, which a textarea shorter than its box never made it do. Chromium does not. Measured, with `overscroll-behavior: contain` and `contain: paint` both tried and neither stopping the walk — there is no CSS that ends scroll-into-view chaining. Accepted: it scrolls toward the bottom, where the composer already sits, and the alternative is a caret visibly detached from its text on every engine.
- Paging and drag-selection are unchanged, both measured old against new. `PageDown`/`PageUp` never moved a textarea's caret in the first place — chromium scrolls a page and leaves `selectionStart` where it was, in both geometries; only the box that scrolls differs. Drag-selecting past the bottom edge still auto-scrolls, and to the same place (chromium 628/628, firefox 625/620, WebKit 170/170 — WebKit's slower autoscroll is equally slow before and after).
- The composer's own `focus()` calls pass `preventScroll` — the unlock/session-switch effect and the focus-keeping mousedown on the toolbar buttons — so a focus nobody gestured for cannot move the transcript through the taller textarea's reveal chain. Suppressing that walk hands the caret back to us on the one path where it matters: the composer DOM is reused across sessions, so switching to a longer draft keeps the previous offset while the value swap puts the caret at the new draft's end. Measured on all three engines, that leaves the caret 940px below a box sitting at 0; the effect therefore reveals it in its own scrollport, landing at 625 of 628 — what the old geometry reached at 628 through the browser. The mousedown path needs no reveal: the caret has not moved, and the next keystroke gets the browser's native one. A separate reveal-only effect handles a non-empty draft that arrives after render: `ConversationSession` seeds a persisted draft in its own mount effect, which runs AFTER this component's, so the first reveal would otherwise measure an empty mirror and never run again for the draft that then appeared. The second effect never focuses, so ordinary empty/non-empty transitions such as send-clear or failed-send restore cannot take focus from another control.
- Undo and redo can change the draft without a caret restore or reveal: the machine replays a previous draft and the DOM selection stays where the browser clamps it. That predates this change and is unchanged by it — named here because the two restores that DO reveal make the omission look deliberate, and the helper is sitting right there if it is ever reported.
- Any layer added beside the backdrop belongs INSIDE the scrollport and must be as tall as the draft, or it reintroduces exactly this defect. This is the composer's standing hazard: the two-layer split is load-bearing for chips and highlights, so the coupling has to be structural, not maintained.

## Testing

The unit spec in [input-bar.spec.tsx](../../../../packages/client/ui-conversation/tests/input-bar.client.spec.tsx) asserts what jsdom can see: that one scrolling box contains both the textarea and the backdrop, that the backdrop's text is now the draft and nothing else, and that a late persisted draft reveals its caret without taking focus from another control. jsdom reports `scrollHeight === clientHeight` for every element and never scrolls one, so the geometry belongs to the browser scenario; the wheel-chaining cases stub the scrollport's metrics rather than the textarea's.

[composer-draft-scroll.e2e.ts](../../../../apps/web/tests/composer-draft-scroll.e2e.ts) measures the rest in chromium against the built client: a 40-line draft in a fresh workspace's blank composer, zero model calls. Every metric is read in the caret's own coordinate frame — where the textarea places line n, offset included — against a DOM Range over the backdrop's text for the same line, because that difference is what a user sees. The decisive case changes the offset and re-reads that difference **before the task ends**, which is before any `scroll` listener could have run: 0 with one scrollport, and the full delta with a mirror. A vacuity guard asserts the draft overflows the capped box first, and separate cases cover the cap, one wrap width across all three layers, a wheel gesture, a trailing-newline draft, and the caret-reveal path that the textarea's own scrolling used to handle — typing after scrolling away must bring the scrollport back to the caret.

A separate case covers the paste path end to end: a short draft, the caret at its end, and one `paste` event carrying real clipboard data — the same event a Cmd-V delivers, through the same handler — then the offset and the last pasted line. It waits on the offset rather than on the draft overflowing, because the restore lands one frame after the machine commits the draft; a build without the reveal fails that wait.

The two-geometry comparison behind the decision was measured on a standalone harness before implementing, since the old and new arrangements cannot both exist in the app at once: the same-task separation is 203/202/203px old against 3/2/3px new (chromium/firefox/WebKit), the wrap widths 768-against-776 old on WebKit against 1264/1264/1264 new on all three, and the textarea's own scrollable overflow 0 in the new geometry, which is what makes a second offset impossible rather than merely equal.

Note that the composer ships inside a client-module bundle, so `pnpm run build:web` alone does not pick up a change to `InputBar.tsx` — the package build must run for the browser lane to see it, and a scenario run against a stale `lib/` asserts against an older client than the tree.
