v1.0.229

✨ New: Skills panel as a card grid

The Skills sidebar is now a responsive multi-column card grid (the same shell as the recent-sessions and open-project modals) instead of a cramped vertical list. Each card shows the skill icon, name, full path with a copy button, and the complete description. Search is inline in the header next to a bordered Add Skill button. The skill preview now renders through the same InteractiveMarkdownPreview as the chat stream, so you get a TOC sidebar and consistent styling.

✨ New: Searchable recent sessions

Cockpit now keeps up to 100 recent sessions (week-bounded, minimum 15) instead of a hard 15-session cap, so anything from the past week is recoverable. The sidebar dropdown still streams its top-15 view, and a new expand button opens a searchable, cross-project grid of every persisted session — card layout, absolute timestamps, and first/last message previews, aligned with the project-sessions view.

✨ New: Markdown opens in preview

Opening a markdown file now defaults to the rendered preview; the toggle reads Exit Preview while you're previewing. Leading YAML frontmatter (--- blocks) that used to render as a garbled paragraph is now parsed into a clean key/value table as part of the document. This lives in the shared renderer, so chat, the explorer, and skill previews all benefit, and it degrades gracefully on empty or invalid frontmatter.

✨ New: Console empty state + New PTY

When the console has no bubbles, it now shows a short guide to the supported bubble types and how to trigger each (command / interactive PTY / browser / database / notebook), plus a New PTY button that launches an interactive zsh terminal.

🐛 Fix: Closing a PTY bubble actually kills it

Closing or deleting a running PTY bubble used to only drop the history entry and frontend state — the backend process kept running and the bubble reappeared on refresh. PTY bubbles now have a single authoritative destroy path, so closing or clearing one really ends the backend process and it stays gone.

🐛 Fix: Light-mode contrast

The light palette had collapsed background, card, and muted surfaces into a narrow lightness band with near-invisible borders. The semantic tokens are re-tiered into a distinct ladder so surfaces and borders read clearly again (AA-verified: 16:1 foreground, ≥4.9:1 muted text, 5:1 focus ring). The dark theme is untouched.