Keep Alive Manager 1.0.0

Changelog

All notable changes to Keep Alive Manager are documented here.

The format follows Keep a Changelog, and this
project adheres to Semantic Versioning.

1.0.0 - 2026-08-23

First public release. Keep Alive Manager keeps long-running terminal AI clients from
idling out by injecting a configured message through Konsole's D-Bus sendText, with a
per-user daemon that owns the timers and a disposable TUI client that can attach and
detach without disturbing them.

Development before this tag happened in a private repository over nine commits. Rather
than invent version numbers for work that was never released, that history is
consolidated here.

Added

• Persistent per-user daemon (systemd --user) managing any number of Konsole AI
  sessions with independent countdowns, surviving client exit, pause, suspend, and
  daemon restart within a login session.
• Attachable TUI client with a creation wizard, live countdown view, per-target event
  log, and configuration editor. Closing a client never stops a keep-alive.
• Automatic discovery and classification of recognized AI CLIs (Claude Code, Codex,
  Kimi, and others) via a user-extensible pattern file.
• Strict target identity: Konsole session UUID, terminal PID, AI PID and start time, and
  foreground ancestry must all still match before any send. A lost identity becomes
  UNAVAILABLE and is never silently rebound to a replacement terminal.
• Message rotation with a canonical order, plus Enter-only modes: e sends a single
  Enter and resumes the normal message rotation, E switches to Enter-only from then on.
• Optional one-shot secondary prompt, delivered once rather than repeating.
• Scriptable CLI (list, add, pause, resume, delete, refresh, send,
  status) with --json output for automation.
• Presentation modes for terminals without Nerd Fonts or color: --no-icons,
  --no-color, --ascii, and NO_COLOR support, each a complete rendering path.
• Per-target runtime-only event logs, bounded in size, that disappear at logout.
• Desktop notifications for delivery failures and lost targets.
• Configuration surface of documented environment knobs covering cadences, timeouts,
  budgets, and retention.
• Test suite of 328 assertions across 14 files, dependency-free apart from an optional
  python3 used to drive a real pseudo-terminal, plus scripts/dev-check.sh.

Changed

• Daemon CPU with monitored targets reduced by roughly five times. Discovery now backs
  off on client presence alone rather than target count, pure string helpers return
  through REPLY instead of a subshell, and a countdown tick marks a target dirty
  instead of rewriting its checkpoint every second.
• Discovery is bounded by a per-pass time budget, so a degraded D-Bus cannot stall the
  scheduler and silently freeze every countdown.
• Health validation reuses the discovery snapshot only while it is fresh, falling back to
  a live check past KEEPALIVE_SNAPSHOT_MAX_AGE.
• Transient D-Bus failures are debounced rather than immediately destroying a target.
• Refusal reasons are propagated from the daemon to clients instead of failing silently.
• Runtime directory resolution follows a documented precedence with a hardened fallback,
  so the daemon works over SSH and in sessions without pam_systemd.
• Invalid tuning knobs warn once and fall back to their default rather than producing a
  degenerate loop.

Fixed

• PrivateTmp=yes in the service unit put the daemon in a mount namespace, which broke
  /proc/PID/cwd and /proc/PID/exe resolution and made every session display as
  unknown. The unit now hardens without namespacing, and carries a comment naming the
  directives that must never return.
• The creation wizard silently rejected custom messages and intervals, so only default
  values worked. Its prompt helper returned the prompt text on stdout instead of the
  typed value.
• Unrecognized escape sequences decoded as a bare Escape, so arrow, function, keypad, and
  bracketed-paste keys immediately exited the TUI. Key decoding is now byte-by-byte.
• A key typed immediately after Escape was swallowed.
• Cancelling the wizard exited the whole client, because a non-zero return escaped the
  action loop under set -e.
• Frames that redrew shorter content over longer content left stale tails, most visibly a
  duplicated key-hint footer.
• A clean daemon stop was logged as a unit failure.
• A partially delivered message is retried as owed rather than counted as sent.

Security

• The control FIFO carries only short request identifiers. Messages and configuration
  travel through private request directories under $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR and are validated
  as data, never evaluated as shell code.
• The daemon is strictly per-user and never runs as root.
• Runtime state is created under umask 077, and the non-XDG fallback directory is
  ownership-checked and hardened before use.