Developer Cast Window Prompts

Prompts in a rofi-spawned cast window

A cast started from a rofi keybind runs in a terminal window the viewer is not sitting at. Carrying TotalEpisodes through the handoff made HandleLastEpisodeCompletion reachable there for the first time, and with it four interactive prompts that can now open a full-screen menu in that window and wait for an answer nobody is there to give.

This is a record of what those prompts should do instead, and why. It is the companion to Casting Verification, which is how any of it gets checked against a real device.

Why the window cannot simply prompt

RunCastSession sets config.RofiSelection = false before anything else, so the spawned window is always the Bubble Tea path, whatever the config says. Two places branch on that flag, and in this window both resolve the same way:

Site	Resolves to
cast_controls.go castControlsBeginTerminal	controls start: raw mode, one reader goroutine
selection_menu.go dynamicSelectInternal	menus draw as a full-screen TUI

So the window is guaranteed to have a goroutine parked in os.Stdin.Read at the same moment a Bubble Tea program starts its own reader on the same descriptor. The bytes are split non-deterministically. Nothing is misinterpreted — every one of these prompts fires between episodes, when no episode holds a subscription, so decoded commands are dropped — but the keystrokes are consumed before that check, and menu navigation loses roughly half of them.

The damage that matters more is not cosmetic. A prompt that blocks ends the season: the window waits forever, the device sits on the finale's last frame, and nothing explains why. A viewer who comes back to a cast that stopped for no visible reason has been told less than a viewer who was told "skipped".

A suspend flag does not fix this. The reader is parked in os.Stdin.Read and takes the next byte whatever its state, and consumed bytes cannot be pushed back for a TUI to re-read. Suppressing the prompts is what removes the race, rather than working around it.

What is actually reachable

Enumerated from the cast session's two entry points, castSessionEpisode and the advance it runs. Two entries that look reachable are not:

• Audio sub/dub fallback already does the right thing. ResolveEpisodeURLAlternateModeWithPrompt passes ask = !AutoAudioFallback, and AutoAudioFallback defaults to true, so the default path prints No <mode> for episode N — playing <other>. and continues without asking.
• promptAnimepaheEpisodeFallbackConsent is dead code — one reference in the tree, its own definition. Worth deleting, but it decides nothing.
• confirmUnairedEpisode is guarded inside StartPlayback, which the spawned session never calls.

That leaves four:

Prompt	Site	When
Provider match confirm	provider_mapping.go confirmProviderMatch	episode 2+, stale mapping
Playback recovery	provider_mapping.go promptEpisodeLinkFailureRecovery	episode 2+, resolve dead end
Rate this anime	otakase.go HandleLastEpisodeCompletion	season end
Sequel select / action	otakase.go handleSequelCheck	season end

The sequel prompt is only ever reached at series end. advanceDecision makes Continue and SeriesFinished mutually exclusive, so the next episode is StartNextEpisode's business with castAwaitNextEpisode's countdown, and that countdown already returns immediately when castSeasonFinished rather than counting into a finale. "Sequel" here means a further instalment in the franchise — AniList's SEQUEL relation, which for a show split across cours is a separate media entry, so it often reads as "season 2" without being the season machinery.

The answers

Set on a per-run config flag, CastNonInteractive, tagged config:"-" the way CastToDevice is so it stays out of the config file. RunCastSession sets it.

• Provider match — accept. A stale mapping is the common cause and refusing it ends an episode that would otherwise play. The alternative, "select manually", needs a menu that cannot be shown.
• Playback recovery — one automatic remap, then decline. This needs care: resolveEpisodeLinksWithRecovery is a bare for {} in which "remap" continues, so today only a human backing out ends it. An unconditional auto-remap would loop forever, which is a worse hang than the prompt. One attempt, mirroring the attemptedAutoAudio flag already in that loop, then back out with the diagnosis printed.
• Rate this anime — asked in the panel, with arrows and Enter. It started as a countdown and declined, which was wrong twice over: accepting it led to RateAnime, which opens another prompt for the score, and that prompt is exactly what a cast window cannot show. So the accept key produced no rating — and, because a cancelled prompt returned nil, a summary reading "rating saved". The countdown is now the score picker itself: ↑↓ move between 1 and 10, Enter saves, and only the window running out declines. Nothing else declines, so a stray keypress cannot rate or un-rate a show on the viewer's behalf. The ten seconds is for absence, not for answering. It exists because a window nobody is at has to resolve by itself rather than sit on a prompt forever, and it is not a budget for the question: a viewer shown a clock is being rushed, and a viewer told "9s to answer" and left alone reasonably concludes a countdown to being rated 8 rather than to losing the rating. So the first ↑↓ takes the clock off the panel and ends the deadline with it. From then on Enter saves, q declines — both named on the panel, so neither is a guess, and the footer changes to say so — and there is no way out but one of them. This needs the panel to be held for the whole cast, which is also what removed the alt-buffer blink between episodes.
• Sequel — decline. Declining is reported. A countdown here would be answering a question about a different show, which is not a thing to decide on the viewer's behalf.

Reporting matters as much as the answer. HandleLastEpisodeCompletion already accumulates a summary and prints Completion summary: …, and handleSequelCheck already returns summary strings. Every suppressed prompt says what it assumed, because a silent default is the same failure shape as the AniList repeat-count bug — a decision made on the viewer's behalf that they never see.

The safety net

The four above are handled at their call sites. Separately, dynamicSelectInternal and promptCancelable refuse to draw when CastNonInteractive is set, and return an error instead.

This is belt and braces on purpose. The inventory above was built by reading call sites, and reading call sites is how promptAnimepaheEpisodeFallbackConsent looked like a live 500 MB consent prompt in an earlier draft of this document when it has never run. A prompt added later, on any path, degrades to declining and a log line rather than hanging a window across the room.

Known limits

• The rate countdown is a sibling of castAwaitNextEpisode, not a call into it. That helper is coupled to the cast panel, and CastEpisode releases the panel in a defer — by season end the alternate buffer is gone and the subscription released. The countdown has to take its own subscription to be cancellable and draw as ordinary terminal output.
• provider_mapping.go prints the recovery diagnosis with a bare fmt.Println. In raw mode \n does not return the cursor, which Out already guards against; the diagnosis prints diagonally. Fixed here, on the episode 2+ path where it is otherwise only reachable.
• None of this is verified against hardware. See Casting Verification.