Preserve literal newlines when inserting text into web composers #76

Found while validating #67 against Ace's actual WKWebView composer, under githubnext/ace2#8 / #65.

desktop_insert turned a newline in its text into an Enter/submit action. The first line became a real message in the isolated validation channel; the rest began entering a new draft before the native receiver check stopped the call with an uncertain outcome. Resolved by #67, merged as 8fb8ccf; the original reproduction is preserved below.

Reproduction and evidence

• Candidate: Add literal desktop insertion with reserved clipboard ownership #67 at d04c8c489441a8781cad28c0b674a7589f0c4feb, signed development app, embedded Peekaboo 4.8.0. Real local host/channel and WKWebView, no mocked input.
• After independent Accessibility inspection and explicit field focus (the separate availability/focus limitations are recorded in Explain native inspection failure when the desktop or target window becomes unavailable desktop-tools#1/Add native targeted scrolling #70), take a fresh native observation of an initially empty Message AXTextArea.
• Call desktop_insert with Ace 🧑🏽‍💻 café\nalpha duplicate omega\nbeta duplicate gamma\nFinish 東京.
• Native result: unknown, window_targeted_events, may_have_dispatched, at least 23 emitted input units. The error reports that the Accessibility text receiver no longer matches the exact target and requires a fresh observation.
• Fresh native observation shows a posted message containing Ace 🧑🏽‍💻 café and a remaining draft of alpha duplic. The text-area frame is still 808×45 at (426,779); an auto-resize explanation is not established.
• Evidence on the validation host: /tmp/ace-actions-validation-xaLuQq/keyboard-webview-TnvO1M/keyboard-attempt-p4VBE1/ and the fresh post-failure observation in keyboard-webview-QJVHFD/. Input was not replayed and channel history was preserved.

Required behavior

Text insertion must preserve literal Unicode and newlines without silently invoking the application's Enter/submit behavior. Explicit key presses remain separate. Determine the correct literal-text path for WKWebView/editable controls and its relationship to the GUI-owned paste work in githubnext/desktop-tools#3/#75. Keep exact target/focus authority, clipboard preservation where applicable, and truthful partial/unknown outcomes; weakening the receiver check or repeating a partially delivered request is not a fix.

Validate the actual Ace composer: inserting multiline text leaves one draft with the intended contents and adds no message; contextual selection and insertion preserve surrounding text. Retain the real AppKit, hosted routing/replay, changed-focus refusal, Stop, and restart guarantees. A constant-size AppKit field alone does not cover this behavior.

Resolution — merged #67

The final signed head eff5e49 replaces character-event insertion with one GUI-owned plain-text paste. Newlines remain text instead of acquiring the editor’s Enter/submit semantics. The existing native lane, clipboard gate, snapshot lease, and exact receiver validation remain in force; uncertain delivery is not retried or reported as completed.

Final dogfooding also exposed ProseMirror’s default plain-text parser turning single newlines into separate paragraphs, which made the actual Accessibility value differ from the intended text. Ace now parses plain-text line breaks as hard_break nodes and preserves them during plain-text copying. Rich HTML and code-block paste retain their existing behavior. Native exact-text verification was not weakened.

On the signed final build, a contextual replacement of the second repeated match in Ace’s actual composer passed with Unicode/emoji, a literal newline, exact surrounding text and UTF-16 caret, observed consumption, restored clipboard, and released ownership. Live observation and independent durable replay confirmed every chat’s messages were unchanged; no text was submitted. Evidence on the validation host: /tmp/ace-literal-composer.bTz4ep/validation-ready/result.json.

Real pi/Anthropic completed-insertion and Stop-during-pending-paste cases also passed. Restarting the isolated channel worker retained exact tool results/images and provider usage without repeating input. Stop preserved the partial-input warning, and the original pending paste arrived once afterward. Evidence: /tmp/ace-literal-channel.5gwa0r/completed/validation-completed/result.json and /tmp/ace-literal-channel.5gwa0r/stop/validation-stop/result.json.

This closes the actual-composer newline/submission defect. Broader hosted validation remains in #65, and the remaining clipboard ownership failure/recovery matrix stays open in #78. Public clipboard tools remain #75. All disposable fixture apps are closed, and final cleanup preserved the current clipboard generation.