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Open One Ask Question At A Time

Status: accepted

Current decision

An Ask questionnaire shows every question, but only one is open: its full text, options, and sample panel. Every other question is a single line, answered ones ending in → answer. The first question starts open. Answering a single-select question closes it and opens the next unanswered question, or moves to Submit when none is left. A question with multiSelect: true instead uses checkboxes: RET/click toggles an option and keeps it open, so further choices remain available. Custom text supplements those choices and editing or clearing it does not remove selected options. RET or a click on a closed question, or TAB/S-TAB, opens one. Moving point never opens or closes anything, so cursor motion cannot change the form's layout.

The form also keeps one height while it is pending. It reserves the screen rows its questions need with whichever question is open, or none, and fills the difference with blank lines above Submit. The questions stay anchored at the top of the form and Submit and the key hints at its bottom; opening or answering a question changes neither the form's height nor anything outside it.

The browser applies the same one-open-question and fixed-height rules. It keeps presentation state local and sends all answers atomically through the existing host questionnaire descriptor. Previous/Next controls and clickable summaries navigate questions; Tab and Shift-Tab keep the browser's ordinary focus traversal so every option, sample action, and text input stays keyboard accessible. Both navigation controls retain their slots when disabled. The browser measures the tallest open panel once per width, not while typing or moving focus, and leaves unchanged host replays intact. Changed host answers refresh untouched questions only: locally edited answers, custom drafts, the open question, inspected samples and focused selection survive until the first final submission settles the form. The same question definition is required; changing its questions or options starts a fresh local form. This follows the other live surfaces' rule that publication never erases a draft. Multi-select browser choices likewise stay open; Previous/Next explicitly leave the question. Single answers remain strings on the wire, multi answers are arrays of strings, and an empty array means no preference. The host validates the entire response against each question's mode before recording any answer. Summaries join multiple labels on their existing single line, and submission lists choices in offered order followed by optional custom text.

Rationale

With all questions expanded, a form with several sample-bearing questions pushed later questions and Submit off screen, and the reader had to find the question they were answering among the others' options. Showing one open question gives that focus while the one-line rest keeps the overview: which questions exist, which are answered and how.

Claude Code shows one question per tab with a separate review page. In an Emacs buffer a tab bar truncates in narrow windows, hides the other questions' text, and needs a review page that the collapsed answers here already are. A guest viewing a shared session also receives the whole form, which tabs would turn into per-question state to synchronise.

Opening only on explicit request follows the form's rule that motion never repaints: n/p across closed questions stay as cheap as any other cursor movement, and nothing moves under the reader.

The fixed height answers live testing: with only the open question at full height, opening a question with an eleven-row sample after one with two options changed the form by fifteen rows. With the composer anchored on its screen row (ADR 0126), every such change moved the whole form and the transcript above it.

Consequences

  • A closed question and its answer are flattened and cut to one line, the answer keeping at least half of it; the full text is in the help echo and appears when the question opens. The cut fits the narrowest window showing the view, and the form lays itself out again when that width changes. It used to wait for the next repaint, so the first keystroke after a resize changed the form's height: after a split from 150 to 70 terminal columns, the form went from 32 to 31 rows on the next n. Below about 25 columns each part keeps a 10-column minimum and the line wraps.
  • Digits and c act only in the open question.
  • A short open question leaves blank space above Submit, up to the height of the tallest open question.
  • Reserved rows are computed by following word-wrap over the rendered questions at the width a wrapped row holds, once per width. Without a right fringe, as on a terminal, the last column carries the continuation glyph, so that width is one less than the window's. Counting the full width let a row that exactly filled a 100-column terminal count as one row while it wrapped to two: with two such option descriptions in one question, opening it made the form 2 rows taller than any other question, measured as 19 against 17 rows. Across realistic descriptions at widths 50-160, about 4% of wrapped lines change their row count between the two widths.

Decision history

The form initially allowed one answer per question on both surfaces. During the browser collaboration review, the user explicitly requested multi-select in both native and browser Ask. The optional per-question boolean adds that choice without another form mode or review page. Unlike single-select auto-advance, multi-select must remain open after a toggle so answering does not conceal the remaining choices. The one-open-question and fixed-height decisions are unchanged.