Surfaces & coordinates

Surfaces

The JouleOS shell presents a workspace of surfaces rather than windows and files. A Surface is a live object in the single-level store with SurfaceContent, an intent history, and a capability set. You ask for things through one intent bar; results spawn as surfaces you can arrange.

Layout modes (native + PWA): free, columns, focus, stack, grid. Each surface carries its own energy attribution — you can see, per surface, what it has cost.

workspace
 ├─ surface  "Welcome to JouleOS"
 ├─ surface  "Fabric Energy Breakdown"   ← live joule pie
 └─ surface  "Action chain"              ← deterministic step trace

Coordinates

A coordinate is a place the runtime can lower onto, described by the control vector. The three shipping coordinates:

Coordinate	Renderer	Persistence	Notes
`native`	winit + wgpu	`~/.jouleos/` arena	energy bridge on :9911
`browser`	WebGPU → Canvas2D	IndexedDB-backed arena	the PWA
`bare-metal`	ramfb framebuffer	direct	`x86_64-unknown-none`, `no_std`

The shell crate is no_std + alloc so the same surface logic runs on all three — the renderer is swapped behind the ShellRenderer trait, not the application code.