Make Cockpit / ink-ui animations a bit faster

[kud]

Goal

Make the overall animation/motion cadence in Cockpit / @kud/ink-ui feel a little faster and more responsive.

This is not just about the spinner. The spinner is one visible example, but the intent is to review animated UI feedback more generally and tighten timings where they currently feel slightly sluggish.

Direction

• Review the animations / timed transitions used by Cockpit and shared @kud/ink-ui components.
• Prefer adjusting shared timings in @kud/ink-ui when the behaviour is generic, rather than adding Cockpit-only overrides.
• Include the shared Spinner cadence (src/components/Spinner.tsx) as one example, but do not scope the work to it.
• Keep the current visual language and animation styles; this is mainly a small timing/speed pass.
• Avoid making motion frantic or distracting — the target is simply a snappier feel.

Check

Exercise Cockpit after the changes and compare the main animated states / feedback against the current behaviour.

Done when

Cockpit feels noticeably a little snappier overall, and shared ink-ui animation timings are consistent where appropriate, without changing the visual style or making motion overly fast.

[kud]

Inventory pass, no code changed — the issue asks for a perceptual result ("a bit snappier") without target numbers, and every knob below is a look choice rather than a bug, so here is the complete set to pick from in one go.

Everything timed in @kud/ink-ui on main (v0.23.0) is three constants. Verified by grepping origin/main for setInterval/setTimeout/interval/duration/delay/frame across all non-test src/:

Where	Constant	Now	What it governs
src/components/Spinner.tsx	cliSpinners.dots.interval	80 ms, 10 frames → 800 ms per rotation	The only continuous animation the package ships
src/components/Toast.tsx	duration default	2000 ms	How long a self-dismissing toast stays up
src/demo/entries.tsx	MARKER_MS	150 ms, 4-frame ramp → 600 ms cycle	Demo gallery only — not shipped behaviour

Notes that bear on any change:

• Spinner has no timing knob. It hardcodes cliSpinners.dots (cli-spinners@3.4.0) and takes only label. Speeding it up means either an interval override or a different preset — 80 ms is already at the fast end of the cli-spinners presets, so there is not much headroom before it reads as frantic.
• Tabs has no animation at all on main; the underline jumps to the active tab. The travelling-rule work is parked on feat/tabs-underline-animation and is unfinished, so there is nothing to speed up there — only something to finish, which is separate work.
• There is no motion token. src/tokens.ts exports colors and spacing only. "Shared ink-ui animation timings … consistent where appropriate" would mean adding a third token group beside them and routing Spinner/Toast through it — a public-API addition, worth deciding deliberately rather than as a side effect of a timing tweak.
• Nothing pins these in tests. There is no Spinner.test.tsx, and Toast.test.tsx passes explicit duration props, so changing the 2000 ms default breaks no test — and equally, nothing would catch a regression.
• Unrelated but adjacent: docs/spinner.mdx says the component "builds on ink-spinner". It does not — ink-spinner is not a dependency; cli-spinners is.

The Cockpit half is unverified. There is no cockpit repo in gh repo list kud (143 repos) and no local checkout, so I could not enumerate its timings. Whoever picks this up will need to point at where Cockpit actually lives.

[kud]

Correction to the note above: Cockpit is not a missing repo — it is packages/gh-cockpit inside kud/gh. Verified 2026-09-09 (kud/gh/packages/gh-cockpit/package.json exists; gh repo list kud has no standalone cockpit because it never was one).

So the Cockpit half of this issue is enumerable after all — its timing constants live in that package rather than here.

[kud]

Design pass, no code changed. My read is that the timings in @kud/ink-ui are already right, and that the thing which would make Cockpit feel snappier is not in this repo. Both halves verified on disk today.

What ink-ui actually contributes to Cockpit

One animation — and it is not the one the reachability looks like from here:

• Spinner does reach Cockpit, transitively. LoadingScreen wraps it (src/components/LoadingScreen.tsx:3), gh-ink imports LoadingScreen (packages/gh-ink/src/inbox/inbox.tsx:42) and mounts it at exactly one site — inbox.tsx:5301, Fetching ${title}…, gated on state.phase === "loading". It appears the moment the phase flips, so there is no delayed start to shorten either.
• Toast is not used at all. Zero hits for Toast across packages/gh-cockpit/src and packages/gh-ink/src, and nothing inside ink-ui imports it, so there is no transitive path. Control pattern colors matched 9 files in the same call, so the search did run.

So the Direction's premise — prefer adjusting shared timings here rather than adding Cockpit-only overrides — holds for exactly one constant.

And that constant is already at the right tempo

cli-spinners@3.4.0 dots is 10 frames at 80 ms, an 800 ms rotation, and it is the 7th fastest of the 90 presets in that package (derived from the installed spinners.json, not remembered).

Below roughly 70 ms, braille dots stop reading as one point travelling round the ring and start reading as a shimmer. You lose the sense of direction, which is the whole signal a spinner carries: a fast spinner says working, a blurred one says broken. Faster here buys jitter, not snap. I would leave 80 ms exactly where it is.

Toast's 2000 ms default is mildly generous for a one-line confirmation sitting beside a glyph — 1500 ms would read tidier — but with no consumer, changing it is invisible today and a behaviour change for the first caller who arrives. Not a trade worth making unattended.

Where the sluggishness would actually be

kud/gh → packages/gh-ink/src/inbox/inbox.tsx, and it is dwell rather than frame rate:

Constant	Value	Kind
MERGED_FRAME_MS	150 ms	frame rate — the shared ticker every row animation runs off
TRANSIT_FRAME_TICKS	1	divisor, so ramps run at the ticker's own rate
MERGED_HOLD_MS	3000 ms	dwell
TRANSIT_HOLD_MS	7000 ms	dwell
LEAVING_HOLD_MS	2500 ms	dwell
flash clear, inbox.tsx:3588	2000 ms	dwell
health note, components/health-panel.tsx:132	2500 ms	dwell
ai-panel back, gh-cockpit/src/views/ai-panel.tsx:96 and :181	1400 / 900 ms	dwell

The frame rate there is already argued down to its floor in the file itself — the block above TRANSIT_FRAME_TICKS walks the divisor 3 → 2 → 1 and closes with "there is nowhere left to go … anything faster means shortening the ramp, which costs a frame of the dissolve rather than time." That reasoning is sound and I would not reopen it.

Which leaves the holds. They govern how long a marker stands, not how fast it moves, and a screen can feel slow entirely because things linger: 7 s is a long time to keep a badge on a row you finished reading in the first second. Each hold carries its own written rationale in-file, so that is a deliberate pass rather than a sweep.

What I did not do, and why

No code changed here. The pass that would satisfy "Cockpit feels noticeably a little snappier" is a dwell pass in kud/gh, which is a different repo from the one this issue is filed against. And the "shared ink-ui animation timings … consistent where appropriate" half needs a motion token group beside colors and spacing — src/tokens.ts exports those two and nothing else — with Spinner and Toast routed through it. That is a public API addition, and yours to call rather than mine.

Unverified: I have not run Cockpit, so I cannot say which hold is the one that reads as slow to you. Sitting with a merge sparkle and a transit mark side by side would settle it in about ten seconds, and that answer is worth more than any number I could pick from here.

[kud]

decision-needed · decision — ink-ui's only timings (spinner.tsx dots 80 ms, toast.tsx duration 2000 ms) were ruled right by the design pass on 2026-09-09 and are unchanged on main (v0.30.0); the remaining options are all yours: add a motion token group to src/tokens.ts (public API), run a dwell pass on the hold constants in kud/gh packages/gh-ink, or close this as no-change here

Clears when: kud picks one of: motion token in ink-ui, dwell pass moved to kud/gh, or close as won't-change

Escalated by k-autopilot.

[kud]

Resolved in kud/gh 3b0156d, not here: ink-ui's own timings stay (spinner 80 ms, toast 2000 ms). Cockpit's lag was dwell, so gh-ink's holds were shortened (merged 3000→2400, leaving 2500→1500, flash and health note →1500), and both flashes now clear the previous timer.