PromptPlus

|Adr-Plus Fields|Values Migrated | |–|–| |ADR|Live answer line follows the cursor, not a checked summary| |Version|01| |Revision|01| |Scope|| |Domain|| |Created|Proposed (2026-07-30)| |Changed|Accepted (2026-07-30)| |Superseded||

# PromptPlus ## **ADR0024V01R01** [](https://www.nuget.org/packages/PromptPlus) [](https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT) [](https://dotnet.microsoft.com/)

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ADR0024V01R01 — Live answer line follows the cursor, not a checked summary

Context

Every control with a live/final answer distinction has two independent rendering paths: WriteAnswer (the live answer, redrawn every frame while the control is running) and FinishTemplate / BuildCheckedItemsText / equivalent (the final answer, written once after Enter/confirm). Before this decision, what the live path showed was inconsistent across controls:

• TableControl (single-choice) already showed the row/column currently under the cursor, resolved through a GetAnswerText(item) helper that reads TextSelector when configured, otherwise the currently Tab-focused column’s cell value. MultiFileControl and MultiTreeControl also already followed the cursor since their inception.
• MultiSelectControl and MultiTableControl, by contrast, rebuilt the live answer as a comma-joined summary of every currently checked item on each check/uncheck, independent of where the cursor was.
• Separately, ExtraInfo/ExtraInfoAsync (SelectControl, MultiSelectControl, TreeControl, MultiTreeControl) and the byte-size suffix (FileControl, MultiFileControl) were rendered only in the list row, never in the answer. The list row has no horizontal scroll: when it overflows the console width, the cut-off text is unrecoverable. The answer line, in every one of these controls, already supports horizontal scrolling for exactly this kind of overflow (see ADR0025 for how that scrolling itself behaves).

This decision was implemented across two rounds: MultiSelectControl’s live answer plus ExtraInfo on SelectControl/MultiSelectControl first (commit 2016a06), then MultiTableControl’s live answer plus ExtraInfo on TreeControl/MultiTreeControl and the size suffix on FileControl/MultiFileControl in a follow-up round covering every other control with the same shape.

Decision

1. The live answer always reflects the item/row currently under the navigation cursor, never an aggregated summary of checked/selected items. This applies uniformly to Select, MultiSelect, Table, MultiTable, File, MultiFile, Tree, and MultiTree. Table is the reference implementation this decision generalizes, not a new pattern.
2. The final answer keeps its own existing semantics and is unaffected by (1). For Multi* controls it stays a plain, comma-joined summary of checked items; for single-choice controls it stays the plain selected value. It never includes ExtraInfo, the size suffix, or the live cursor’s per-column value.
3. ExtraInfo/ExtraInfoAsync and the file-size suffix are appended to the live answer only, never to the final answer — because the live answer line can recover overflowed text via horizontal scroll, and the final answer is meant to stay a clean, plain summary.
4. Formatting of the appended text follows each control’s own existing convention, not a unified one: Select/MultiSelect use the configurable PrefixExtraInfoValue/SuffixExtraInfoValue (default " ("/")"); Tree/MultiTree use a fixed two-space separator with no parens; File/MultiFile use a fixed two-space separator before the formatted byte size. Unifying these formats was explicitly out of scope.
5. MultiTable’s per-column complexity (Tab/Shift+Tab changes which column the live answer reflects) needed no new logic — the existing GetAnswerText(item) helper, already proven by Table in production, was reused as-is by pointing it at the single item under the cursor instead of joining every checked row.

Consequences

• Positive: one consistent mental model across every control with a live/final answer split — the answer shows what you are looking at right now; only Enter commits a summary.
• Positive: users navigating a long list with ExtraInfo or a file size can always recover overflowed text via the answer line’s horizontal scroll, where before it was only visible if the list row happened to fit the console width.
• Negative / trade-off: MultiSelect/MultiTable’s live answer no longer shows a running count of checked items while navigating; that information is carried by the existing pagination/footer count (Checked: N), not duplicated here.
• Negative / trade-off (documented, not fixed): Tree/MultiTree’s GetExtraInfoText has no per-node cache, unlike Select/MultiSelect’s ItemSelect<T>.ExtraText. This decision adds one extra delegate call per frame for the focused node, on top of the already-uncached per-frame cost the list row already paid for every visible node. A caching improvement is a separate, unrequested change and was not made here.
• Resolved: a MultiSelect group header under the cursor shows the group name in the live answer — this is not a regression of the group-header case, it is the same “follow the cursor” rule applied to a header row instead of an item row.

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