Textile

Textile is a tactile multiverse loom for generating and exploring branching possibilities. Grow a story from any turn, compare alternate continuations, or open an archive and follow the paths and relations already there. Keeps, notes, and generation provenance stay attached to their source material, so a path through the loom can become a durable, portable record.

Today, Textile combines OpenRouter-backed continuation and judging with a provider-free archive reader and curator. Its longer horizon is one human projection over a shared causal record for generative work—text and media, model and program traces, evaluations and selections, resident lives, and world histories. That horizon is direction, not a claim that every source or projection is implemented.

Status: private application, version 0.1.0. This repository is not an npm package and has not been published as a public product. It uses a checksum-pinned unpublished Lync 0.4.3 build described in vendor/LYNC-PROVENANCE.md.

Five-minute provider-free archive task

Requires Bun.

bun install --frozen-lockfile
bun run dev

Open the URL printed by bun run dev; it defaults to http://localhost:5173 on macOS and http://localhost:5000 elsewhere or under Replit. PORT overrides those defaults.

The example ZIP is parsed in the browser and is not uploaded. On the normal URL, its minimized readable projection participates in Textile's configured Lync relay, so use only a relay you trust. To disable the relay, append ?lync=local to the printed URL; the status strip must say Lync local-only. A Twitter import in this mode remains curatable in browser-local IndexedDB but cannot synchronize or produce working remote share links. Raw .lync imports use the stricter session-only, read-only projection in this mode.

Choose SELECT → Stories → Import Archive and select examples/twitter-archive/textile-twitter-demo.zip. The checked-in synthetic archive contains two reply threads, an external-parent reply, a retweet, and likes. It needs no OpenRouter key.

Press START to see the map. Use Down to follow a thread and Left/Right to compare roots. Press K to keep the focused turn and N to attach a note, then choose Export KEPT from that archive's Stories actions. The downloaded Markdown contains each kept target and its parent path. Import the Markdown in a fresh browser to reopen the selected context, source identities, keep, and note without the original ZIP.

See the exact walkthrough and privacy boundary.

Grow a generative loom

Generation requires an OpenRouter account and may incur provider charges; the archive task above does not. To use generation, put OPENROUTER_API_KEY=your_key in .env, start Textile with bun run dev, and open the local URL.

Textile opens on a story rooted at “Once upon a time, in Absalom,”. To replace that seed, press Backspace, choose edit, enter your text, and press START to save. Press Enter on a turn with no continuations to generate three possible next branches. Enter on a turn that already branches adds one more. Use Down to follow a branch, Left/Right to compare siblings, and Escape to move between the reading column and MAP.

Backtick opens Settings, where model, temperature, length, and automatic iteration are explicit. Each generated branch retains its model and settings; the underlying Loom also retains generation mode, program, reasoning policy, available provider usage, and any provider-returned reasoning provenance.

What works now

Textile accepts:

• Twitter/X archive ZIPs containing tweets, retweets, and likes, converted locally through Splice's browser-safe adapter;
• raw .lync and .jsonl event unions, including supported Splice source kinds, Curare annotations, named pointers, and safe Behold resident views;
• authenticated Behold ordered-prefix manifests with their selected Lync source files, opened as a read-only indexed review;
• conversation Loom .json snapshots; and
• Textile kept-context and kept-conversation Markdown artifacts.

The reading column follows the first causal parent as a tree. MAP preserves that geometry and shows additional causal parents, pointers, and annotation targets; the focused source's LINKS sheet provides direct typed traversal. Keeps and notes remain attached to exact source identities. Mutable Looms can synchronize through the configured relay, and share links open the same story, thread, or index in another browser.

The generative surface can create exact raw continuations or run the versioned Ax continuation program. Automatic judging records its candidate set and choice as a non-prose Loom turn. These features are unavailable when OpenRouter is not configured; archive reading, curation, sync, and export continue to work.

Present limits

• The only source-native ZIP adapter is Twitter/X. Other Splice sources enter through raw Lync or conversation snapshots.
• A first-parent tree is one view of a Lync DAG, not a complete graph model.
• Indexed ordered source sets are read-only. Existing eager single-file imports retain their mutable/exportable behavior.
• The indexed path has opened a retained 68 MB Behold checkpoint and a synthetic 490 MB projector fixture. The open tex-wrif ticket still requires a retained six-hour source set through the ordinary browser path; multi-day usability and browser-vendor heap behavior are not established.
• Kept artifacts preserve contextual selections; they do not infer training roles, a model perspective, or preference pairs.
• The application is private. Publication of Textile and the vendored Lync 0.4 dependency remain owner decisions.

Controls

Key	Action
Arrows	Move through depth, siblings, menus, or the Loom dial
Enter	Open or generate where the current mode permits it
Backspace	Open actions for the focused turn
Escape	Toggle the map
K	Keep the focused turn
N	Note the focused turn
L	Open typed Lync links for the focused source
Backtick	Open settings

The on-screen gamepad exposes the same navigation on touch devices. The mode bar is the authority for the controls available in the current projection.

Evidence and deeper documentation

The checked-in browser suite exercises native ZIP intake, visible navigation, exact-source keep and note actions, relay reconstruction, download, manifest inspection, and fresh-browser reopen. Unit tests cover import rejection, presentation, graph relations, policy suppression, portable export, generation provenance, authentication, and runtime storage. Run the current repository gate with:

bun run verify
bun run test:e2e

These tests establish bounded behavior. They do not establish general archive compatibility, public readiness, or the value of a multi-day corpus experience.

• Raw Lync reference: accepted graph behavior, indexed source sets, presentation boundaries, and corpus-loop rehearsal.
• Kept conversation contract and kept-context contract: portable artifact meaning and privacy boundaries.
• Operations: local and production commands, access gates, persistence, relay modes, and configuration.
• Interface design: why the projections and tactile control grammar have their present shape.
• Changelog: release-candidate history and the evidence claimed for version 0.1.0.

Project-owned unfinished work is in .tickets/; tex-wrif is the one open ticket in this checkout. Cross-project corpus coordination belongs to the workshop ledger, not this README.

License

MIT