An About menu, and the build stamp behind it¶

The menu bar had one entry, View, and nothing anywhere named the running build. There is now an About menu with three items: two links out to the repository and the documentation site, and a window carrying the logo, the version, the commit, whether the binary is a release build, and the licence. build.rs stamps the commit and its date into the binary as environment variables, so the window reports the tree it was built from rather than a hard-coded string. The two menu links needed eframe's links feature, which the workspace had off. Without it open_url is silently a no-op on native.

State before¶

menu_bar.rs held a single view_menu, and Tab::ALL was the only thing it offered. Nothing in the app named its own version, its commit, or its licence, so a bug report had no build to attach to it. The logo assets landed under assets/ earlier the same day and nothing referenced them.

eframe was pinned with default-features = false and four features, none of them links. egui-winit compiles open_url_in_browser to a log::warn! without it, so any hyperlink or Context::open_url on native did nothing.

What was done¶

New files marked +, modified marked ~.

Cargo.toml                                   ~ eframe gains "links", and `image` joins the
                                               workspace deps (eframe already pulls the same
                                               crate with the same single feature)

crates/henad-app/
├── Cargo.toml                               ~ image
├── build.rs                                 ~ emit_commit_stamp(): HENAD_COMMIT and
│                                               HENAD_COMMIT_DATE via `git`, plus rerun-if-changed
│                                               on HEAD and the branch ref
└── src/
    ├── lib.rs                               ~ menu_bar_panel now takes the state; about_modal
    │                                          runs beside fault_modal
    ├── state.rs                             ~ about_open, logo_texture
    └── ui/
        ├── mod.rs                           ~ registers about
        ├── menu_bar.rs                      ~ about_menu + link_button
        └── about.rs                         + the window, the build rows, and the clipboard text

about_menu sits after view_menu and holds Source code, Documentation and About Henad. The two links carry MDI_OPEN_IN_NEW and show the destination on hover, and go through Context::open_url so the web build opens a tab and the native build hands off to the system browser.

The window¶

A Modal, the same container fault.rs uses. The logo, the name and the tagline sit in a row, with the two links repeated underneath the tagline; a two-column grid below carries Version, Commit, Build and License; Copy and Close sit under a separator.

Four things the layout has to survive:

A 300pt window. main.rs sets that as the minimum, well under the 420pt the window wants. The width is pinned with set_width to whatever fits, the area is constrained, and the tagline wraps. Capping with set_max_width instead let the window size itself past a narrow viewport and put the label column off the left edge.
A short window. The header and the grid scroll inside a ScrollArea, so Copy and Close stay reachable.
No git. HENAD_COMMIT comes out empty from a source tarball, and the row then reads Unknown.
The clipboard. Copy writes one Label: value line per row. It is plain ASCII on purpose: the app's clipboard path mangles non-ASCII on macOS, and a · separator arrived as a single 0xe1 byte.

Build reads Release or Debug from cfg!(debug_assertions). Benchmark numbers here have been wrong before because a debug build was mistaken for a release one, so the window says which it is.

The logo¶

assets/henad-logo-transparent-256.png is included in the binary and decoded once on the first open through image, then kept in AppState::logo_texture. reset_simulation clears the grid and density textures and leaves this one alone. The white mark suits the dark window fill, which is the only fill the app has: setup_custom_styles gives the light theme slot the dark style too.

State after¶

./check.sh is green, the web build included. Two tests cover the parts that can rot without anyone noticing: the bundled PNG decodes to a square, and Copy emits a line per row.

Driven through the live app over the egui inspection port:

the three menu items render with their icons,
About Henad opens the window and Close, Escape and a backdrop click all close it,
Copy puts four clean-ASCII lines on the clipboard,
Documentation brings the browser to the front, which is what the links feature buys,
the window fits inside a 340 by 400 viewport with every label and both buttons visible.

The commit row reads 0fd5051d (2026-09-08) on this tree.

Issues found & future directions¶

Popups and modals are translucent. The View menu, the About menu and both modals let the panels behind them show through, badly enough that the About grid is hard to read over the viewport. This predates the session, Frame::popup uses window_fill() and the style sets that opaque, so the cause is somewhere else. The View menu shows it on an untouched code path, which is the cheapest place to reproduce it.
The clipboard is not UTF-8 clean on macOS. Context::copy_text turned · into a lone 0xe1, the Mac OS Roman byte for it. Avoided here by staying ASCII. It still affects the fault modal's Copy, where an error message is not under our control.
links costs 32 crates. webbrowser pulls url, idna and the icu tree, and jni for Android. The alternative is spawning open/xdg-open/start directly, which is a dozen lines but puts the platform matrix, the missing-opener case and process reaping on us.
The window is native-shaped in one place. Build and the commit are the same on the web, but a wasm visitor has no notion of a local build. A Target row, or the host summary the System tab already collects, would say more there.

Manual notes (human)¶

A fairly trivial task. Manually changed a few stylistic/conventional points.