47 — An archive button on the card, where the card is

Status: Done PR: https://github.com/12vectors/bench/pull/45 Assignee: istos Priority: Medium — archiving works, but only by dragging a card the length of the board to a tray at the far corner Type: Feature

Today the only way to archive a card is to drag it onto the activity bar. That is a long gesture for a common tidy-up, it is awkward on a trackpad, and it is invisible to anyone who has not discovered it. Put the same action on the card itself: an archive chip at the right-hand end of the footer row, arming on the first click and firing on the second.

Context

The tray is #tray in manager/core/board.html:587, rendered at :1581 with the glyph ⌸ (it swaps to ↓ while a card is over the bar). That glyph is the one the card's chip must wear — the whole point is that the two are visibly the same action.
The rule about which cards may be archived already exists and is already enforced server-side: ARCHIVE_FROM = {"backlog", "to-do", "done"} in manager/core/taskfiles.py:111, with archive_task() refusing anything else at :123 ("archive takes cards from backlog, to-do or done only"). AGENTS.md says the same in prose: cards in the working stages cannot be archived — finish or walk them back first.
The routes exist: POST /api/archive and /api/unarchive (manager/core/httpd.py:200, :211), with state.LAST_ARCHIVED behind the ⌘Z undo the toast promises.
The arm-then-fire pattern is built and general: actLabel(rest, confirm, busy) and armAction() (board.html:1191 onwards) drive it, and the stylesheet already anticipates a chip using it — button.chip2.armed is styled at :240 alongside the hover actions.
The footer row is where .chip2 lives: CI, copilot, PR, drive, and the $ local-command chips.

Affected areas: manager/core/board.html — the card's footer row and its click handling. No server change: the API and its guard are done.

What to build

An archive chip at the right-hand end of the card's footer row, wearing ⌸. Quiet in its resting state — this is a tidy-up, not a destination — and taking the --alarm register when armed, exactly as the hover actions do.
Only on backlog/, to-do/ and done/ cards. On in-progress and review cards it is not there at all, rather than present-and-refusing: the board's habit is to offer what it will do. ARCHIVE_FROM is the list; read it from the state the board already has rather than hard-coding a second copy in the page.
Arm on the first click, archive on the second, through the same helper the other two-step actions use. Nothing about archiving should invent its own confirmation.
The undo stays the promise it is. The existing toast — ⌘Z brings it back — must fire from this path too, because it is the sentence that makes a one-click archive safe.
The tray's count follows, since it is the same action reaching the same place.

Out of scope — tempting neighbours left alone:

The drag-to-the-bar gesture, which keeps working exactly as it does.
Archiving from in-progress or review, by any route.
Bulk archive, or archiving from the card sheet.
What archiving does in git. Card 44 settled that: an archive goes out through _relocate like every other board-made write to a task file, attributed and committed under the same gate a move is.

Acceptance

Given a card in backlog/, to-do/ or done/, when it is rendered, then its footer row ends with a ⌸ chip.
Given a card in in-progress/ or review/, no such chip appears.
Clicking the chip once arms it visibly and archives nothing; clicking again archives the card, and it leaves the column.
An armed chip disarms itself the way the other armed actions do, rather than staying armed until the page is reloaded.
The toast after archiving names ⌘Z, and ⌘Z brings the card back to the stage it came from.
The archive tray's count goes up by one.
Edge case: a card archived from the board by someone else — or by hand on disk — while the chip is armed does not leave a stale armed chip behind or fire a second archive.
Dragging a card to the bar still archives it.

Notes

Nothing blocks this. Card 44 already made an archive commit itself, which is what makes a one-click archive safe to offer: before it, this card would have turned an occasional uncommitted deletion into one a click away, and in team mode an uncommitted deletion is what stops sync publishing anything at all.

Risks — the footer row is described in AGENTS.md as carrying tool chips, which are "destinations, not statuses", while actions live in the status pill's slot on hover. An action chip in the footer is a deliberate exception to that division: the pill's slot is capped at two actions and already spent on most of these cards, and the card asks for this control to sit bottom-right. If it reads as noise on a full board, the fallback is to reveal it on hover like the other actions rather than to move it back into the pill.

Work report — 2026-08-01 17:27 (Nell)

The suite is still running; I'll wait for the monitor rather than poll further.

5.2 KiB Raw Permalink Blame History