A window on the sky, and flags on the routes

The terminal board says what is overhead.  This says where: a real map
with the aircraft moving on it as the frames arrive, and beside each one a
box carrying everything known about the flight -- type and registration,
who operates it, where it came from and where it is going, height with a
rate of climb, speed and heading, how far away and on what bearing, its
position, how many frames it has sent and how long since the last one.

Qt is asked for and not required.  Four bindings are tried, the module
imports on a machine with none of them, and asking for the window without
one gets the instructions rather than a traceback -- before the receiver
is opened, since nothing is gained by taking the dongle for a window that
cannot be drawn.

In the menu, "listen now" is now "passive capture" with a realtime
display beside it.  Closing the window leaves exactly the files pressing
control-C leaves, because listen and watch share one read loop and one
finishing step; the receiver runs on its own thread, so a slow repaint
cannot cost a frame and a slow tile fetch cannot stall the picture.

The animation's labels grew to match: flight level and speed, type and
registration, and both ends of the route, each with a small flag of the
country its airport is in.  The flags are a table rather than a network --
twelve pixels by eight, where a flag is the arrangement that makes one
recognisable rather than a rendering of the real thing -- and a country
not in the table is named by its two letters, since a flag that is nearly
another country's is worse than none.  Where a route arrives as bare
codes the country comes from the ICAO prefix.

Four things found on the way.  The window ignored --seconds, so "listen
for ten minutes" meant something different with a window open; it closes
itself now.  The register was being asked twice per aircraft, once for
labels and once for airport positions.  Cached routes had no country in
them, so the first real redraw drew no flags at all -- routes are
versioned now.  And past fourteen aircraft on one frame the labels go
back to the callsign, the height and the speed, because five lines beside
each of three hundred aircraft is a page of overlapping text with a map
somewhere behind it.

Long names are folded rather than allowed to stretch a box, breaking at
the arrow of a route so the two ends stay whole; and the animation's
label placement gained the same ring search the window uses, having only
ever tried four spots.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016PsWPTweCT6pwxKngvVxcg

packaging/saunterbrowse.1

@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 .\" Generated by packaging/make-browse-man.py -- do not edit by hand.
-.TH SAUNTERBROWSE 1 "2026-09-04" "bandsaunter 2026-09-04_02" "User Commands"
+.TH SAUNTERBROWSE 1 "2026-09-04" "bandsaunter 2026-09-04_04" "User Commands"
 .SH NAME
 saunterbrowse \- read and listen to what a bandsaunter scan collected
 .SH SYNOPSIS