[JSdotNet]

Summary

A workspace holds several repositories at once, and only the roadmap band said which was which. The filter above the backlog, the entries in it and the agent sessions under them read identically in every project, so telling one project's work from another's meant reading the alias on every row.

This gives each configured repository one colour, chosen once in Settings → Repositories, and shows it as a small marker on every surface where that repository appears.

The design system already sanctioned five identity hues (--color-band-1..5) — it just fenced them to the roadmap band. This widens the fence rather than inventing colour: the palette is unchanged, and the count of distinct colours the product declares stays at twenty-five.

Nothing in the existing design is given up. The mark is a 4px rule down the leading edge, painted as an inset shadow rather than a border, so no element's box, padding or alignment moves. Chips take the extra 4px out of their own leading padding, so a coloured chip is exactly as wide as an uncoloured one beside it. Every surface, border and text token each control already wore is untouched — the hue is added to what was correct, never replacing part of it.

That restraint is why the set may leave the roadmap at all. A band is a region of a chart and can afford a 24% wash; a filter chip and an entry row sit in dense chrome that already spends its contrast on status, priority and selection. A wash there would put an identity hue in competition with colour that carries meaning, which is the one thing the design rule forbids.

Changes

Design rule — a precondition, not a follow-up. .design/color-scheme.md#band-identity-tokens said "Nothing outside a roadmap band may use one" and required a new consumer to justify itself against that section. It is now a named consumer table (filter chip, roadmap, entry row, session group, and the Settings picker) with the identity-edge painting rule and the color-background-raised contrast measurements added. Binding pair is color-band-5 at 4.01:1 as an edge on a raised surface, a third above the 3:1 a non-text mark owes.

Storage and resolution. GitHubRepositoryRef.Colour (int?, 1–5) beside CloneDirectory / Token / KnowledgeFolders, persisted in the per-user github.json and preserved when the repository list is retyped. GitHubSettingsStore.SetRepositoryColour follows the house no-save-button rule. One resolver, RepositoryColours.Resolve: an explicit choice wins, everything else takes its position stepping over the hues already claimed, wrapping after five.

Rendering. A shared .repo-mark / .repo-mark--N utility. Applied to the header scope chip, entry rows, the integration link list's repository group, and the repository cell of a row in the Sessions area. Entry rows get it through a new TaskListView.RowCssClass hook rather than a field on TaskRow — that record is deliberately a task and not an entry, and a list of checklist steps has no repository to answer with.

Settings. A swatch radiogroup plus Reset to default in the per-repository tab, with a status line stating the effective colour in words.

Roadmap. PlannedRepository gains Colour and is told its hues instead of choosing them; RoadmapPlanView no longer reads plan.Bands or runs its own allocator. The in-band Colours picker and the whole ColourBand feature — command, handler, IRoadmapPlanning.ColourBandAsync, RoadmapPlan.ColourBand, its error — are removed. One choice, one place.

Migration. RoadmapBand.CarryOverPlanColours seeds Settings from an existing plan file's bands map, only for repositories with no colour of their own, so a choice made in Settings since is never overwritten.

Two things a reviewer should know

The active scope chip is the one case a contrast ratio cannot answer. It is filled with color-primary, and color-band-1 is color-primary — a band-1 rule there measures 1:1 and disappears. It is held off the fill by a 1px seam in color-background, which clears 3:1 on both sides (11.15:1 each way). Verified live: computed box-shadow reads rgb(242,193,78) 4px inset, rgb(18,18,20) 5px inset with the same colour behind it.

One deliberate behaviour change. The roadmap used to number hues over the bands it happened to draw, so a repository with nothing planned let its neighbour slide to a lower hue. It now keeps the hue Settings gave it whether or not its neighbours have work — otherwise the same project would be one colour on the filter and another on the chart, which is the thing this change exists to fix. HuesAreCountedOverTheBandsDrawn_NotOverEveryConfiguredRepository asserted the old behaviour and was rewritten rather than patched.

Accessibility

Colour is identity and never meaning — it sits beside status, priority and selection rather than behind them. It is never the sole carrier: every marked surface still writes the repository alias and every mark is aria-hidden. A session group with no heading gets no hue at all, because the heading is where its repository is named.

Testing

dotnet build Backlog.sln — 0 errors, 0 warnings.
dotnet test Backlog.sln — 2,356 passed, 0 failed across 11 projects (after merging main). 29 new tests:

Suite	Covers
RepositoryColourTests (14)	resolution, persistence, reset, refusal, drop-not-clamp, list retype
SettingsRepositoryColourTests (5)	picker writes immediately, reset, exactly five offered, state said in words
HomeRepositoryScopeTests (4)	chip marks, chosen colour reaches the chip, alias still written, mark survives selection
BacklogPaneRepositoryColourTests (4)	row marks by area, chosen colour, unfiled wears none, alias still written
IntegrationLinkListTests (+3)	headed group wears the mark, unheaded does not, uncoloured host draws none
SessionsPaneTests (+3)	repository cell wears the host's colour, an unplaceable repository wears none, no host means no colour
RoadmapBandDatesAndColoursTests	band reads Settings, no picker of its own, migration carries over, Settings wins

node .github/tools/knowledge-meta/build.mjs --check — clean.

Manual QA with Playwright against desktop-web-harness and ui-storybook under Aspire — 8 scenarios, all pass, no console errors and no Aspire errors:

• One choice in Settings reached the chip, the entry row and the roadmap band together; Dates and Unfiled bands stayed neutral.
• The choice hit github.json on each click, and Reset cleared it while leaving the repository with its positional hue.
• The band-1-on-selected-chip seam holds, as above.
• Four repository groups in the reference list each carried their hue; the unheaded group and "Not in a repository" carried none, with state chips beside them unaffected.
• The migration was verified against real pre-existing data, not a fixture: the harness workspace already held _roadmap/plan.json with bands: {backlog: 3} from an earlier session, and the app carried it onto the repository on first render.

Running Aspire for this checkout was stopped with build\stop-aspire-before-pr.ps1, scoped to this worktree so parallel sessions were left alone.

Related

• .design/color-scheme.md#band-identity-tokens — amended by this PR; it forbade the change until it was.
• .domain/roadmap/features.md#feature-repository-scoped-planning — the roadmap feature the hue set was originally introduced for.

After merging main

main brought a Sessions area with a Repository column, added while this branch was in flight. That is the surface the request named and this branch could not reach at the time — sessions existed only in the shared library. It is now covered: the repository cell carries the mark, beside the name rather than down the row, because a row there is a session and the repository is one of eight things it reports.

The pane is told the colour rather than looking it up, the same way the roadmap and the entry list are — the Sessions context holds owner/name as an opaque string on purpose, and resolving it there would tie sessions to repository management for a decoration.

Merging also resolved conflicts in three derived _meta graphs. Generated files were regenerated rather than hand-merged, and HomeRepositoryScopeTests had its copy of the Home harness refreshed from HomeWorkspaceSurfaceTests after main's storage refactor removed RepositoryBacklogSource.

Follow-up

IntegrationLinkList — the per-entry panel that groups linked issues, PRs and agent sessions by repository — is still not wired into the desktop app. The mark is implemented on the component and demonstrated in the Storybook, so it arrives with the panel when that surface is adopted. This is separate from the Sessions area above.

Checklist

• Scope is focused and excludes unrelated changes
• Documentation or instruction files were updated when governance or behavior changed
• Running Aspire instances for this checkout were stopped before PR creation (build\stop-aspire-before-pr.ps1)
• Follow-up work is captured when the implementation is intentionally partial

🤖 Generated with Claude Code