Summary

User report — brand-new build, Konsole terminal, mostly Kimi:

I have one small visual error with some models, they write ~? ~! all the time and sometimes that gets changed to ! or ? which messes with the md format... when I switch to the regular cli the models are only writing ~? ~!.

The inline markdown regex has a Pandoc-style subscript alternative (H~2~O) defined as ~([^~\\s][^~]*?)~. That's too permissive: ~! is a valid opener (first char ! isn't whitespace or tilde) and pairs with the next stray ~ on the line. So a message like:

Aww ~! Building me up step by step, I love it!
Let me do a thorough investigation~! First, let me...

renders as dim text from the first ~! through investigation~, with a leading _ prefix from the subscript render path. You can see the _ in the reporter's screenshot at investigation_!.

Fix

Tighten the subscript pattern to ~([A-Za-z0-9]{1,8})~ — short, alphanumeric-only content. Real Pandoc subscript is H~2~O / CO~2~ / X~n~, never punctuation or spaces. Matches:

• H~2~O → matches ~2~ ✓
• CO~2~ → matches ~2~ ✓
• X~n~ → matches ~n~ ✓
• Aww ~! blah ~! → no match ✓ (regression fixed)
• cool ~? yeah ~? → no match ✓
• ~good idea~ → no match ✓ (whitespace inside bails out)

Same tightening applied to stripInlineMarkup so width measurement stays aligned. Prior fix b17eb949 was for _..._ intraword italics — a different regex. This one targets the tilde path.

Test plan

• npm test (167/167, incl. 5 new markdown cases)
• npm run type-check clean
• npm run lint clean on touched files
• Visual check with a Kimi-heavy transcript in the TUI