Status: one quad per path — track·base·patch·wt against root

Status reporting is unified across status, GET, POST and PATCH: one vocabulary for file rows and commit ahead/behind, replacing the per-verb noun zoo of Dirty. Four states of a path — the tracked tip, the base, the patched-in lines, the worktree bytes — each compare to the root, the nearest common ancestor of track and base. Each comparison yields one of four relations, so a path displays as a quad of chars; all-same .... rows are omitted. Implementation: /todo/BRO/BRO-030.

The four columns

The columns are the four states a path can live in, in fixed order; position is authoritative, color is decoration. Patch and worktree build on base, so they are ahead of or diverged from root by construction.

1st, the tracked ref tip (blue): where a sync would take the wt — the recentmost get row's target line.
2nd, the base commit (green): the wt's baseline tree — the recentmost get/post row.
3rd, the patched-in lines (yellow): refs absorbed by PATCH since the base, pending for the next post.
4th, the worktree (orange): the bytes on disk, compared to the BASE (not root) — the local-dirt axis, so a committed change reads .v.. and only uncommitted work lights the 4th char.

The four relations

Per path, the track/base/patch columns compare to root's entry and the wt column to BASE's (local dirt); the relation is one char of the greppable ASCII canon .xov. A gitlink compares exactly like a blob, so an advanced submodule is a v like any file. A tty renders the Unicode glyphs (x→∅ removed, o→● created, v→↑ advanced); plain/piped output is always the ASCII canon.

. same: the hash equals root's entry, or the path is absent in both.
x removed: present in root, absent in the column.
o created: absent in root, present in the column.
v advanced: present in both, different hash — changed, no ancestry implied.

Style annotations

Two facts do not reduce to a relation and ride as styles on the wt char: staging provenance and merge outcome. In plain output the style IS a char change, so the fact greps; a tty adds color on top.

Staged (an explicit put/delete row backs the wt relation): UPPERCASE in plain — put is ...V, del is ...X; a tty INVERTS the wt char (column color as bg, RGB-white glyph).
Conflicted (the weave left markers): plain spells the wt char !; a tty inverts it to white-on-red — a conflict must not be missable.
A tty glyph carries its column's truecolor (blue/green/amber/orange for track/base/patch/wt); . is unpainted; white is RGB, never the theme-remappable palette white.

Commit rows use the same relations

Ahead/behind is the same comparison one level up: commits against root instead of tree entries, so the old post/miss divergence rows join the same vocabulary.

A commit row marks o in every column whose tip reaches it: a local unposted commit is .o.., an unabsorbed track commit o...; a tty renders that o as ✔ ("present in this line"), never the file-row ●.
A commit already absorbed into the wt is patch-column territory, o.o. — no longer miss (see /todo/STATUS/STATUS-012).

Old vocabulary mapped

Every Dirty noun is a named quad (plus a style), so the old 3-char statuses become display aliases at most; each verb reports the transitions it produced through the same renderer.

mod = ...v, put = ...V, unk = ...o, new (staged add) = ...O, mis = ...x, del = ...X.
pat and mrg are both ..vv — the overlay-vs-weave distinction is outcome detail, no longer a status; cnf/con = ..v!.
v... is a theirs-side change pending sync; v..v both sides touched — the conflict candidates; adv = a gitlink v.

Open edges

The quad is settled and is THE default output of status, GET, POST and PATCH reports (not a flag); a few renderings are fixed by implementation and listed here for the record.

Collapse rule: several patched-in lines share the one yellow column newest-wins (a later absorption shadows an earlier one).
Moves: the dst row's path column spells src#dst, so the o/x pair does not read as an unrelated delete+create.
The status summary line's count segments are per-column tallies (N track, N base, N patch, N wt, N staged, N con), zeros omitted.

Degenerate roots

The corner cases reduce cleanly: root=base and root=track just blank one side of the quad, a detached wt tracks its pin, and no common ancestor is not a status at all.

Detached: track = the pinned hash itself (get ?<sha>), so the track column is that commit and root = LCA as usual.
Root=base (all-behind) and root=track (all-ahead) need nothing special — the elder side's column reads all-..
No common ancestor between track and base is a broken tree — an error to refuse, never a quad to render.