fix(weather): stop the Vegas ticker spending a display width on current conditions

[ChuckBuilds]

Reported as: the ticker scrolls with tight spacing, then current conditions takes a full display width.

What's happening

get_vegas_content() handed the ticker the same image the full-screen renderer produces. That layout anchors the condition, temperature and high/low to the right edge of the panel and distributes the metrics bar evenly across the whole width. Correct for a screen you look at; wrong for a tile that scrolls past.

Measured on a live 512x64 device — the three weather modes contributed 1536px on every rebuild, and auto_trim reclaimed only 14%, because the ink genuinely reaches both edges. There is no blank margin to crop:

[ledmatrix-weather] Native: SUCCESS - 3 images, 1536px total width
[ledmatrix-weather] Trimmed native content: 1536px -> 1318px (14% reclaimed), 3 kept, 0 blank dropped

For contrast, other plugins hand the ticker tiles of 110–145px each (11 image(s), 1581px total; 2 image(s), 220px total). Weather is the only plugin padding each tile to the panel width — which is exactly the "tight elsewhere, full width here" contrast in the report.

The change

All three renderers now take an optional width, defaulting to the panel exactly as before. The Vegas path passes one measured from the content. That's the whole change — no second layout:

• the condition/temperature/high-low stack right-aligns to whatever width it's handed
• the metrics bar divides that width instead of the panel
• the forecast columns are width // count, so they pack rather than spread

So the tile stays the familiar screen — icon left, condition over temperature over high/low, metrics along the bottom — just drawn closer together.

tile	compact	full-screen	reclaimed
current conditions (this device's metrics)	265px	512px	48%
current conditions (every metric on)	371px	512px	28%
hourly	272px	512px	47%
daily	204px	512px	60%

741px instead of 1536px for a full weather cycle on this device.

The metrics bar reserves a real gap between items rather than packing to the text. It centres each item in an equal section of the width, so sizing to the text alone left about 6px between them against 79px at full width — legible in a still image, tiring scrolling past. A 24px per-item floor brings that to 29px.

Metric items are also now built by one helper shared with the full-screen path, so the show_* toggles and the UV severity colour can't drift apart.

An earlier revision of this PR hand-built a separate compact layout. It was wrong twice — first dropping the optional metrics and flattening the UV colour, then simply being a parallel layout someone would have to keep in step. Reusing the real renderer deleted ~90 lines and packs better than my copy of it did.

The full-screen renderer still serves the normal rotation slot, unchanged in output.

The guard, and why it's there

The compact arrangement is not universally narrower. Fixed-size bitmap fonts don't shrink with the display, so on narrower panels the packed layout is no narrower than the screen it replaces. When the compact tile would be at least as wide as the panel, it falls back to the full-screen tile:

panel	compact	full-screen	result
512x64	265px	512px	48% reclaimed
256x64	falls back	256px	0% — no regression
128x32	falls back	128px	0% — no regression

So a narrow display reclaims nothing rather than paying extra.

Verification

Core harness passes for all five weather modes at 128x32, 256x64 and 512x64, and all five render pixel-identical in the normal rotation path, verified by image diff — every change is confined to the Vegas path.

Two revisions of this were rejected on review, both usefully: the first wasn't the weather screen at all (it dropped the optional metrics and the UV colour), and the second was a faithful copy that still shouldn't have been a copy. The current version reuses the real renderer at a narrower width, which is both smaller and impossible to drift.

A note on how the numbers above were arrived at, since two earlier revisions of this PR quoted wrong ones. My offline harness stubbed extra_small_font as PressStart2P 6px; DisplayManager actually loads assets/fonts/4x6-font.ttf for it, which is ~40% narrower. That inflated every metrics-bar measurement and rendered the bottom row in the wrong typeface. The plugin code was never affected — it measures with self.display_manager.extra_small_font — but the reported figures were, and are now taken with the real font.

One pre-existing quirk left alone: the amber temperature slightly overlaps the tail of a long condition string. It does that at full width too, so fixing it would change the normal rotation render this PR deliberately leaves untouched.

Hourly and daily

I originally scoped these out, claiming they "genuinely fill their width". Rendering them showed the opposite — they are the worse offenders:

tile	inked	gap between columns	reclaimable
current conditions	49%	~49px	43%
hourly	28%	91px	67%
daily	20%	136px	77%

Daily is 80% black. Both renderers lay columns out as width // count, so they inherit whatever width they're handed — three days across a 512px panel puts 136px of nothing between each column.

Both now take an optional width (defaulting to the panel, as before) and the Vegas path passes one sized to the columns: hourly 512px → 272px, daily 512px → 204px.

All three tiles together: 784px instead of 1536px on this device.

One part of the report I could not reproduce: the "tight the first time through, full width later" asymmetry. Weather's contribution is constant at 1536px on every single rebuild over hours of logs, so nothing in this plugin varies between passes. If the first-pass difference persists after this, it's in the ticker's composition rather than here.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01Udr6MfaFLUPhX5Fgo67Jf5

[coderabbitai]

📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

The weather plugin now supports compact current, hourly, and daily weather tiles for Vegas layouts. Shared metric construction reduces duplicate formatting logic. Catalog and manifest metadata now identify release 2.6.3.

Changes

Compact weather rendering

Layer / File(s)	Summary
Shared weather rendering plugins/ledmatrix-weather/manager.py	Renderers accept optional widths. Current-weather metrics use the shared _build_metric_items helper.
Vegas compact integration plugins/ledmatrix-weather/manager.py	Vegas content generation calculates content-based widths and passes them to the current, hourly, and daily renderers.
Release metadata plugins.json, plugins/ledmatrix-weather/manifest.json	The plugin version and dates changed to 2.6.3 and 2026-08-05. The manifest includes the new release record and escaped Unicode em dash sequences in older notes.

Estimated code review effort: 3 (Moderate) | ~20 minutes

Sequence Diagram(s)

sequenceDiagram
  participant VegasContent
  participant CompactWidthHelpers
  participant WeatherRenderers
  VegasContent->>CompactWidthHelpers: Calculate compact tile widths
  CompactWidthHelpers-->>VegasContent: Return content-based widths
  VegasContent->>WeatherRenderers: Render current, hourly, and daily tiles
  WeatherRenderers-->>VegasContent: Return compact weather images

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Possibly related PRs

• ChuckBuilds/ledmatrix-plugins#126: Introduced the weather display pipeline extended here for compact Vegas tiles.

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 5

✅ Passed checks (5 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Docstring Coverage	✅ Passed	No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check.
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Description Check	✅ Passed	Check skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.
Title check	✅ Passed	The title clearly describes the main change: reducing the Vegas ticker width used for current weather conditions.

✨ Finishing Touches

📝 Generate docstrings

• Create stacked PR
• Commit on current branch

🧪 Generate unit tests (beta)

• Create PR with unit tests
• Commit unit tests in branch fix/weather-vegas-compact-current

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