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+# Search-active terminal close freeze report
+
+## Summary
+
+I have been hitting frequent cmux freezes where the macOS app becomes unresponsive and shows the spinner. The clearest sampled occurrence happened while terminal search/find state was active or recently active and a terminal surface was being torn down.
+
+This document records the observed failure and links a possible fix. The proposed fix is entirely AI-suggested and should be reviewed as a hypothesis-backed patch, not as a fully human-audited Ghostty threading change.
+
+## Observed hang
+
+A local sample of the hung cmux process showed the app/main thread blocked in Ghostty teardown:
+
+```text
+Main Thread
+  ghostty_surface_free
+  Surface.deinit
+  pthread_join
+```
+
+The join location corresponds to Ghostty's per-surface search thread shutdown, before renderer and IO thread joins.
+
+## Suspected deadlock
+
+The suspected sequence is:
+
+1. cmux closes or frees a terminal surface on the app/main thread.
+2. Ghostty `Surface.deinit` asks the per-surface search thread to stop and then synchronously joins it.
+3. While exiting, the search thread emits final search UI callbacks such as clearing selected match, viewport highlights, and match counts.
+4. Those callbacks can enqueue messages into renderer/app mailboxes.
+5. If a mailbox is full and the callback waits indefinitely, the search thread waits for queue progress while the app/main thread is already waiting for the search thread to exit.
+
+That produces a full app freeze.
+
+## Proposed fix
+
+A proposed Ghostty-side patch is open here:
+
+- https://github.com/manaflow-ai/ghostty/pull/55
+
+The patch changes search-thread callback delivery so it no longer waits forever on renderer/app mailbox pushes:
+
+- normal search callback delivery gets a short bounded wait to preserve ordering in ordinary cases;
+- once surface teardown has started, search callback delivery becomes instant/best-effort;
+- arena-backed renderer messages deinitialize their arena if they cannot be enqueued.
+
+Search UI notifications are stale/recoverable state. During teardown the surface is already closing, so dropping a final search reset is preferable to deadlocking the application.
+
+## Local validation performed
+
+The AI-suggested patch was built locally with:
+
+```bash
+zig fmt --check ghostty/src/Surface.zig
+zig build -Demit-xcframework=true -Demit-macos-app=false -Dxcframework-target=universal -Doptimize=ReleaseFast
+./scripts/reload.sh --tag fix-search-shutdown-hang
+```
+
+The tagged cmux debug build completed successfully.
+
+## Caveat
+
+The freeze is real and has been happening often locally, but the proposed fix and root-cause analysis are AI-assisted. Please treat the linked Ghostty PR as a concrete candidate fix that needs careful review by someone familiar with Ghostty's search, mailbox, and surface teardown threading model.