Sometimes One Line Must Stay Whole
Shared typing is the default because the two glasses usually belong to one person. But there are moments when a line must not be interleaved: pasting a long command from the phone, composing Korean where a half-finished syllable is still being built, typing a password a second surface should not race. For those moments a surface can take a hold. While it holds, the daemon refuses input from every other surface on that session, with a typed error, until the hold ends.
The word matters. The old contract had a lease you had to take before you could type at all. A hold is the opposite shape: you can already type, and you choose, briefly, to make sure nobody else does. Nothing waits on it. Most sessions never see one.
Visible on Every Glass
A hold nobody can see is a lock with a hidden key. So every surface shows it. The holder's phone says Holding · keyboard here and its button becomes Release hold:
Every other phone shows Held by and the holder's name, so a refused keystroke is never a mystery. On the Mac, the pane's context menu carries Hold Input Here and Release Input Hold, and the tab's subtitle names the attached surfaces and the hold. An observation-only device never holds — it cannot type, so it has nothing to protect.
A Hold Dies With Its Holder
The dangerous version of a hold is the one that outlives the person holding it: a phone that locked in a pocket while holding would freeze the Mac's keyboard until someone found the phone. So a hold ends when it is released, or when its holder's connection ends. The gateway closes a connection that has sent nothing — no frame, no ping — for 45 seconds after its greeting (the phone pings every 15 seconds while it is active), and closing it drops that device's surface and any hold it had. Revoking a device, or changing its approval, releases its hold too.
The phone is careful in the other direction as well. Only moving to the background pauses its connections. A momentary interruption — Control Center, the app switcher, a system alert — keeps every connection and every hold, so glancing at a notification mid-paste does not drop the fence you raised. And a reconnect never replays a hold. If you come back and still want one, you take it again, in the present, where everyone can see it.