[blessedcursed]

Papilot desktop can now be packaged and run on Windows, including a native installer, Windows process handling, and Codex executable discovery/bootstrap.

Fixes compiler discovery when Windows supplies Path instead of PATH. Previously the desktop backend could lose the TeX Live directory or send conflicting environment keys, reporting “xelatex was not found” even with a working installation. The launcher now preserves inherited path entries and emits one canonical PATH key on Windows.

Validation:

• npm run typecheck passed.
• Windows PATH regression test passed (node --import tsx --test tests/desktop-runtime.test.ts).
• On the installed Windows app, normalizing PATH allowed the imported XeLaTeX manuscript to compile to 12 pages with no build errors.

[cu1ch3n]

Thanks for this, the PATH/Path fix looks right. A few things before merging:

1. macOS/Linux behavior must not change. codexExecutable() is also used on Unix (paths.ts, doctor.mjs), and there it returns the first codex on PATH that merely exists, fixed at startup. Previously spawn('codex') and doctor's executable() skipped entries that weren't executable. If a directory or a non-executable codex comes earlier on PATH, the desktop app now fails with EACCES. Please keep the Windows changes behind process.platform === 'win32' and leave the existing Unix code as it was, including the new recent(downloaded) check in papilot.mjs. Also, the second test in tests/codex-executable.test.ts fails on macOS because the temp dir is a symlink (/var → /private/var). Calling fs.realpathSync on it fixes that.

2. The same Windows issues remain in other places:

• src/server/agents.ts:135 still calls execFile('npm', …), so the Claude/Cursor SDKs can't be installed on Windows.
• loaderFor() in src/server/update-install.ts still passes a raw path to --import, so updates fail on Windows.
• doctor's executable() doesn't try .exe, so papilot doctor reports git and latexmk as missing.

3. Stopping processes on Windows:

• In desktop/runtime.ts, stop() sends SIGTERM, which is a hard kill on Windows, so the backend's cleanup never runs. Calling child.disconnect() first triggers the existing shutdown handler.
• In vendor/latex-review/src/core/process.ts, a timeout kills only latexmk and leaves xelatex holding file locks. taskkill /pid <pid> /T /F kills the whole tree.