MCP stdio servers' stderr was being dumped directly onto the user's
terminal during hermes launch. Servers like FastMCP-based ones print a
large ASCII banner at startup; slack-mcp-server emits JSON logs; etc.
With prompt_toolkit / Rich rendering the TUI concurrently, these
unsolicited writes corrupt the terminal state — hanging the session
~80% of the time for one user with Google Ads Tools + slack-mcp
configured, forcing Ctrl+C and restart loops.
Root cause: `stdio_client(server_params)` in tools/mcp_tool.py was
called without `errlog=`, and the SDK's default is `sys.stderr` —
i.e. the real parent-process stderr, which is the TTY.
Fix: open a shared, append-mode log at $HERMES_HOME/logs/mcp-stderr.log
(created once per process, line-buffered, real fd required by asyncio's
subprocess machinery) and pass it as `errlog` to every stdio_client.
Each server's spawn writes a timestamped header so the shared log stays
readable when multiple servers are running. Falls back to /dev/null if
the log file cannot be opened.
Verified by E2E spawning a subprocess with the log fd as its stderr:
banner lines land in the log file, nothing reaches the calling TTY.
Teknium
379b2273d9