7i95T spindle control via Modbus RS485 and SPINX1A

Direction pins left as GPIO what does actually mean. Does it mean that I need to use the outputs ssr for the dir and enable?
I am quite at the limit with just 6 outputs so consuming them on stuff like this is quite an issue for me.
It seems I have very limited understanding of mesa and that my configurations so far were pretty basic

It means that you use the GPIO pin in hal  to control the direction

Something like:

setp hm2_7i95.0.gpio.009.is_output true
net spindir spindle.0.forward hm2_7i96s.0.gpio.009.out

( gpio.009 is the dir pin for step4)

(you could of course also use the pin for enable)