John's Blog

I’m happy to announce the release of Sigil version 0.5.0.

0.5.0 comes with a number of bug fixes and some major new features:

• Inline spell check in code view
• Support for PCRE in search and replace
• Translations into 15 languages

Please see the changelog for a full list of changes in this release.

One smaller change is I’ve decided to drop OpenCandy. Surprisingly I’ve only encountered one complaint about OpenCandy and it was directed at bundling offers for other software inside of an installer not at OpenCandy in particular. I want to make it clear that this change is not due to user request or opposition to OpenCandy but my own decision.

While I respect what OpenCandy the company is doing and I don’t see anything wrong with the offerings they provide I don’t think their system is right for Sigil. The big thing I don’t like is OpenCandy’s installer components are distributed as closed source binary modules. While my understanding is this can be used without running afoul of the GPL I fully believe it goes against the spirit of the GPL and open source in general.

Thank you to everyone who provided feedback and helped during the beta process.

Tags: release, Sigil.

Sigil 0.4.1 is complete and available. This is mainly a maintenance release and fixes a number of bugs. Specifically a few bugs related to data loss. There was one major user visible change. The well-formed error dialog can be toggled not to show. This will cause errors to be auto fixed. Use this with care because the auto fix Sigil makes might not be what you want. As always see the changelog for a complete list of changes.

Tags: release, Sigil.

Sigil 0.4.1 is complete and available. This is mainly a maintenance release and fixes a number of bugs. There are a few new features mostly around the code view. As always see the changelog for a complete list of changes.

Tags: release, Sigil.

The long awaited Sigil 0.4.0 release is now out. Along with Sigil is a new release of FlightCrew. FlightCrew version 0.7.2 is the latest version bundled with Sigil.

If you’re an OS X user then one thing need to be aware of is these two releases bump the minimum OS X version to 10.6 (Snow Leopard). The Linux builds (x86 and x64) are built on Ubuntu 11.04.

A lot of work went into 0.4.0. New features and bug fixes galore. See the ChangeLog for full details. I have to thank Strahinja Marković (the original creator) for leaving the 0.4.0 in a nearly finished state. Also, Charles King for being a bug fixing monster and helping make this release great.

One major change that is going to take place next week is, I am switching the source code management (SCM) system from Mercurial (hg) to Git. This will break the update checker in previous versions. Hence waiting a week before making the change. I have already converted FlightCrew (needed to test) so FlightCrew’s updater in previous version won’t inform you of an update. This is unfortunate but unavoidable.

Due to the change to Git the links for the manual in Sigil are not going to work for a week. This is because I’ve updated the locations in Sigil to point to the new locations that won’t be available until the switch to Git.

Tags: release, Sigil.

Tonight I was able to fix bug 813 (see 837 for details). This is the last blocker bug for the 0.4 release. I merged a few patches there were sitting around. I’ve also fixed and issue with changes to metadata not being relayed to the GUI as the file having been changed. With these bugs fixed 0.4 is in a state that I feel is ready for release.

I have little experience with building releasable, binary packages for OS X and Windows. So It will be a few days (maybe weeks) before they’re out. There is a strong possibility I need to buy a copy of Windows and that will take a few days to get. Also, I need to actually setup a Windows build environment. I’m going to try building using an old netbook I have (it’s the only computer I can use that has a copy Windows for building packages.

I don’t want to do this release piece by piece so I’m going to wait to release all packages (OS X and source) together. Also, I plan to put out an RC 2 before 0.4 final. The RC 2 will be exactly the same as 0.4 final as far as the code is concerned. RC 2 is to make sure I package Sigil properly. It won’t do any good to put out 0.4 that can only be run if you have all of the development libraries Sigil uses installed independently of Sigil.

Tags: release, Sigil.

Version 4.6 is now available for direct download.

This release focus on fixing two bugs when using KDocker with the KWin window manager. It fixes and issue with windows not restoring when the “iconify when minimized” option is set. There is also a small change in how windows are focused after being restored as KWin often didn’t focus restored windows.

Tags: KDocker, kwin, release.

Version 4.5 of KDocker is now available for direct download and from the Ubuntu ppa.

Matching by name handling has been simplified in this release. The -y option to force matching by name has been removed. The -n NAME option now works the same as the -n -y combination. Also, name based matching now works whenever -n is used. Previously it would only work when KDocker is used to launch an application. These changes was at user request to make name based matching more intuitive.

Tags: KDocker, release.

I’ve released KDocker 4.4 today. It is mostly bug fixes and clean up. However, there is one major change. The feature to dock when the window decorator close button (the x in the upper corner) is clicked has been removed. This feature was introduced in 4.3 and I really like how it. It gives KDocker a feature that no similar application has. However, I was not able to keep it due to a number of issues it introduced.

The dock when closed feature was implemented via XEmbed. Basically I was creating my own window mimicking the window border of the application’s window. I would then remove the border from the application’s window and embed it into my window. Events would be passed from my window into the embedded window. This should work just fine in theory but it didn’t work out so nicely. Embedding caused five issues. The first four are serious and the last is only an annoyance.

The most serious issue was, it broke drag and drop. This looks to be an issue with X itself because I could recreate the problem using Qt and GTK’s embed support as well as writing the embed calls myself using xlib.

Another issue it caused related to support windows. When the main window was embedded it broke the connection between the main window and it’s support windows. So when docking the main window there were issues docking the applications other windows. This is an issue for applications such as XMMS and the Gimp.

Embedding didn’t get along very well with borderless windows. Applications like Chrome and XMMS draw their own window border in place of using the window manager’s decorations. These applications have special handling for moving when clicking and dragging their border. When they are embedded you end up with one of two situations. You can click and drag the window but only in the container window. So instead of moving the window you just move the window’s contents. The other situation is moving via the border doesn’t work at all. In this case resizing doesn’t work either. Oh, and the minimize, maximize, close buttons might not work either. In both cases you can still move the window using alt+left mouse button but this isn’t ideal.

Focus handling with embedded windows didn’t work correctly between different window managers and possibly different versions of Xorg. Some combinations it was fine. Others focus handling only followed the mouse. There were issues with the embedded window never getting focus or only getting focus when using alt+tab to select the window after it was docked.

The only annoying issue that I was okay with having was when undocking a window the window manager (compiz) would cause it to move a little bit. When undocking the position of the container window is recorded, the embedded window is removed from the container and moved to it’s location. Then the container window is destroyed. Compiz didn’t like placing two windows in the exact same place and kept moving the second window down and right by the size of the decoration and frame. This isn’t a very big issue but I really don’t want to have window manager specific work arounds in the code base.

The decision to remove iconify on close wasn’t taken lightly. It was only due to the large number of issues it created. There is not point in using KDocker if it is only going to make docked applications unusable. I have created a branch for iconify on close so I can hopefully get it working properly.

Tags: KDocker, release.

Large parts of the application have been restructured. For instance QtSingleApplication is now being used. The major new feature is the window manager decoration close button (X at the top right) can now optionally iconify the window when clicked. The -c command line option has also changed. It no longer creates a borderless window it now disables the iconify behavior of the decoration close button.

Note: There is one known issue with this release. Drag and Drop is partly broken for docked windows.

Tags: KDocker, release.

This release includes bug fixes as usual. Some new features: bash completion, iconify on focus lost option and Italian translation thanks to Alessio Cassibba. There is also a small change to the behavior when activating the tray icon. If the window is not visible it will become active and if it is active it will iconify. You can get it at the launchpad page.

Somehow I forget to mention the 4.1 release last week… I don’t think I’m going to be getting into the habit of making a release each week but there is still more I have planned. Mostly refactoring, and not to much in the way of new features.

Tags: c++, KDocker, qt, release.