Changes in 2008
New in 20081230:
- Terminal view drag-and-drop now copies Unicode strings, for better interoperability with other applications.
New in 20081229:
- Internal changes to improve support for arbitrary text encodings.
- The Copy command now produces an accurate Unicode equivalent when text selections have VT graphics characters.
New in 20081221:
- Fixed text Copy to no longer include long streams of blank space at the end of each line.
New in 20081219:
- Fixed the insert-line and delete-line sequences of the VT102 emulator.
New in 20081215:
- Preferences window General pane Special tab now correctly saves changes to text fields (such as the window origin).
New in 20081213:
- Preferences window collections can now be reordered using new buttons in the drawer.
- Fixed Preferences window crashes that could occur when using items created by the Duplicate Collection command.
New in 20081212:
- Macros can now perform actions besides text entry, including: verbatim text entry, opening a URL, or running a command in a new window.
- Preferences window Macros pane now supports F13, F14, F15 and F16 as macro keys.
- Terminal view animation now only occurs for terminals in the active window, to reduce idle CPU usage.
New in 20081210:
- Terminal view cursor, if set to blink, now pulses with an effect similar to that of blinking terminal text.
- Terminal view cursor now has an anti-aliased appearance, which makes it seem brighter on dark backgrounds.
- Terminal view cursor now has an alpha channel so that it can use the text color without making text unreadable.
New in 20081209:
- Fixed a serious terminal view rendering bug, where a wrapping cursor could cause only the wrapped remnant of text to be drawn.
- Fixed the VT100 cursor-line-erase variant to invalidate the proper region, otherwise the erase may not occur right away.
New in 20081208:
- Terminal view renderer is now more efficient at rendering small changes to the contents of the screen.
- Fixed a rendering glitch that caused lines to be erased in certain cases, such as in text editors.
- Help updated to correct some minor points and expand on Preferences documentation.
New in 20081207:
- Terminal view renderer is now more efficient when drawing text that uses the normal background color.
New in 20081118:
- Preferences window Macros pane now correctly displays macro names in the list, which is also where they are now edited.
New in 20081115:
- Expanded macros are now implemented: allowing arbitrary key combinations, rapid switching between sets, and more.
- Preferences window Macros pane can now be used to edit most aspects of macros.
- Fixed the commands for choosing macro sets via the Map menu, including None which now turns off macros completely.
- The "Display a macros menu" preference now properly determines whether or not the Macros menu is visible.
- The menu items for importing and exporting macros have been temporarily removed.
- The old "Show Macro Editor" window has been permanently removed.
New in 20081109:
- Fixed the floating command line to use a cursor color that will not blend in with the user's custom background.
New in 20081108:
- Fixed an internal error which had broken the Copy and Open URL commands, as well as whether or not menu items were enabled.
New in 20081107:
- When reviewing windows at quitting time, tabs no longer shift positions as they close; the animation was too distracting.
New in 20081106:
- Fixed the tendency for certain new tabs to shift multiple spots, which also caused assertion failures in some cases.
- Improved the performance of Help.
New in 20081105:
- Contextual help items and help buttons once again bring up relevant search results in Help.
- Fixed the "New Default Session" command in the Dock menu.
New in 20081030:
- Due to the huge number of changes in the code base, renamed this to version 4.0.0 beta.
New in 20081011:
- Fixed a possible crash using default preferences, where "server-port" was saved as a string but read as a number.
New in 20081009:
- Terminal window tabs now open in the same tab group as the frontmost window, instead of always choosing the latest tab group.
New in 20080911:
- Fixed terminal view text selections to once again be modifiable using standard key equivalents such as shift-right-arrow.
New in 20080905:
- Preferences window Macros pane interface for selecting the base key has been slightly tweaked.
New in 20080827:
- Fixed the Preferences window Formats pane and similar interfaces to show text at the displayed font size, without scaling.
New in 20080821:
- Preferences window collections now always display Default values for any setting that is undefined, instead of a recent value.
New in 20080820:
- Preferences window Macros pane now properly saves and reads key modifier settings.
New in 20080806:
- Acquired a new multiprocessor Intel Mac for testing, and verified that the last daily build works fine on Intel Macs.
- Preferences window Macros pane enhanced further, now properly saves certain macro settings.
New in 20080704:
- Preferences window Macros pane has been redesigned (again), as work on enhanced macros continues.
New in 20080703:
- Application should no longer crash if the system Python has changed, as it can now locate another suitable interpreter.
- Application now uses a more descriptive interpreter process name, with only a suffix of "_python2.x".
New in 20080701:
- The Find Next and Find Previous commands now work, focusing on each match in turn (though all are highlighted at once).
New in 20080629:
- Preferences window General pane Options tab is now used to globally set the preference to display a menu for macros.
New in 20080627:
- Fixed framework search path for Quills so that it is once again easy to refer to it in terminals (e.g. "pydoc Quills").
- Added Session.pseudo_terminal_device_name() to Quills, which tells how to directly control the terminal of a session.
- Added Session.resource_location_string() to Quills, to determine what a session represents; normally, this is a command line.
- Added Session.state_string() to Quills, to determine the status (such as, "Running") of a session.
New in 20080626:
- New low-level preferences for setting notification frequencies (such as keep-alive and idle).
New in 20080625:
- Restored Panther compatibility by correcting an accidental dependency on a newer framework for Growl.
New in 20080616:
- Preferences window Sessions pane Resource tab no longer has wasted space at the bottom.
- Preferences window Sessions pane Resource tab now shows a correct progress indicator for domain name lookups.
- Internal improvements to the Preferences window Sessions pane and Custom New Session sheet.
New in 20080613:
- Preferences window Formats pane ANSI Colors tab now correctly uses factory defaults for resetting, instead of the Default set.
- Preferences window Terminals pane Emulation tab now correctly sets the identity, so you can "fake" the terminal type.
New in 20080611:
- Preferences window Terminals pane Options tab no longer has an "ANSI colors" checkbox (use the Emulation tab).
- Preferences window Terminals pane Emulation tab now correctly sets the emulator type.
New in 20080606:
- Modified the method for interfacing to Growl, now that Growl 1.1.3 fixes a key bug for Leopard users.
New in 20080604:
- Fixed a serious bug where batch copies of lines to scrollback (such as on clear) would occur in reverse order.
New in 20080603:
- Fixed a possible crash when choosing a Format from the View menu.
- Preferences window Formats pane now displays samples of all styles, as originally intended.
- Minor tweaks to the text of notifications.
New in 20080602:
- The Growl framework is now used for background notifications, when it is available.
New in 20080530:
- Preferences window Terminals pane Emulation tab now has an option for fixing the line wrap bug of a standard VT100.
New in 20080529:
- The floating command line is now a Cocoa window, which fixes numerous problems this window has had in the past.
New in 20080527:
- Fixed various contextual menu commands to better-match their menu bar equivalents.
- The keypads, Full Screen mode off-switch and "IP Addresses of This Mac" no longer steal keyboard focus when displayed.
New in 20080524:
- The off-switch window in Full Screen mode is now a Cocoa window.
- The off-switch window in Full Screen mode now remembers its position.
New in 20080523:
- Preferences window Terminals pane Emulation tab now has the intended list of checkboxes for terminal tweaks.
New in 20080522:
- Fixed the sample terminal display in places like the Preferences window Formats pane.
- The command line displayed as the default window title no longer has a trailing space.
- Help now contains some basic information on how to use Automator.
New in 20080520:
- The Open dialog is now implemented using Cocoa, which is an improvement on older versions of Mac OS X.
New in 20080517:
- Fixed a possible crash if a session is still trying to process data at the time it is terminated.
- Fixed startup errors, such as type -2703, that could appear on certain computers.
- Added Prefs.TRANSLATION to Quills, allowing Python functions to refer to this type of collection.
New in 20080515:
- The "IP Addresses of This Mac" command now matches its window title, and is also in sync with the Dock menu.
New in 20080514:
- Preferences window Sessions pane Keyboard tab has been refined further.
New in 20080513:
- The "Show IP Addresses…" command is now in the Window menu, and has been renamed "IP Addresses".
- The IP Addresses window is now implemented using Cocoa, which made it trivial to support drags.
- "Send IP Address" was removed due to ambiguity; now, just use drag-and-drop from the IP Addresses window.
New in 20080511:
- The Preferences window Translations pane now displays localized names for all text encodings (character sets).
New in 20080510:
- Key palettes are now implemented using Cocoa, which makes them easier to use (for example, command-W works on them).
New in 20080506:
- The Special Key Sequences dialog now reuses the floating Control Keys palette to make changes, so the dialog is much smaller.
New in 20080505:
- Fixed a conflict in the Preferences window where using the Default command in the File menu would affect the collections list.
- Fixed name generation in the Preferences window collections drawer (for "+", and duplication) so the result is always unique.
- Terminal window tabs can now display much longer titles.
- Terminal window tabs now have a small side button for the "new workspace" behavior, instead of a huge button.
New in 20080504:
- Fixed the Preferences window Sessions pane Resource tab, so it is possible to properly save favorite commands or servers.
New in 20080501:
- Fixed the Preferences window Sessions pane Graphics tab.
New in 20080429:
- Dragging text into a background terminal window will now automatically bring the window to the front after a short delay.
New in 20080426:
- Fixed arrow key sequences in certain modes, noticeable in applications such as the "vim" text editor.
- Fixed command-option-click to once again send arrow key sequences to move the cursor to the clicked location.
- Fixed "Move cursor to text drop location" behavior.
New in 20080424:
- Added even more to the Low-Level Settings section in Help.
New in 20080422:
- Added more to the Low-Level Settings section in Help.
New in 20080421:
- Fixed the Preferences window Translations pane.
- Fixed the Map menu to display all Translation collections.
New in 20080418:
- Fixed some parts of the Preferences window Terminals pane Screen tab.
New in 20080417:
- Fixed background window text selections to allow immediate drags, as their enabled states imply.
- Changed the style of Help somewhat, to better fit the monospaced layout that the content generates.
New in 20080416:
- Started a Low-Level Settings section in Help to document preferences hidden from the main user interface.
New in 20080413:
- Fixed font selection in the Preferences window Translations pane.
New in 20080412:
- Redesigned parts of the Preferences window Translations pane to offer more useful rendering preferences.
New in 20080411:
- The About box now uses the Cocoa standard implementation.
- Fixed certain cases on Panther where user interface panels could become "unclickable".
New in 20080410:
- Fixed some glitches in the display of items in the Window menu.
- Fixed a possible crash at quitting time if the Command Line was ever displayed.
New in 20080409:
- Fixed random actions to be more random; used in such things as the splash screen and the random terminal format setting.
New in 20080408:
- The foreground and background colors used by TEK windows are now defined by Default Format preferences.
- The 6 other colors used by TEK windows are now defined by the normal ANSI Colors from Default Format preferences.
- Minor internal optimizations to TEK windows.
New in 20080406:
- Fixed a case where renaming a single window could propagate the change to every open terminal window.
New in 20080405:
- Fixed color boxes on Panther to no longer use the floating Color Panel, because it is too buggy on that system.
- TEK-related menu commands can now be used when a vector graphics window is frontmost.
- The Rename menu command now works with TEK windows.
New in 20080404:
- Fixed bug (recently introduced) with Copy command in TEK windows.
- Various minor layout improvements in the Preferences window.
New in 20080403:
- Fixed all known stability problems when using multiple TEK windows.
- Since the application cannot currently input text directly to TEK windows, it no longer puts them in front when they open.
New in 20080401:
- Fixed dynamic resize of TEK graphics, so they once again scale as the window is resized.
- Internal changes to improve vector graphics handling.
New in 20080330:
- Fixed bug (recently introduced) where closing a vector graphics window would not restore terminal input.
- Preferences window Terminals pane has been refined further.
New in 20080329:
- Improved overall terminal performance by adjusting the session loop to process data at a faster rate.
New in 20080328:
- Internal changes to improve vector graphics handling.
New in 20080327:
- Various minor tweaks to user interface text, such as alert messages.
New in 20080326:
- Internal changes to improve how process spawns are handled, and how process attributes are saved.
New in 20080325:
- Fixed a problem where icon-changing toolbar items (such as LEDs) may stop working after a toolbar is customized.
- Added a hidden preference (accessible through the "defaults" program) to randomize the Format of every new terminal window.
New in 20080324:
- Various minor changes to the menu bar layout, including the removal of the Action menu.
- Help updated with additional preferences information, and a few minor corrections.
New in 20080323:
- Fixed Preferences window Sessions pane Resource tab to properly handle text field entries.
New in 20080322:
- Selecting the name of a Format from the View menu will now transform the active terminal window to use those fonts/colors.
- It is now possible to override the state of an LED toolbar item just by clicking on it. (Can also be set by the terminal.)
- Fixed user interfaces to consult default preferences when a required setting is not actually defined by a chosen collection.
- Now using a slightly more correct control-key symbol in the Control Keys palette and various other user interface elements.
- Preferences window Sessions pane (and Special Key Sequences dialog) now using segmented views instead of menus in some places.
- Preferences window General pane Special tab now using a segmented view for cursor shape preferences.
New in 20080321:
- Fixed significant persistence problems in preference collections.
- Using Show Help Tags on the Control Keys palette now displays the common abbreviations and meanings of each control key.
- Internal changes to restructure preferences, renaming some keys and placing collections into their own domains.
New in 20080320:
- Preferences window Sessions pane Keyboard tab has been refined further.
- Session Info window now has a Device column, showing the pseudo-terminal connected to a process.
- Fixed setup of window title and command line display when creating certain kinds of sessions.
New in 20080319:
- Fixed Custom Format sheet to show the actual terminal font size.
- Minor fix to definition of text selection regions, visible through their outline shape in inactive windows.
New in 20080318:
- Preferences window General pane now allows command-N to be used for creating log-in shells.
- Preferences window Sessions pane (and Special Key Sequences dialog) slightly redesigned to collect keyboard-related settings.
New in 20080317:
- Fixed terminal windows to respond to changes in the font or font size.
- Terminal view matte now renders with precisely the chosen color, not a tinted version of it.
- Terminal view now renders extra space between the focus ring and text of a view, in the default background color; this is known as padding.
- Terminal views now read terminal margin preferences (hidden, but accessible through the "defaults" program) when setting matte thickness.
- Terminal views now interpret terminal padding preferences as the size of the new interior space, not the thickness of the matte.
- Help updated with additional preferences information, and a few minor corrections.
New in 20080316:
- Preferences window Formats pane and other color box interfaces now use a floating color panel.
- Fixed various keyboard focus quirks.
New in 20080315:
- Preferences window Macros pane redesigned because of far too many bugs in the Apple implementation of pop-up menus in lists.
- Fixed help tags in the Preferences window collections drawer.
New in 20080314:
- Fixed calculation of ideal terminal view size, which affected the dimensions chosen by commands such as Make Text Bigger.
New in 20080313:
- Fixed calculations that set terminal view size based on screen dimensions, to no longer lose a row or column in some cases.
- Terminal views now read terminal padding preferences (hidden, but accessible through the "defaults" program) when setting matte thickness.
New in 20080312:
- Fixed seemingly random display glitches, traced to a corner case in processing CSI parameters.
New in 20080311:
- Preferences window Terminals pane is now visible, though incomplete.
- Fixed blink rate to not change as more windows are opened.
- Fixed blink to not include a random color (usually black) at the end.
- Fixed crash when clicking the close box of the command line window.
New in 20080310:
- Terminal views now render blinking text with a quadratic-delay pulse effect.
- Terminal view renderer has been further optimized in minor ways.
New in 20080308:
- Custom Format dialog now correctly affects a single window and not global preferences.
- Preferences window Formats pane now sets the sample correctly, but due to a display bug this can only be seen after resizing the window.
New in 20080307:
- Terminal view renderer has had several internal improvements, now only partially redrawing the screen in many cases (which is faster).
New in 20080306:
- Finally on Leopard, the application menu is no longer named "Python", and preferences will no longer be saved in the Python domain.
- Fixed bug with files not opening correctly after the application first launched.
- The preferences converter no longer displays graphical alerts, although it will print a status line to the console.
- Find dialog search highlighting now has a unique appearance that does not interfere with normal text selection.
- Find dialog now allows blank queries, so it is possible to remove all previous search highlighting when the dialog is closed.
New in 20080305:
- New Log-In Shell (hidden command requiring Option key in File menu) now runs "/usr/bin/login -p -f user" so there is no password prompt.
New in 20080303:
- Reverted the default emulator to VT100 (from VT102), pending some important accuracy fixes in VT102.
- Floating command line appearance improvements.
New in 20080302:
- Preferences window Formats pane now correctly updates font and color preferences.
- Preferences window Formats pane now uses the system font panel; though only for font name and size settings.
- Any font can now be chosen, but the application takes a performance hit from forcing monospaced layout on proportional fonts.
- A warning is now displayed in the Format pane if the user chooses a font that will be slow.
- Terminal inactivity notification now supports an additional reaction, "keep alive", which sends text to the server after 10 minutes.
- Added Session.set_keep_alive_transmission(str) to Quills, allowing Python to override what is sent after a keep-alive timer expires.
- Added Session.keep_alive_transmission() to Quills, to determine what string is sent to sessions when keep-alive timers expire.
New in 20080301:
- Preferences window Formats pane is now as wide as many other panels, which avoids some resizing and truncation of toolbar icons.
- Major internal changes to improve handling of clipboard data, and rendering in the Clipboard window.
New in 20080229:
- Fixed "Automatically Copy selected text" preference to also Copy selections from double-clicks, triple-clicks and keyboard selections.
- Fixed the rendering of text selection outlines for such things as inactive windows and drags.
New in 20080228:
- Terminal view text selections now support shift-down-arrow and shift-up-arrow to manipulate by one line vertically.
- Terminal view text selections now support shift-left-arrow and shift-right-arrow to manipulate by one character horizontally (with wrap).
- Terminal view text selections now support shift-command-left-arrow to jump to the beginning of the line.
- Terminal view text selections now support shift-command-right-arrow to jump to the end of the line.
- Terminal view rectangular text selections are also changed intelligently when these new keyboard short-cuts are used.
- The cursor location or cursor line can now be selected simply by using a new extension short-cut while no text selection exists.
New in 20080227:
- Even more tweaks to the Find dialog; it is now horizontally much narrower by default, but still resizable.
- Find dialog history menu no longer saves empty or all-whitespace searches.
- Fixed help tags in the Find dialog.
New in 20080226:
- Further tweaks to the Find dialog; it is now about as vertically small as it can be, to show as many results as possible.
New in 20080224:
- Significantly changed the layout of the Find dialog, to increase visibility of the terminal text underneath.
- Menus now correctly display the names of various Preferences collections as they are added.
- Preferences window once again has a help button; but a footer frame was added to give the button a logical place to be.
- Preferences window General pane Options tab now has correct keyboard focus ordering.
- Added accessibility descriptions for color boxes and the add/remove buttons in the Preferences window.
- Added accessibility relationships between certain labels and views (useful with VoiceOver, for instance) in the Preferences window.
New in 20080223:
- The mouse pointer shape is now reset when selecting another window, to prevent (for instance) a persistent I-beam.
- Very minor tweaks to accessibility descriptions, affecting such things as speech when VoiceOver is on.
New in 20080222:
- Custom Format dialog and Preferences window Formats pane now display proper colors.
New in 20080220:
- Fixed presentation of Custom Format dialog.
- Help has received several minor corrections and other edits.
New in 20080216:
- Terminal bell sound can once again be arbitrary. See Preferences window, General pane, Notifications tab.
- The Print Screen command is no longer instantaneous, it displays a dialog (allowing export to PDF, among other print options).
New in 20080212:
- Fixed a possible crash if an item being renamed was deleted with the "-" button in the Preferences window collections drawer.
New in 20080210:
- Fixed a possible crash when quitting.
- Fixed item highlighting in Preferences window collections drawer, so that something is always selected.
- Preferences window collections drawer now contains a contextual menu button with commands for duplicating and renaming items.
- Preferences window collections drawer "-" button is no longer enabled for items that cannot be deleted.
- Terminal backing store can now use Unicode, which will enable better text and rendering support.
New in 20080205:
- Preferences window Translations pane now actually shows lists for the base character set and exceptions.
New in 20080203:
- Fixed truncation of the last line of text when copying or dragging rectangular selections.
- Fixed drag highlighting to not reveal text that is marked as "concealed".
- Fixed Preferences window General pane to properly save preferences in text fields (like window stacking origin).
New in 20080202:
- Find will now properly highlight matching text.
- Find will now highlight *every* match, anywhere in your terminal screen or scrollback, instead of just the first one.
- Find dialog now searches live, as you type or change search options!
- Find dialog now displays the number of matching terms during live search.
- Find dialog now disappears immediately when the Go button finds a match; sheet animation is bypassed.
- Find dialog search history menu no longer has a fixed size.
- Fixed a possible crash after several uses of the Find dialog.
New in 20080130:
- Save Selected Text interface has been modernized, displaying a sheet and using Unicode.
New in 20080129:
- The Quit warning is no longer displayed if every terminal window was recently opened.
New in 20080128:
- Window slide-animation during the review for Quit is now turned off for recently opened sessions, since they do not display alerts.
- Fixed file-opens for extensions that are not scripts, namely macros and session files!
- Added Terminal.dumb_strings_init(func) to Quills, allowing Python functions to define how a dumb terminal renders each character.
New in 20080126:
- Terminal view rendering speed now improved slightly in general, and noticeably during text selection.
- Fixed a possible crash in debug mode when setting the scroll region.
- Fixed Dock menu.
New in 20080121:
- Robustness improvements to the focus-follows-mouse feature, particularly with sheets and non-terminal windows.
New in 20080120:
- Implemented the special editing modes of the VT102 (delete character, insert line, delete line).
- Improved some rendering in the Clipboard window.
- Help updated with some terminal emulator information.
New in 20080115:
- Fixed drag and drop of text into terminal windows.
- Fixed print dialog display when Media Copy (line printing) sequences are sent by applications in VT102 terminals.
- The TERM variable is now properly initialized to match answerback preferences, instead of always using "vt100".
New in 20080111:
- Added Session.on_fileopen_call(func, extension) to Quills, allowing Python functions to respond to file open requests by type.
- Added Session.stop_fileopen_call(func, extension) to Quills, to mirror Session.on_fileopen_call().
- Now any common scripting extension (like ".py" and ".sh") can be opened.
- Preferences window Formats pane now has correctly sized tab content.
- Preferences window Translations pane is now visible, though incomplete.
New in 20080103:
- Terminal window tabs forced to the bottom edge by the system (window too close to menu bar) are now corrected when you move the window.
New in 20080101:
- Help has received several minor corrections and other edits.