Cutting 1.31

[Jez]

There have been quite a lot of good changes lately and I think it would be great if we could get that pushed out to our users.

Here's a summary of the changelog:

• Hint appearance has undergone a redesign
• New hint scattering strategy for alphabetic hints
• Divs can now be scrolled after the user clicks on them (we'll eventually add a pure keyboard mechanism for doing this)
• Detection and following of next / prev links has been improved
• Addition of g0 and g$ commands
• Addition of p/P for URL pasting
• 'Hardening' of CSS to prevent site interference
• A greatly enhanced find mode, in particular:
• Regex support (turned on by the \r escape sequence)
• Smartcase searching is the default now (case sensitivity is triggered by uppercase characters)
• Case sensitivity can be enforced using the \I escape sequence
• Find queries are now global across tabs and persistent across browser sessions
• Page shortcuts e.g. on GitHub should no longer be triggered during find mode
• Find mode no longer triggers insert mode if there are input elements that match the query, but we can enter insert mode on one of the results by hitting <esc>.
• Insert mode is automatically exited when changing tabs
• Many many many bugfixes and minor improvements.

Things I'd like to see settled before the push:

• Escape in insert mode should not be passed to page -- https://github.com/philc/vimium/issues/468 (Waiting for Ilya's input on this -- If you don't remember the reason for the original commit, could we just back it out?)
• Have escape focus content -- https://github.com/philc/vimium/issues/138 -- current implementation / interface is awkward, I plan to back it out before the release
• Find mode behavior needs to be documented -- I'm thinking of linking to a separate HTML page from our help dialog
• I don't like `g0` and `g$`. g$ in particular seems *really* awkward to press. Could we do simple tab numbering instead? I.e. g1 for the first tab, g2 for the second,, and g0 for the last tab. We can also add in negative numbers -- `g-1` for the second tab from the end, etc. It's pretty similar to Chrome / FF's default Ctrl/Cmd-[number] behavior for switching tabs, but a) we'll have negative numbers and b) `g` is considerably less awkward than `Ctrl`, which would benefit our non-Mac users. Or we could back this out as well and do some experimentation before our next release.

Jez

[Phil Crosby]

Thanks for taking the lead on this Jez. The linkhint improvements really improve quality of life (thanks for everyone who contributed), so we shouldn't keep them out of users' hands for too long.

Regarding this change, I thought you concluded after experimenting that it wasn't gelling that welll:

Insert mode is automatically exited when changing tabs

It would be good to tag issues with the 1.31 milestone for all of the remaining bugs we should resolve prior to cutting a new release. I can scrub through the queue later tonight, apply the tag, and see if there's anything big we're missing.

[Ilya Sukhar]

Thanks so much for all your work Jez. Regarding your points:

#1: I commented on the bug but unfortunately I have nothing productive to add. I'm okay with reversing this.

#4: I'm fine with numbering but g0 for the last tab doesn't seem right. g0 should be the first tab.

Ilya

[Phil Crosby]

#2: I closed #138 based on the discussion. I didn't see any mention of a patch or next actions.

#3: Nice idea. We can replace the "found a bug? report it here" link with "Vimium documentation" which links to our wiki.

#4: note that Chrome has the shortcut CMD+1 for the first tab. That means g+x and CMD+x will be offset by 1 and thus frustrating to use together. I've added a note about this on #390 (https://github.com/philc/vimium/issues/390).

I've scrubbed through the issues in the issue queue and we're looking good. I've moved two issues into a milestone that we should close these down before cutting the 1.31 release:

https://github.com/philc/vimium/issues?sort=updated&direction=desc&state=open&page=1&milestone=1

[Jez]

#1: Alright, I'll reverse it in my next push.

#2: Oops, I linked to the wrong issue. It was supposed to be #426. Essentially, I made a commit that returned focus to the top-level frame if ESC was pressed more than once. However, this turns out to be the wrong thing to do at times -- sometimes the top-level frame is not the one with the scrollable content. I have a bunch of ideas to deal with this, but I don't have time to experiment with them at the moment.

#3: I was thinking of linking to a page that's packaged within the extension, actually. Linking to our wiki might cause confusion as the dev version deviates from the last released one.

#4: I've replied in the comments on #390.

Thanks so much for working through all those issues last night! I'll follow up on them this coming weekend.

Cheers,
Jez

[Phil Crosby]

I merged in a pull request to hide the HUD (which obscures Facebook Chat's textbox) until we come up with a longer term solution, like eliminating the HUD. The 1.31 milestone now has no open issues.

For #3, let's make the docs as lightweight as possible. I didn't expect that they'd be changed that much which is why I suggested simply a link to the wiki.

Let me know when we're clear from your end Jez and we'll push this out.

[Phil Crosby]

Ilya just shipped 1.31 to the Chrome store. Nice work guys. Big release, lots of important bugs fixed. Let's keep an eye on the reviews over the next few days to see if there's any regressions we missed.

[Phil Crosby]

Unfortunately, since this version of Vimium requires further permissions, I don't believe it will autoupdate. To get the latest version I had to go to the extensions tab and manually click Update Extensions. I wonder if all of our users will stall on Vimium 1.30 because of this.

[Ilya Sukhar]

Why do we require extra permissions now?

[Phil Crosby]

For this:

https://github.com/philc/vimium/issues/76

This should be the last added permission for awhile (or maybe until we add global hotkeys).

BTW I just came across this humorous thread discussing this same upgrade experience for 1.28:

https://github.com/philc/vimium/issues/366

[Jez]

It's actually for the URL pasting functions -- we need the clipboardRead permission to do that.

Idea: install a notification system for these manual-upgrade cases. Have vimium poll an update-notification site periodically, and display a message to the user via the HUD whenever manual action is required.

I guess it's a little late to do this for 1.31 though.

Jez