CHANGELOG.md

Unlike the Git commit history, this changelog does not include code cleanups and other details that don't affect using Porcupine.

v2024.03.31

• There are two new easter eggs in the about dialog. Happy Easter :)
• Porcupine's documentation has been updated and rearranged. The documentation is now clearly split into two folders, user-doc for using Porcupine and dev-doc for developing Porcupine. Both folders also contain newly written documentation. Porcupine Wiki was deleted, and deleting akuli.github.io/porcupine is planned.
• The contents of the Help menu at top were updated. For example, User Documentation opens the user-doc folder.
• Porcupine now checks for updates when it starts. Many other programs do this in an annoying way (with e.g. a popup message). Porcupine notifies you about a new version by showing a message in the status bar instead. If this is still too annoying, you can easily disable update checking in Porcupine Settings or in the plugin manager.
• All right-click menus are now offset a little bit from the cursor location, so that you don't accidentally click the first item in the right-click menu. Thank you ethical-haquer for fixing this.

v2024.03.09

Bug fixes:

• Installing Porcupine no longer fails on MacOS. In previous versions, there was an error caused by the PyYAML dependency.
• The File → Quit menu item works again. Previously it was always grayed out, and nothing happened when it was clicked. Thank you Tuomas for fixing this.
• The Filetypes menu no longer displays the wrong filetype in some situations. Thank you Tuomas for fixing this.
• Porcupine should no longer segfault in a corner case that happens only on some Linux systems with the Amiri Quran Colored font installed (see issue #1442). This is technically a bug in Tk, but Porcupine now contains a workaround for the bug.

v2024.02.07

Bug fixes:

• Porcupine no longer crashes on Mac when you try to open a file. Thank you ThePhilgrim for fixing this.
• When the stop button (or other buttons) in the top right corner of the command output area are hovered, they display tooltips that explain what the buttons do. These tooltips no longer go partially off the screen when the Porcupine window is maximized or dragged to the right edge of the screen. Thank you lawson89 for fixing this.
• The directory tree now colors file names with non-ASCII characters correctly based on their Git status. For example, when a file is git added, it will now become green regardless of its file name. In previous versions, files named e.g. örkkiäinen.txt were always white.
• On some systems, such as Debian 12, the font chooser in Porcupine Settings now shows more fonts than before, and doesn't show a confusing warning triangle when the default font is selected.
• In previous versions, the "Jumping to previous/next anchor cycles to end/start of file" setting didn't work when the file contained only one anchor point. Thank you ThePhilgrim for reporting this.

Other changes:

• Porcupine no longer runs on Python 3.7.
• Ctrl+Y does redo (that is, reverting a Ctrl+Z) also on Linux. Previously Linux users needed Ctrl+Shift+Z for redo.
• Ctrl+/ now comments selected lines, somewhat similarly to typing the filetype's comment character (e.g. # in a Python file).
• Sort Lines in the Edit menu now takes only the lines with the same indentation when nothing is selected. This is convenient for sorting long Python lists and dicts.
• Previously the encoding chooser was just a big list of encodings with no explanation. Now it's easy to choose between UTF-8 and Latin-1, and the encoding chooser explains their advantages and disadvantages.

v2023.06.27

New features:

• Porcupine now looks quite different than before, because it uses the sv-ttk themes. You can choose between dark and light theme in settings.
• When running programs with output going to the terminal window (try Shift+F5), Porcupine now supports keyboard input. For example, programs that use Python's input() function now work.
• Pastebinning is now done by right-clicking selected text. There is no longer a "Pastebin" menu in the menubar.

Bug fixes:

• The editor now scrolls automatically to keep the cursor visible when pressing Ctrl+Delete or Ctrl+Backspace.
• Porcupine now autoindents slightly better when typing into a JSON file. Thank you Moosems for fixing this.
• On Linux, if you use the launcher, you can now choose Porcupine in "Open with" menus. For this to work, you may need to uncheck and check again "Show Porcupine in the desktop menu system" in the settings.

v2023.03.11

New features:

• On Linux, there's a new and easy way to launch Porcupine without using the terminal. In settings, you can check "Show Porcupine in the desktop menu system", which makes Porcupine appear in the operating system's menu like most other applications. There are more instructions in the README.
• There is a new menu that appears when right-clicking the main editing area. It doesn't contain much yet, but more things will probably be added into it in subsequent releases. Thank you ArchKats for designing and implementing the new right-click menu.
• When right-clicking a folder in the directory tree, there is a new option "Open in terminal". It is equivalent to opening a terminal or command prompt as usual and then going to the right-clicked folder with cd some/path/to/the/folder. Thank you Tuomas for implementing this.
• Porcupine now recognizes BOMs in text files. Previously UTF-8 files with a BOM would get a weirdly behaving blank character in the beginning. Thank you Tuomas.

Bug fixes (both by Tuomas):

• Dragging and dropping files to Porcupine now works even when the file names contain non-ASCII characters.
• File types selected with the Filetypes menu in the menubar are now remembered when Porcupine is restarted.

v2023.01.19

Fixes a bug where on some computers, the minimap would show keywords and other highlighted parts of the code with a ridiculously large font (see #1171). The minimap is the narrow view of the file being edited on the side.

v2022.11.25

New keyboard shortcuts and UI fixes:

• There are new key bindings for focusing various parts of Porcupine without clicking them: Alt+Shift+D for directory tree, Alt+Shift+F for the file being edited, and Alt+Shift+C for command output. Thank you lawson89 for adding the new key bindings.
• The directory tree now opens the selected file when pressing the Enter key. Previously this worked only for directories, and to open a file, you needed to press the right arrow key or double-click. Thank you lawson89.
• The buttons related to running commands now have tooltips that explain what they do. You no longer need to guess based on the images. Thank you lawson89.

Filetype-specific fixes and improvements:

• In Python files, comments placed on the same line with a decorator are now syntax highlighted as comments.
• In Rust files, function names and a few more keywords are now highlighted correctly.
• There are new default commands for Rust. For example, pressing F5 in a Rust file does cargo run by default. As with any filetype, you can press Shift+F5 (or Shift+F6, Shift+F7, Shift+F8) to run any command you want.
• Porcupine now supports .pyx files slightly better than before. Thank you lawson89.

Other improvements:

• On Windows, the Porcupine installer now uninstalls and reinstalls faster than before, because it does not display the name of every file it deletes.
• When restarted, Porcupine now remembers whether or not the window was maximized. Previously it would only remember the location and size of the window, so restarting a maximized Porcupine would result in a window that is big but not in a maximized state. Thank you lawson89 for fixing this.
• The full-screen mode (F11 or Full Screen in the View menu) now works better with window managers that have their own full-screening feature. Thank you Tuomas for testing this.
• The Filetypes menu now shows which filetype is currently selected. Thank you lawson89.
• The plugin manager is no longer a plugin, so it is not possible to use the plugin manager to disable the plugin manager. Thank you aloner-pro for fixing this.
• In the Run menu, there is a new built-in Python prompt that runs within the Porcupine process. It is meant to be used for developing and debugging Porcupine. For example, get_tab_manager().tabs()[0].textwidget['bg'] = 'red' sets the color of the first open tab.

v2022.08.28

Yesterday's release (below) turned out to be broken: syntax highlighting didn't work at all. This release fixes that.

v2022.08.27

The main feature in this release is Porcupine's new syntax highlighter. It is faster and less buggy than the old syntax highlighter. The old and new highlighters are also known as "pygments highlighter" (old) and "tree-sitter highlighter" (new), named after the libraries they are based on.

The tree-sitter highlighter is currently used for C, JSON, Markdown, Python, Rust and TOML files. Other filetypes still use the pygments highlighter. As with any other problem with Porcupine, please let me know by creating an issue if the pygments highlighter isn't working with a filetype you use.

Thank you rdbende for working on the new highlighter with me, and for your work on Porcupine in general :)

Mac fixes:

• "Save As" no longer crashes Porcupine on some Macs. Thank you Moosems for reporting this and helping me figure out what the problem was.
• By default, the Alt key is no longer used for key bindings on Mac. For example, the binding for setting an anchor on Mac is now Control+Shift+a instead of Alt+Shift+A. Many key bindings that used Alt didn't work because of how Alt is also used for entering special characters. Thank you Moosems for fixing this.

Filetypes fixes:

• The Filetypes menu is now in alphabetical order. Thank you sokratisvas for fixing this.
• Settings from filetypes.toml and default_filetypes.toml are now merged recursively. This is useful for giving custom langserver options without copy/pasting the default configuration from default_filetypes.toml.

Other fixes and improvements:

• The line numbers now work in files that are more than 9999 lines long. Thank you Moosems for fixing this.
• Porcupine no longer displays errors on the terminal when right-clicking (empty) items in the directory tree. Thank you Tuomas and nicolafan for fixing this.
• Renaming a currently opened file in the directory tree now works as expected. Previously you would often get an error saying that the file isn't found, and then you would have to close and reopen the file.

v2022.07.31

Porcupine now uses calver: from now on, a Porcupine version is simply its release date in the "year.month.day" format.

Windows improvements:

• Porcupine no longer looks blurry on some Windows installs. Thank you VideoCarp for finally fixing this old issue!
• Alt+F4 now works on Windows. Previously it worked on some Windows systems and didn't work on others.

Directory tree:

• There are a couple new options that appear when right-clicking: "Copy full path to clipboard" and "New directory here". Thank you ihammadasghar and TyGuy54.
• Items in the directory tree are indented less than before. This makes the directory tree fit in a narrow area when there are many nested directories.
• Some keyboards have a Menu key (also known as App key) that usually does the same thing as right-clicking. This now works in the directory tree.
• The directory tree runs git status internally to figure out how to color each item (green means your changes will be included in the next commit, for example). It no longer kills git if it doesn't complete within a few seconds. This prevents lock file errors that happened when trying to run git afterwards.

Pastebin menu:

• When you pastebin for the first time, you now get a dialog asking whether you really wanted to do it. In other words, you can no longer accidentally send your code to a pastebin service.
• Indentations are now removed when pastebinning. Previously indentation was removed only from the first line of code when pastebinning to dpaste.com. This was annoying when pastebinning a part from the middle of a function, for example. (If you select some text before pastebinning, only the selected text is pastebinned.)

Running programs without an external terminal window:

• Porcupine no longer freezes if the program produces a lot of output, e.g. print inside an infinite loop.
• On Linux and MacOS, there is now a pause button that can be used to stop and continue running the program. This is useful if you made a game but you didn't implement pause yet, for example. Thank you rdbende for implementing this.
• Porcupine no longer stops showing the output in a corner case. This corner case happened frequently when printing large amounts of random bytes in Python.
• Porcupine now recognizes file names and line numbers of the format (filename:linenumber) and makes them clickable. Recognizing file names and line numbers this way was added in Porcupine 0.99.0, and this release only adds one new format.

Other new features and improvements:

• You can now decide whether Porcupine should remember your opened tabs when you close and reopen it. There's a new checkbox in Porcupine Settings (in the Settings menu).
• You can now select text and press Ctrl+G to search the selected text on Google. This is useful if you don't know what a function does, for example. Thank you okankamilsen for implementing this.
• Hover popups now appear with some delay: if you move your mouse over a function call, you will now have to wait about half a second before you see a description of what the function does. This makes the hover popups less annoying and reduces CPU usage when moving the mouse. Thank you rdbende for implementing this.
• The color scheme buttons in Porcupine Settings can now be accessed with keyboard in addition to clicking them.
• It is no longer possible to open several instances of the same dialog. For example, previously it was possible to open Plugin Manager even if Plugin Manager was already opened. Thank you rdbende for fixing this.
• The encoding button (at bottom right, usually displaying utf-8) now becomes wider if you select an encoding with a long name. Thank you rdbende and Moosems.

Removed features:

• It is no longer possible to use langservers with local TCP sockets. Use stdio (i.e. stdin and stdout) instead. So far I haven't seen any langservers that can't be used with stdio.

v0.99.2

Directory tree:

• When a file has been renamed, it is now selected. Previously you would have to click the file after renaming it if you wanted to open it, for example. Thank you rdbende for fixing this.
• You can now make a new file by right-clicking the directory tree. Thank you rdbende.
• Deleting an empty directory no longer asks you to confirm whether you surely want to delete it. Previously it would show a dialog that confusingly said "Do you want to permanently delete foo and everything inside it?", even if there was nothing inside the directory.

Running commands:

• If Porcupine is installed into a virtualenv, that no longer affects running commands. Previously Python would often fail to find libraries installed with pip.
• Output displayed in the Porcupine window now shows CRLF line endings (aka \r\n) correctly on all platforms. Previously it worked only on Windows, and on other systems, it showed a weird box at the end of the previous line.

Other improvements:

• Porcupine no longer prints weird things to the terminal when it is closed on Python 3.9. I haven't checked what other Python versions this affects.
• The X button that closes a tab is now white on dark themes, so it is easier to see. Thank you rdbende.
• The status bar now shows the number of words selected.
• URLs in code are now opened with Ctrl+Click or Ctrl+Enter (Command+Click or Command+Enter on MacOS). They previously used Alt+Shift instead of Ctrl, which was unnecessarily confusing. Thank you 1anakin20.
• Page up and down keys now work in the autocompletion list. Thank you rdbende.

v0.99.1

Directory tree:

• Right-clicking a file or folder gives a menu with a few Git-related items in it. They now work. Previously they were sometimes disabled (grayed out) when they weren't supposed to be, and most of the time they didn't actually do anything when clicked. Thank you rdbende for reporting this and helping me fix it.
• Empty folders are now refreshed correctly when they become non-empty. Previously empty folders would remain empty-looking even after creating files inside them, unless you closed and reopened the folder. Thank you nicolafan.
• On MacOS, control+click now does the same thing as right-click. Thank you 1anakin20.

Running commands:

• "Repeat previous command" is now clever enough to not repeat commands from the wrong filetype. Previously it would happily run Python commands in C files.
• When the output is displayed in the Porcupine window, it now stays scrolled to the bottom as more output appears.
• File names and line numbers are now clickable in some cases that previously didn't work, such as pytest error messages.
• Pressing F5 in a HTML file will now open it in a web browser.

Other improvements:

• Entries in the find area (Ctrl+F) now stretch as you make the Porcupine window wider. This should make replacing long pieces of code easier. Thank you rdbende.
• The setting dialog is now tall enough to show all of its content by default, regardless of what Ttk theme you use. Thank you rdbende for noticing and fixing this.
• Tooltips that appear when hovering code now have a similar background as the area itself, so if you use a dark theme, the tooltips will also have a dark background. Previously the colors would be opposite. Thank you rdbende.
• There is now automatic indenting when editing HTML files. Thank you rdbende.

Very small fixes:

• The plugin manager now shows a more meaningful description when the run plugin is selected.
• In a switch statement (e.g. C, C++, Java), you can press Alt+Enter instead of Enter to avoid automatic indentation when combining multiple case foo: statements. Alt+Enter is now mentioned in Porcupine's default_filetypes.toml. Thank you Tawishi.

v0.99.0

I'm excited about this release. It has lots of awesome improvements, and several people have contributed to it. Thanks to all contributors!

New features:

• The run plugin has been rewritten. If you previously used it only for running Python code in a terminal by pressing F5, that will still work, although it can do a lot more. Press Shift+F5 to get started. My favorite feature is running commands so that their output goes to the Porcupine window, and things like File "foo.py", line 52 become clickable links.
• Files in the directory tree can now be cut/pasted and copy/pasted by right-clicking them or with Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. Thank you nicolafan.
• The right-click menu of the directory tree now contains git add and a couple other Git operations.
• There is a new button "Jump to definition" in the Edit menu. For example, if you have a method call like foo.bar() in a Python program and you put the cursor on top of bar, this will take you to the line of code that looks like def bar(self, .... The functionality itself isn't new, but it is now in the menubar, so it's easier to discover.

Bug fixes:

• Right-clicking and middle-clicking now works on MacOS. Thank you 1anakin20 for fixing this.
• The Windows installer now shows a very clear error message if you try to run it on a 32-bit Windows. Previously it would extract some files and then fail without a good error message. Thank you Mannuel25 for noticing this.
• When right-clicking a folder in the directory tree, one of the menu items is "Open in file manager". It now works on Windows.
• When uninstalling on Windows, Porcupine no longer deletes the whole directory chosen when installing it with the Windows installer. This means that the uninstaller will behave sanely even if you accidentally install Porcupine directly into C:\Program Files as opposed to e.g. C:\Program Files\Porcupine. You don't have to worry about this if you didn't choose a custom directory when installing Porcupine.
• Porcupine no longer kills git status if it runs for more than 2 seconds. This hopefully prevents errors where Git complains about a lock file (issue #885). Porcupine runs git status internally to figure out how to color files in the directory tree, e.g. green for git added.

Other improvements:

• Porcupine now uses a dark theme by default, although you won't notice it if you have chosen a custom theme. To change the theme, there is a new button in the Porcupine Settings dialog (in Edit menu), and the old Syntax Colors menu has been removed.
• Many small UI details have been improved. For example, many buttons are now wider than before, so it's easier to click them. Thank you rdbende.
• You can now uncheck Python virtualenvs after right-clicking them in the directory tree. This means that you can choose to not use a virtualenv even if the project has one. This is useful if something isn't working, and you suspect there might be something wrong with the virtualenv.
• On Windows, Python virtualenvs now show up as selected immediately after selecting them in the directory tree.
• Files whose name starts with a dot are now grouped after other files in the directory tree. Previously they were first, which is annoying, as these files are by convention hidden and usually you want to ignore them. Thank you nicolafan for fixing this.
• Porcupine no longer comes with pycodestyle, so you should get less yellow underlines when editing Python files. Nowadays many Python projects use black, so enforcing pycodestyle's coding style doesn't make sense.
• You now get a warning if you try to open a huge file. Previously Porcupine would open it without checking the size, and in the worst possible case, freeze the whole computer. Thank you rdbende for fixing this.
• A few smaller improvements and fixes that I don't expect most users to notice.

v0.98.2

The relevant part of CHANGELOG.md is now shown on the releases page. I manually added it to the releases page for v0.98.0. You can read all changelogs here.

v0.98.1

A failed attempt to fix showing CHANGELOG.md contents on the releases page.

v0.98.0

New features:

• From now on, the relevant parts of this changelog should appear on the releases page on GitHub.
• Several new features in the directory tree:
  • The directory tree now acts as more of a file manager than before. You can right-click files and folders to e.g. rename or delete them.
  • You can now type a character to navigate. For example, pressing the a key cycles through all files in the selected directory whose name starts with a.
  • Right-clicking a project now offers you an option to hide it from the directory tree. It will appear again when you open a file inside the project.

Bug fixes:

• Syntax highlighting now works in code blocks of Markdown files. Previously they would sometimes display weirdly depending on scrolling. Thank you rdbende for reporting this.
• Porcupine no longer segfaults on systems with the Noto Color Emoji font installed, regardless of what version of Tcl/Tk it uses. Thank you Tuomas for fixing this.
• Some menu items, such as most items in the Edit menu, are now grayed out when there are no open tabs or the currently selected tab is not a regular tab for editing text files. Previously they would appear clickable, but clicking them would do nothing visible and cause an error to be logged.
• Remembering the opened tabs when restarting now works regardless of what is configured in filetypes.toml.

Other changes:

• The Windows installer is slightly smaller than before, 19.2MB instead of 22.7MB.
• The tetris plugin was deleted. It was never included by default, and it will likely continue to work for a few releases if you installed it manually from more_plugins/. Use Arrinao's tetris project if you want to play tetris.
• Porcupine now uses a different library for parsing filetypes.toml and default_filetypes.toml. If you have customized your filetypes.toml and you get errors when starting Porcupine, you may need to switch to slightly different syntax. See default_filetypes.toml for examples of what works (there is a link to it in your user-specific filetypes.toml).

There are also other small improvements.

v0.97.0

New features:

• Alt+Shift+C+E sets anchors to every yellow or red underline. This is useful for stepping through all errors in a file and fixing them one by one. See Anchors in the Edit menu.
• You can now run isort from the Tools/Python menu.
• The status bar has new buttons for choosing the line ending and encoding. Also, if you select a single character, it displays information about that character. This can be useful if you want to distinguish “ and ", for example.

Bug fixes:

• When Porcupine detects a file that has a Git merge conflict, it creates "Use this" and "Edit manually" buttons to help resolve it. They no longer show up weirdly on top of tooltips and autocompletion popups.
• The Wrap long lines setting (in View menu) is now preserved when restarting Porcupine or dragging a tab out of Porcupine.
• Line numbers now update when unfolding, even in very short files. Speaking of folding, the fold plugin is currently not very easy to use, and I am planning to improve it (#410).

There are also other small improvements.

v0.96.0

• The minimap (the thing that shows your code on the side with small font) is no longer ridiculously wide. You can also resize it by dragging with the mouse. If you previously disabled it because it was too wide, you can re-enable it in the plugin manager.
• The long line marker can no longer move to the wrong place in unpredictable ways.
• Changing the filetype now deletes yellow and red underlines from the file being edited. If you somehow open a C file as if it was a Python file, it is probably full of complaints about invalid Python syntax, and you want them to go away when you choose C from the Filetypes menu.
• Better error handling for opening and saving files:
  • If you open a file written with the wrong encoding, let's say a file using Latin-1 but Porcupine thinks it's UTF-8 (default), Porcupine will now ask you which encoding the file uses, and mentions using .editorconfig files to change it permanently. There is also error handling for encoding errors when saving files.
  • Porcupine now shows an error message if a file is deleted while it is open in Porcupine. Previously it would prevent you from opening more files, with no visible error messages, until the tab with the non-existing file was closed. This was a bug, not a feature.
  • Many other improvements that you are unlikely to come across when using Porcupine normally.
• Several smaller improvements.

v0.95.0

Windows improvements:

• Automatic indentation now works on Windows. For example, if you type def foo(): into a Python file and press Enter, the next line will be indented. Press Alt+Enter instead of Enter to prevent getting the additional indent.
• You can now right-click a Python file and choose to open it in Porcupine. This works not only for Python files, but for all file types that are defined in default_filetypes.toml. You can open other files in Porcupine by right-clicking them too, but it takes a few more clicks.
• Porcupine now shows up as Porcupine.exe in the task manager. It previously showed up as pythonw.exe. Let me know if your antivirus program dislikes Porcupine.exe (it is not malware, but sometimes Windows Defender complains about executables it hasn't seen before).
• Porcupine installer now displays an error message if Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable is not installed. Porcupine has never worked without it, but previously it would install silently. If you see the error message, search it with Google.

Other fixes:

• Porcupine can no longer start off-screen if your screen size changes.

v0.94.3 and older

No change log, but you can browse the Git commit history. Let me know if you need help with that.