LeechCraft Changelog

What's new in LeechCraft 0.6.0

• It took us more than four months and more than 1400 commits to make this release happen, but it is worth it: we've implemented quite a few new tasty features, some of them being requested for quite a long time, and we've also fixed a whole bunch of things, from small annoying artifacts to nasty crashes. Moreover, this is the first release under the new Boost Software License.
• Global changes:
• First of all, we've finally added multiple windows support to LeechCraft, so now you can have all your IM chats in one window and web pages in another one. LeechCraft has an option to open each tab class in its own window automatically, so it will throw private chats in one window, conferences in another one and, say, documents opened in Monocle into third one. Moreover, this feature is very useful for those having multiple monitors: one can put a long article to read or documentation pages on one monitor and leave primary LeechCraft window on another one.
• Plugins also support this new multiple windows feature. For example, SB2 will keep different settings like panel placement and quarks list for each window.
• The multiple windows feature is still very experimental and may lead to segfaults. Please report any problems with it!
• Dock widgets management was improved considerably. Now only one dock can be visible at a time on each side of each LeechCraft window, and the dock windows are toggled via the corresponding toolbars or SB2 if it is available.
• Plugins with the most improvements are, as always, Azoth, the IM client, LMP, the media player, Monocle, the document reader, and SB2, the next-generation sidebar plugin.
• Azoth:
• Azoth IM client became more keyboard-friendly with shortcuts for showing quick navigation list with current MUC participants or contacts from the whole roster, or for opening last detected link in a chat. It also saves whether formatted messages are enabled for separate contacts now, so you can have formatting disabled Azoth-wide and enabled for separate contacts only, so next time chat tabs with those contacts are opened, Azoth will automatically enable formatted messages. It is much faster and stable now as well.
• Azoth' subplugins were also improved. For example, Acetamide, the IRC protocol plugin, now supports querying the list of channels on a server. AdiumStyles was optimized a lot. ChatHistory module loads history way faster now. Modnok, the LaTeX renderer, supports settings custom background colors and disabling antialiasing. Xoox, the XMPP support plugin, got most fixes: it now supports properly changing account password, forwards XHTML-IM message body in Ad-Hoc commands and exposes TLS settings. It also has an option for turning off requests for VCards and versions in MUCs, considerably reducing traffic usage and server load in conferences.
• And good news for some users of protocols currently not supported by Azoth: work on a new plugin, VelvetBird, has been started. VelvetBird is basically a wrapper around libpurple adding support for protocols supported by it to Azoth. It is in its very early stages now, some vitally important features are still missing (working with authorization/subscription, for instance, is still somewhat experimental), but some LeechCraft users already use it as well and are generally happy with it.
• LMP:
• LMP, the audio player for LeechCraft, has been improved a lot as well. It now has a proper album art manager, supports showing artist browser from a bunch of various places, supports previewing whole albums from sites like VKontakte (if discography if available via plugins like LastFMScrobble and MusicZombie).
• LMP also has got a new subplugin, LMP Graffiti, which allows one to tag audio files, split CUE files into separate tracks and obtain tags for files from services like MusicBrainz via audio fingerprinting (if corresponding plugins are installed).
• Monocle:
• Monocle document reader now supports a bunch of new things:
• page thumbnails (with visually highlighting the currently displaying area);
• bookmarks;
• forms for PDF files;
• text searching.
• Monocle also allows searching for selected text via text searchers like Pogooglue or SeekThru OpenSearch client.
• A lot of behavior issues (mostly keeping state between Monocle launches) were fixed as well. Monocle FXB, the fb2 format plugin, has been optimized two-fold on a typical fb2 book.
• SB2:
• SB2 now supports placing the panel in any window side, not only left one. It also supports removing and reordering quarks now, and the quarks can have settings as well.
• Panel placement preferences, as well as quark list, order and quark settings can be different for different windows.
• Other plugins:
• Blogique, the blog client, now supports such features as autosaving, tab unclosing and session management with the TabSessManager plugin or showing recent comments and inbox messages. It also supports keeping a local blog now.
• GActs, the module for supporting global shortcuts, now bundles a patched copy of required Qxt files with it. The patches add support for assigning media keys to global shortcuts, a thing that upstream Qxt misses (and seems to not accept the proposed patch for several years already). GActs still supports building with system Qxt instead of bundled one, but in this case one misses this media keys feature.
• Launchy module now supports favorites category where applications and LeechCraft tabs can be added. Favorites will be shown in quick launch area in SB2, if the corresponding quark is enabled.
• Launchy now also supports keyboard navigation as well as filtering the list of applications by name, description or name of the executable.
• NetStoreManager module (responsible for cloud storages support) was reworked quite a bit. For example, there were several stability improvements and older tree-based interface was replaced by a more Total Commander-like thing.
• Among other changes:
• Aggregator module got a major speedup.
• LHTR visual editor plugin now supports tables and some other features.
• GMail Notifier module now supports showing a quark with the list of mail in the mailbox.
• Liznoo power manager has extended support for Mac OS now, with things like querying battery voltage or temperature.
• A new module has been added which provides a quark with temperatures readings from libsensors: HotSensors. It is experimental for now and is known to crash sometimes during heavy system load in Qt internals.
• Poshuku history widget has been fixed, supporting filtering by URL and eliminating duplicates in the same section.
• Vrooby module now supports UDisks2 and supports building with several backends at once, trying them in order at run time.
• Several old and unsupported plugins were removed, among them:
• EiskaltDC++, the DirectConnect-client.
• LCFTP, the FTP client.
• TransparentArch, stub for easy access to archives contents.
• VFSCore, virtual file system implementation. This module had to be removed because the functionality it relied on is unavailable in Qt 5 and there are no alternatives.
• Tab++, being replaced by TabsList and SB2.
• These plugins were extracted into separate repositories, keeping all the revisions that relate to them in case someone would take them over.
• And now we are even closer to having a working LeechCraft installation on Windows. For that, we had to migrate to the MinGW toolchain, since MSVS' support for C++11 standard is pretty crappy yet.