weekly-v2.5.8+456.g56f1410

Weekly Pre-release

Fixes

• Fix bug where retro delete space wouldn't work for punctuation and numbers
• Fix "space-after" fingerspelling problem that caused spacing
• Attempt to fix transposition errors on OS X, also improve reliability of extended characters
• Add missing import; last week's builds didn't work on Linux

Documentation

There's now a Linux readme for users looking to get set up for development

Download & Install

Windows

Download and run the .exe below.

OS X

Download the .dmg file, drag Plover to your Applications folder, then go to System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Privacy > Accessibility > "+" Button > Select Applications/Plover. Now, run Plover.

Linux

You can pip install the wheel file. You can chmod +x the egg if you have all dependencies installed. Ubuntu users may need to use a backport to get the latest version of wxPython:

sudo apt-add-repository -y ppa:adamwolf/kicad-trusty-backports
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python-wxgtk3.0

Plover-2.5.8.317.gced379f

With this new "weekly" build of Plover, we hope to start a trend of rapid releases. We'll try to push a new weekly every time there's a new feature, so you might see weekly builds on a daily or biweekly basis, depending on how much actual development gets done. One thing is for sure, though, we won't wait another 2 years (!!!) before getting improvements into your hands.

This is a "pre-release", not quite a version 3.0.0 just yet, we want to have the brave among you try it out and let us know if anything broke in a major way.

Special Thanks

This release has been a huge team effort, and I'd like to thank many people and give some credit, where due. Firstly, thanks to @balshetzer for bringing Plover to its current state, and leaving a wonderful project with consistent style to take over. It's been a joy following in your footsteps. Thanks also to @mighele for work on many features, including the dictionary editor, the retrospective commands, and the lookup window. Another huge thanks is due for @Balthamos, who created the suggestions window in this release. @rbrewer123 also submitted some useful pull requests to improve the Stentura machine. @jeremy-w revived the translation transparency issue and got us set up with awesome contributing guidelines to help curious developers get started.

And in the last few months, since October, I've been hard at work with @benoit-pierre, who has been wonderful to work with. Benoit has done so much work on Plover, attacking core problems and making sweeping internal changes. He kept making pull requests and pushing for a release, he helped set up continuous integration, performed many code reviews, refactored the development environment on all systems, changed the core of Plover's steno engine, and made countless bug fixes. I can't summarize just how much he has done, you'll just have to review the commit history to see all the incredible work.

Finally, I'd like to thank @stenoknight. Without her, we wouldn't be all be stenoing together on the Discord chat, I wouldn't be stenoing my code, life would be very different. I've been overjoyed to be put in the position as lead dev for Plover, even though I'm not a Python expert like some of our other developers. I've really enjoyed getting things organized and I'm immensely proud of where the Open Steno community has managed to get Plover for this release; it's amazing to use and I hope that everyone enjoys all the new stuff! Speaking of new stuff, here's the changelog:

Features

• New icon
  
• Full Unicode support on Windows, OS X, and Linux. Now you can use a non-Latin alphabet, including extended symbols such as emoji 💥
• New lookup window to look up strokes for a word. Use {PLOVER:LOOKUP}
  
• Configure whether space is outputted at the beginning or end of the current stroke (default/current is " add", new option outputs "add ")
• New option to configure whether Plover's first stroke after being turned on is capitalized and has a space.
• New option to change the number of undos that Plover remembers. The default is 100 up from 10.
• New Dictionary Editor that lets you view and edit strokes in your dictionaries. You can filter by stroke or definition, and add, edit, and delete entries in your JSON and RTF dictionaries.
  
• New Suggestions window, a training tool that watches what you are writing, and gives other strokes that have the same output. It's great for discovering briefs, suffixes, prefixes, and alternative strokes.
  
• "Add Translation" Transparency option to make your dictionary updates more subtle in case you have clients who get distracted by it.
• New commands:
  • Repeat last stroke: repeats the last stroke exactly, useful for things like arrow keys to avoid having to do a complex stroke multiple times: {*+}
  • Uppercase next word, turns "word" into "WORD": {<}
• New retrospective commands:

  • Retrospective capitalize

    Capitalize last word: {*-|}

  • Retrospective uppercase

    Uppercase last word: {*<}

  • Retrospective lowercase last word

    Lower the first letter of the last word: {*>}

  • Retrospective toggle asterisk

    Change whether the last stroke did or didn't have an asterisk: {*}.

  • Retrospective insert space

    "Split" the last two strokes, turning KAT/LOG, "catalogue", into "cat log": {*?}

  • Retrospective delete space

    Remove a space between the last two words, turning "break off" into "breakoff": {*!}

  • Retrospective currency formatting

    Using a stroke of the form {*($c)}, where you can replace "$" with your own currency symbol, Plover will adjust your last stroke, if it's a number, optionally with two decimal places, (e.g. 123412.34) into currency format (in this case, $123,412.34)

• Delete words on empty buffer. When Plover runs out of asterisk-undos, it will start to try to delete a word at a time instead of doing nothing.
• Add remapping of the keyboard's layout through the configuration dialog, so that users can change which keys are suppressed and which suppressed keys correspond to steno keys. For example, you can suppress the spacebar, or set "Tab" to act as S-.

- **Notifications!** Information and errors are now displayed in your system's notifications system. - **New error log**. `strokes.log` now shows strokes and translation output, `plover.log` shows errors and logged information. - **Better portable mode**. Configuration file (`plover.cfg`) and dictionaries can be stored relatively, so Plover should work portably. - **Carry capitalization across characters** with a new command: `~|`. Useful for quotations, like an opening quote: `{~|\"^}` - **Radio buttons instead of red/green P for output enabled/disabled**. Tweak main user interface window to be a little more accessible for users who may have difficult distinguishing between red and green.

- **Add multiple dictionaries at once**. You can now add multiple dictionaries at once instead of one at a time in the "Add Dictionary" file selector. - **Add output modes** (manage case and space character)

Introduce a new breed of meta command, "MODE". Now Plover has persistent "modes" that affect the output of the text. The core of the functionality comes from controlling just:

• The text case
• The space character

For the text case, users can use "CAPS", "TITLE", "LOWER". This lets the text come out IN ALL CAPS, In Title Case, and, in all lowercase.

For the space character, using "SET_STRING", users can effectively replace Plover's built in "space" character with any of their choosing. For example, youcouldsetthecharacter to nothing, or-to-the-dash, or-ow-to-ow-any-ow-arbitrary-ow-string.

Then, to disable the functionality, users can use "MODE:RESET_SPACE" to reset to the default space, "MODE:RESET_CASE" to reset to the default case, and "MODE:RESET" to clear the space character and the case.

Finally, Plover ships with some special mode names to help out programmers: "SNAKE" and "CAMEL". Snake just sets the space character to underscores,_like_this_if_you_will, and Camel sets the next character to lowercase (using "{>}"), sets the case to Title case, and sets the space character to none, thus resulting inThisOutputStyle.

Example dictionary for most of the strokes (reset space and case aren't useful to me personally):

{
 "KA*PS": "{MODE:CAPS}",
 "T-LT": "{MODE:TITLE}",
 "HR*R": "{MODE:LOWER}",
 "STPH-BG": "{MODE:SNAKE}",
 "R-FT": "{MODE:RESET}",
 "KHRAO*ER": "{MODE:RESET}",
 "TK-RBS": "{MODE:SET_SPACE:-}",
 "K-BGS": "{MODE:CAMEL}",
 "TPH-FPS": "{MODE:SET_SPACE:}"
}

Dictionary

• Split default dictionary into 3 default dictionaries. New Plover users (or users without any dictionaries configured) will find 3 dictionaries set up in their dictionary list by default: main.json, commands.json, and user.json. "Main" contains all the words, numbers, prefixes, and suffixes from the default dictionary, whereas "commands" is just the commands, such as copy, paste, add dictionary translation, toggle Plover, et cetera. The "user" dictionary is a blank dictionary that new strokes will automatically be added to, alleviating one of the struggles of starting out learning steno and not realizing that it's important to separate your own strokes from the default strokes.
• Add more time increments (1:05 through to 1:55) to the default dictionary, using the K- and -BG strokes.
• Add symbols to the dictionary to match Learn Plover!
• Roughly 20,000 entries added to the main dictionary, mainly from Mirabai's and Ted's personal dictionaries. Includes some fixes, lots of new words, and steno-specific terminology.
• New strokes using the carry capitalize meta: update quotation strokes to better handle words starting with apostrophes, like 'cause or 'em. The default quotation mark and parentheses strokes (KW-GS, KR-GS; PREPB and PR*EPB) also should no longer force lowercase, making them better for use in your text.

Fixe...

Version 2.5.8

Reduce CPU usage in txbolt protocol (Thanks to Rob Brewer).

Version 2.5.7

Changes in this release:

• New feature (on Windows and OS X): Portable mode allows putting Plover on a removable drive. To use, put an empty file named plover.cfg in the same directory as the Plover.exe (on windows) or Plover.app (on OS X) and Plover will use the local directory for all its files.
• RTF/CRE dict parser is more forgiving and recognizes unix style newlines. This allows users to edit RTF/CRE dictionaries in regular text editors more easily

Bugs Fixed:

• Adding a dictionary with the wrong extension crashed Plover.
• Arpeggiate was broken (thanks rbrewer123).
• Plover crashed if the serial port in the config doesn't exist.
• Plover stopped working on resume when using a machine other than the NKRO keyboard.

Changes to default dictionary:

• Fixed several entries (thanks Simon Melhart)
• Default dictionary is now sorted by translation (thanks Zack Brown)
• Removed all conflicts
• converted to UTF-8.

Version 2.5.6

• speed up windows output.
• recognize DigitalCat's dictionary command for 'capitalize next'

Version 2.5.5

Fix bug in suffix folding introduced in v2.5.4

Version 2.5.4

This release includes the following fixes:

• Fix crash when reading options with invalid values for machine
• Try to fix dumping experienced on some stentura machines e.g. elan mira
• improve orthography by choosing more common word in the dictionary
• Fix suffix folding to not interfere with translations in the dictionary
• Can now output non-latin characters on OSX
• Output on OSX is independent of keyboard layout
• speed up startup time on OSX

Version 2.5.3

• Makes windows version of plover able to take input from any keyboard language
• Make windows be able to output any characters regardless of the current keyboard language
• Fix linux outputs to stop reordering events in some applications (thanks to benoit-pierre)
• Fix some icons (thanks to benoit-pierre)

Version 2.5.2

Bug fix release:

• Fix handling of prefixes in rtf dictionaries
• improve port scanning in linux
• NKRO input in linux now works regardless of language setting (thanks to sbuller)
• Try to fix reported issue of key events arriving out of order (fix is unverified).

Version 2.5.1

A bugfix release for 2.5.0:

• There was a bug that prevented plover from running for new users. This release fixes that issues.