Summer 2021

Hello,

Welcome to the eighth quarterly Tridactyl newsletter. This one’s a bit shorter than usual as I had some consulting work and there’s been less time since the previous newsletter. I’m trying to catch up and release the newsletters in the (northern hemisphere) seasons that they’re named after.

The big new feature this time is one that people have been asking for for a long time: Tridactyl now has a superignore setting that almost entirely disables Tridactyl after a page reload. It should be useful to web developers who want to make sure that Tridactyl is polluting their pages as little as possible while they are developing them.

You should only use it with :seturl for now - if you use it with :set it will be difficult to re-enable Tridactyl; the easiest thing to do then would be to use the tri keyword in the Firefox address bar to remove the setting with :tri unset superignore.

And that’s it, really - there’re a few other very minor new things (a :tabrename command, a new midnight theme, and :no_mouse_mode now hides the mouse, for example).

:editor should now work with lots more web-based text editors as we’re now using Firenvim’s code, which glacambre kindly extracted out into a library here: https://github.com/glacambre/editor-adapter. We’ll now share bug fixes and be able to collaborate on supporting new editors, which is pretty exciting to me.

We also had a tiny fix for a bug that’s been getting on my nerves for a while: SVG favicons on :tab completions. This means you’ll correctly see, amongst others, the GitHub favicon in that list.

I might actually rewrite completions this quarter! I’ve been threatening to do it for years but a few days ago I got fed up enough with the code that I started sketching out a replacement here: https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl/issues/3896. If you have any thoughts on what you’d like our completions / command line to be like, please do share them in that issue. My main aims are to reduce code duplication, improve responsiveness and allow users to write their own completions at runtime.

As always, thanks for your generous support,

bovine3dom and the rest of the Tridactyl developers