Table of contents
Hello,
Welcome to the third quarterly Tridactyl newsletter.
It has been an eventful quarter. We received our first payout from GitHub sponsors (it was real, they really did double your donations!). Visual mode has landed in Tridactyl stable. We weren’t accepted on to Google Summer of Code. I finally got round to adding a setnull command which lets you remove default settings, e.g. setnull searchurls.google allows you to open google and search for “google” with your default search engine.
I (bovine3dom) have now hit the cap for doubling for GitHub sponsors as I managed to get paid for some commercial open source work through it. If you would still like your donation to be doubled you can sponsor Tridactyl through glacambre’s page - we’ll still put your money into a central Tridactyl pot. No pressure if you don’t want to do that :).
In terms of Tridactyl bugs, I tried really hard to fix the “Tridactyl sometimes doesn’t execute all the lines in my RC file” bug, even implementing our own locks library to try to eradicate some race conditions. Instead, it mostly just broke some people’s configurations in beta, so we swiftly reverted it. The locks are currently used in Tridactyl beta and stable to try to make command line history more reliable … which works about 50% of the time; the same seems to apply to repeat, which is a great improvement on the approximately 5% of the time it used to work. We have a bit of a plan to fix this - see (#2208) - but it would be unwise to promise that it will happen any time soon, given our track record.
On to the main event of the past few months. The novel coronavirus. One of the reasons we ask for donations is to fund retreats for the developers of Tridactyl to meet up and work on Tridactyl together, somewhere a bit nice. This clearly cannot happen again for a while. Personally, I am of the view that it would be immoral to encourage international travel until the virus is beaten or endemic in all of the countries involved. I don’t see that happening for at least a year.
The question, then, is what to do with the funds in the meantime. Another aspect of this pandemic is that it may take a while for me (bovine3dom) to find a job and that my savings have taken a hammering. After talking about it with the rest of the Tridactyl developers, at the end of March I started to take the majority of Tridactyl’s income as my own. If anyone isn’t comfortable with that, please feel free to contact me or any of the other developers and we can make sure that all of your money stays in the central pot.
I hope that the next quarter is better for us all than the last. I have to move house in the middle of June, so I may be a little unresponsive around that time.
We hope you and your families are keeping well,
bovine3dom and the rest of the Tridactyl developers