2.8 Release Planning

[vkbo]

I think the 2.8 Beta release milestone has a lot of features now, so I'm going to start the pre-release cycle. I expect there will be the normal Beta 1 and RC 1 release, so there's still time to tweak things.

Since most changes are theme and GUI related, I'm going to collect a few more such features for inclusion, and make this a GUI focused release. This means I will remove most of the remaining feature tickets to the 2.9 milestone.

Contributions

@HeyMyian, you will be able to tweak themes until the full release, but I'd like to avoid adding new ones after 2.8 RC1.

@idealemu, I hope to get your Vim Mode feature in too. It doesn't have to be done for the Beta release, but if it is, it gives a little more time to test and tweak the features in both Beta 1 and RC 1 before the full release. I've queued the task up for the Beta 1 milestone.

@BlayW, the session goals feature seems to have halted. I'm still interested in getting it done, but it can be bumped to the 2.9 milestone. I still haven't decided if there should be a panel on the left for the session goal feature, but that isn't really a big blocker because having them on the status bar should anyway be an option. The work you did on Project Settings is also nice, and I want to keep that too. Let me know if you have any thoughts on that feature.

At my end, I will make some more GUI changes for consistency mainly. I want to make the dialog buttons consistent across all platforms. Now they use Qt's OS adaptive feature that tries to mimic each platform, but that doesn't always work so well when mixed with novelWriter custom buttons.

Pre-Release Procedure

The point of the Beta release is to test major changes. No major changes are usually added after that release, but minor features are OK. After RC 1 I usually only accept bugfixes and feature improvements to new features for the release. The RC 1 release is also when the translation files are prepared for the people who do the translation work, so I try to avoid changing GUI text after that.

The Beta 1 to RC 1 time window varies, but is usually a few weeks. RC 1 to full release is usually 2 weeks.

[vkbo]

I also want to add that I'm really happy people are starting to contribute features. This has been a bit trickier in the past because I have done major rewrites on much of the code since I started working on 2.0. This is now largely done. The remaining tools that need a rewrite is the global search feature and the outline panel.

I also want to improve the dev tooling.

I'm considering switching to uv (from Astral) for the environment setup, which will simplify the dev environment setup, and help centralise the config. I recently moved most of the linting to ruff (also fram Astral) which should help with code style consistency and linting. Correct typing is also now required, and uses pyright which is built into VSCode, but Astral is also working on a typing tool, so that will be interesting to follow.

Anyway, the point here is that all these tools are configured via the central pyproject.toml file, so project style compliance should be fairly easy.

[HeyMyian]

@HeyMyian, you will be able to tweak themes until the full release, but I'd like to avoid adding new ones after 2.8 RC1.

I'm personally finished creating new themes, otherwise I'd never stop 😅

The themes in their current state have been iterated over a couple of times so they should be ready now. I'll however keep an eye open for any changes to novelWriter for the 2.8 release (and of course for future releases) that would require tweaking or updating the themes again.

[vkbo]

I don't think there will be any more changes to the theme framework anyway. Most of the time it's just adding and removing theme colour settings. I do plan to do some more work on the syntax part, but not for 2.8.