Zulip Terminal 0.7.0

This long-awaited release includes contributions from our four 2021 GSoC students, though as with recent releases we welcomed those from many others - many thanks to you all for making this a great release!

This release features an extension of the existing autocomplete infrastructure to handle viewing, autocompletion and validation of private message recipients, dramatically improving the user experience in this area. Another major feature is application of arbitrary reactions to messages, which was previously limited to 👍. Those interacting with more visual communities may find the ability to download and open attachments particularly useful.

Other than these and other changes for growing parity with existing Zulip clients and later Zulip server versions, we continue to explore terminal-specific features such as improved layout designs, and ideas such as sender presence markers adjacent to each message.

IMPORTANT NOTES

Python versions (CPython 3.6-3.10, PyPy 3.6-3.9)

As noted in the release notes for 0.6.0, this release depends on a minimum of python 3.6 (see #838, #567) since 3.5 was dropped upstream some time ago. Testing against CPython 3.10 and a wider range of PyPy Python versions was added in CI (#1132, #1141, #1159).

This is highly likely to be the last release with support for python 3.6, for which support has now ended upstream (see #984).

Footlinks settings (#773, #841)

The previous footlinks setting for configuring footlinks now has adjusted behavior if enabled (the default), to show only the first 3 per message; the full set can be found in the Message Information popup (i).

In future this previous setting is expected to be phased out in favor of the new maximum-footlinks setting, where 0 corresponds to footlinks=disabled and 3 represents the new footlinks=enabled behavior.

Customized installs

If you've customized your install by editing themes or keys, be sure to back these up before upgrading and then carefully integrate them. This is particularly important in this release since themes are now structured differently in the codebase (see the new themes/THEME_CONTRIBUTING.md)

HIGHLIGHTS

• Message composition has great new features!
  • Private message recipients show sender names, may be autocompleted, and are validated
  • Autocomplete topic links like #**some stream>exciting topic**
  • Check your content markdown by comparing with examples via meta(alt)-m
  • Narrow to conversations you're just starting using meta(alt)-.
• More useful message actions!
  • Apply arbitrary reactions to messages via :, like in the web app
  • Download and open attachments directly from ZT
  • Open a message in the local web browser, for those features ZT doesn't yet handle
• More useful information!
  • Indicate the presence status of the sender of each message in the central list of messages
  • More information available for streams, messages, and now also for users via i
• Improved behavior for smaller terminals!
  • Popups can be wider on narrower (80-100 character) terminals, showing eg. all of help text
  • Autohide mode now overlays the side panels, which shrink to mini-panels to indicate their presence
  • View long messages in scrollable popup windows
• Theme support improves!
  • Syntax highlighting of code blocks via pygments
  • Contributions of new themes should be much simpler - eg. gruvbox_light added already
  • Support for 24-bit colors

Interactivity improvements

• Message actions:
  • Support downloading of media (attachments) and opening in default viewers (#1223, #1058, #740, #359)
  • Support adding arbitrary reactions to a message using : (#559, #707, #913)
  • Support renaming of messages with topic set to "(no topic)" (topicless messages) (#837, #946)
  • Allow editing messages when there is no time limit on edits (#1034, #1035)
  • Support opening a selected message in a web-browser (#397, #698, #991)
  • Give more information text when messages are moved between topics (#1172, #1178, #1196)
• Message composition:
  • Private message composition now shows the user name and supports autocompletion (#587, #877)
  • During private message sender autocomplete, name/email pairs are validated and tidied (#937)
  • During mention autocomplete, use user id's to distinguish between users with identical names (#151, #928)
  • Support autocomplete of topics in composing message content (#1004)
  • Properly handle spaces in autocomplete of mentions (#925, #1004)
  • Avoid cycling to stream name when editing stream messages (#870, #1161)
  • Add Markdown formatting help popup, accessed using meta(alt)-m (#623, #1025)
  • Notify the user if a message is sent/edited outside the current narrow (#781, #824)
  • Support narrowing to the current compose narrow using meta(alt)-. (#1182, #1194, #1206)
  • Use new urwid-readline feature and server parameters to limit typing long messages on the client side (#996)
  • Only send private message typing notifications if the setting is enabled on the server (#1136, #1163)
• General UI:
  • Indicate and update the number of starred messages in the top left UI area (#578, #951)
  • Indicate and update the presence status of the sender of each message in the central list of messages (#896, #987)
  • Toggle display of new User Information popup from user list using i (#511, #848)
• Options/configuration:
  • Added --notify and --no-notify command-line options to override the notify config file setting (#964)
  • Support update of per-stream notification setting during session, including from Stream Information popup (#900, #1080)
• System notifications:
  • Hide content of private messages if this setting is enabled on the server (#1166)
  • Hide spoiler content in all message notifications (#1173)
• Fetch organization custom emoji cleanly at startup and update them during each session (#809, #827)

Visual improvements

• Popups continue to show more information:
  • Links within topic names (eg. linkifiers) are shown in the Message Information popup (#709, #867)
  • Show year of message posting in Message Information popup (#879, #930)
  • Stream descriptions in the Stream Information popup now support any markdown included that is rendered in messages (#743, #749)
  • Stream Information popup has various other fixes and additional information available (#880, #1127, #1119, #1165)
• Message rendering:
  • If fewer than 4 users react to a message, their names are shown instead of a count (#1212, #1213)
  • Improved math text (katex) rendering (#1024)
  • Improved rendering of nested quotes (#942)
  • Heading titles in message markdown is now styled differently to main text (#1095, #1146)
• Improved behavior for smaller terminals:
  • Automatically scale popup widths better on narrower (80-100 character) terminals (#1018)
  • Autohide mode now indicates which panels are closed with a few labelled columns (#1097)
  • Autohide mode now overlays the side panels rather than 'squashing' the window (#1100)
  • View any (particularly long) messages in scrollable popup windows, showing rendered or raw formatting (#874, #543)
• Themes have been restructured, making contribution simpler (#1051, #1160, #1167):
  • Syntax highlighting of code blocks via pygments (#1012)
  • 24-bit colors may be specified in colors used in themes (#998, #1051)
  • A new gruvbox_light theme is available (#1144, #1176)
  • Gruvbox themes are updated to use only colors from the official suggested palettes for dark and light modes (#1176)
• Indicate web-public streams differently (#712, #1135, #1177)
• Respect user preference on server regarding 12- or 24-hour time rendering (#917, #770)
• Emphasize borders and text at top of sections (#952)
• Add categories of footer notifications, with different styling (#782, #971)
• Indent topic list appropriately to take into account space for any resolved-topic marker (#1124)

Important bugfixes

• Fix errors when both reactions and message read/star status are changed for uncached messages (#920, #1162)
• Always start a new prefilled composition when using x or c (#871, #947, #960)
• Remove unstarred messages from starred narrow upon leaving narrow (#940, #943)
• Avoid crash when entering an empty stream or topic search list; show feedback instead (#923, #977)
• Allow draft to be accessed (focused) when cursor was in the side panels (#1044)
• Maintain position in stream/topic lists before and after searches (#975, #978)
• Fix behavior where narrowing to another message within the same narrow failed (#954, #967)
• Fix failure to support editing only message content on later servers, by tracking original topic (#1056)
• Improve consistency of mouse scroll speed in side panels (#1082)
• Display hint in footer on attempting to select text in any area of the screen, not just a message (#1085)
• Only create debug.log file in current directory if in debug mode (#1066, #1122)
• Avoid sending and showing typing notifications from yourself (#1011)
• Improve tracking of topic message ids when message topics are edited (#1130)
• Include wildcard mentions (eg. @all, @everyone, @stream) in mentions narrow (#1037, #1038)
• Avoid rapid repeated help hints, by updating footer only if it does not have the same text (#647, #748)
• Correctly indicate stream markers on editing stream messages (eg. private streams) (#1181)

User documentation updates

• New documentation:
  • README section added to indicate where updates are announced (#1031)
  • New User Tutorial added as docs/getting-started.md (#922, #221)
  • Hot keys documentation is now generated automatically from the source, in docs/hotkeys.md (#926, #126, #941)
  • Clarify intentional design choices where different from webapp (#1224, #547)
• FAQ-related updates:
  • New FAQ entry regarding issues running with Windows Terminal (#955)
  • Indicate that we specifically wish to scale from 80x24 rowsxcolumns upwards and add a FAQ entry for how best to work at smaller widths (#1007)
  • Improved FAQ section regarding rendering symbols, with new zulip-term-check-symbols to test each for debugging (#979)
  • Add section to FAQ regarding how autocomplete works (#1017)
• Indicate possibility of -h/--help option in README (#1170)

Infrastructure improvements

• Automatically format codebase with black (#1039, #1087, #1092)
• Migrate development branch from master to main (#891)
• Various changes enabled by the new minimum python version of 3.6+:
  • type comments to inline type annotations (#910, #901)
  • prefer f-strings (eg. #949)
• Development documentation:
  • Commit style notes split out into an expanded section of README (#1055)
  • Add notes on using auto-formatting tools (#1192)
• GitHub Pull Request template added (#1071)
• Type annotations added to many tests, few now remain (eg. #1076, #1077, #1083, #1091, #1096, #1099, #1102, #1105, #1125)
• Use updated mypy with external packages for type stubs (#1131)
• Finalized migration away from hardcoded keys (#953, #469, #533, #539)
• Improved platform handling code, particularly appropriate to supporting WSL (#1059)
• Migrated to send and retain user_id for message composition as per updated API (#1006)
• Improved debug experience by saving all print() output to debug.log without requiring flush (#1122)
• Updated user and development dependencies (#1179)
• Reduce redundancy by redirecting Pipfile to setup.py and removing requirements.txt (#936)
• Add check-branch tool to ensure independence of commits in a branch (#1214)