It's been a while since I last published an update to Rogallo. In part this is because I've had other distractions, but also in part because I've not had a huge need to add any new features of late. For the most part I feel Rogallo is "done"1.

I haven't, however, been doing nothing with the code. On and off, over the last handful of weeks, I've been addressing something that I've wanted to tidy up since the early days of development: application configuration. The majority of my Textual-based applications use a simple JSON configuration file, and that's generally good enough. When I started Rogallo I used the same approach. Rogallo has since grown quite a lot and there's much that can be configured and so the "honking great pile-o-JSON" approach was starting to feel quite untidy.

So Rogallo v3.0.0 addresses this. The headline change is that the single JSON file has been replaced with a number of focused YAML files, and some items that were in the original configuration file have been moved out to either the data directory or the state directory, depending on their purpose.

Now for some details on the changes.

❗ Important

There are a lot of changes to how Rogallo is configured. As is mentioned at the end of this post, Rogallo will make a best effort to migrate your old configuration to the new format. However, as a precaution, you might want to think about making a backup copy of your configuration.json file before upgrading Rogallo.

Focused configuration files

As mentioned above, whereas before Rogallo kept all of its configuration in a single file, it now looks to a number of different YAML files that focus on a different aspect of configuration. These include:

General configuration

For the configuration items that remain, that aren't exactly focused on a particular Rogallo feature, the settings have moved to general.yaml.

Removal of some application commands

Rogallo's design is based around the idea of some "actions" being application-wide commands, and some actions being UI-control-specific. As I worked through the configuration changes I decided that it was time to "demote" some application-wide commands to either being UI-control-specific bindings or just simple configuration properties. With this in mind I've removed the following commands:

  • ChangeCommandLineLocation
  • StripeLinks
  • ToggleANSIEscapeSequenceHandling
  • ToggleCosyLinkNumbers
  • ToggleEmojiRemoval
  • ToggleLinkNumbers

All but ChangeCommandLineLocation are now keyboard shortcuts specific to the viewer widget itself (press F1 when the viewer has focus to get more details). ChangeCommandLineLocation is now a simple configuration property in general.yaml.

UI element action keyboard bindings

From the very start, Rogallo has supported some degree of control over keyboard bindings. As mentioned above, there's a split between "application-wide commands" and "UI-element-specific" actions. Until now it's always been possible to configure the bindings for the former, but never the latter.

In other words: you could always configure the binding for the HandOffToOperatingSystem application command (hands the URI of the currently-viewed document to your OS), but you couldn't change the in-viewer binding for the o key, which opens the URI of the focused link in the OS.

Rogallo v3.0.0 adds support for changing the bindings of the latter. So if you wanted to change o to b for opening a URI externally:

gemtext_link.open_link_externally: b

You can find the bindable IDs for each of the UI controls at the bottom of each page for each of the controls.

New Gophermap badges

Not directly a configuration setup change, but something I noticed while doing the work, was the fact that Rogallo (and the underlying Gophermap library) didn't handle PNG and RTF item types. They're now directly supported.

Conclusion

I believe all of the above changes make it easier to configure Rogallo, and more importantly easier to backup and share the configuration. Technically all of this is one huge breaking change -- everything that was in configuration.json now lives elsewhere. However, I've added some code to Rogallo that detects when you still have a pre-v3.0.0 configuration active, loads up the values, creates the new files, and then renames the old file to configuration.migrated.json. As mentioned near the start of this post, you might want to think about making a backup copy of configuration.json before upgrading.

  1. One last big thing I do want to add is support for tabs. Still to come. ↩