Konversation 1.1 has been released!

August 06, 2008

We are extremely pleased to announce Konversation’s newest major release, v1.1. Konversation 1.1 is a special release for us in multiple ways: It’s our farewell to KDE 3, by way of being the last major release built upon that venerable platform. It’s also our biggest release yet, in terms of the number and magnitude of the changes. The additions and improvements in this release are both user-visible and under the hood. Some of the highlights are rewritten connection handling (robustness and correctness improvements, better support for IRC URLs, bookmarking and more), redone DCC with better UI and Passive/Reverse DCC support, a redone away system with the addition of auto-away support, redone and much more useful remember / marker line support, a new outbound traffic scheduler that is capable of aggressive throttling to avoid flooding while smartly reordering messages to improve latencies, great convenience additions like a “Next Active Tab” shortcut, and much, much more, along with a large number of bugfixes and tweaks to round things out. Note: All fixes made since RC1 are marked with a “[New since RC1]” label in the changelog. We’re confident that this release is the best and most robust version of Konversation published so far, and upgrading comes highly recommended to all users. Enjoy! Changes from 1.0.1 to 1.1: Text views

• Added an option to hide the scrollbar in chat windows.
• Don’t scroll to bottom if the view was scrolled up before resizing.
• Fixed chat views occassionally not being scrolled to the bottom at their inception with long backlog appends.
• Fixed an off-by-one error in scrollback culling.
• Fixed a bug that lead to single leading whitespace characters in lines being omitted from display in chat windows.
• Now preserving trailing whitespace in raw log tabs.
• Fixed display of ‘<’ and ‘>’ in backlog lines.
• Fixed copy/paste with shortcuts other than the default Ctrl+C/V ones.
• Fixed onotice display.
• Fixed middle-click-to-open-in-new-tab on chat window URLs when Konqueror wasn’t running.
• Fixed superfluous closing parenthesis being inserted after links in lines which contain multiple links followed by closing parenthesis.
• Fixed URLs with encoded hash mark %23 being incorrectly passed off to handler.
• Fixed variable expansion causing certain URLs to be corrupted when pasted.
• Added a “Save Link As” item to the context menu of links in the chat window.
• Have the “Save as…” dialog suggest a file name.
• Implemented Shift+Click to “Save as…” URLs..
• Made the channel links context menu work in server status views.
• Fixed nickname links in chat view messages created as a result of ‘/msg <nick> <message>’ commands erroneously prepending ‘->’ to nicknames.
• Fixed operations on nicknames containing “" characters from the nickname context menu.
• Fixed query view context menus operating on the wrong nickname under certain circumstances.
• Fixed a bug that caused the “Send File…” action in the generic query context menu to pick the wrong recipient after hovering the user’s own nick in the chat display.
• Fixed date display not using the locale’s date format.
• Fixed IRC color parsing so that the colors gets reset to default if no color numbers were given.
• Fixed a bug that could cause the text selection in a chat window to be messed up when new text was appended.

Marker/Remember Lines

• Konversation now distinguishes between manually and automatically inserted marker lines, making the “show line in all chat windows” preference less confusing.
• The automatically inserted remember lines when chat windows are hidden are now “sliding”, i.e. there is only one per chat window, and it moves.
• Automatically inserted remember lines will now optionally only be inserted when there’s actually new text being appended to the chat window (enabled by default).
• The automatic remember line will now also be inserted when the window has lost focus.
• Added an action to clear all marker lines in a chat window.
• Improved marker lines-related preferences and terminology.
• Improved the appearance of marker lines in the chat window.
• Made the (marker line-related and other) identity default settings consistent between the initial identity and additional newly created identities.
• Fixed hidden join/part/quit events marking tabs as dirty, allowing multiple consecutive remember lines to appear.
• Fixed crash when minimizing or closing the application window prior to any tab switch when the auto-insertion of remember lines is enabled.

Input line

• Fixed input line contents rather than actual sent text being appended to the input history upon a multi-line paste edit.
• Special characters and IRC color codes will now be inserted at the cursor position rather than the end of the input line contents.

Nickname list

• Implemented an additional “Sort by activity” nicklist sorting mode.
• Added Oxygen nicklist icon theme by Nuno Pinheiro.
• The list of nickname list themes is now sorted alphabetically.
• Fixed race condition when removing a nicklist theme (listview would be repopulated before deletion was complete).
• Fixed using the wrong palette for the disabled text color in the nickname list.
• Fixed moving back from the custom alternate background color to system colors in the channel nickname listviews when disabling the “Use custom colors for lists, […]” preference.
• Cleanups in the nicklist item code.

Tab bar / Tree list

• Added option to add and remove a channel from its network’s auto-join list from the tab context menu.
• Added option to close tabs using middle-mouse.
• Slightly sped up tab switching by eliminating some redundant UI action state updates.
• Channel tabs will no longer close when kicked, but rather grey out on the tab bar and offer context menu actions to rejoin.
• Channel and query tabs will now grey out on the tab bar when disconnected and no higher priority notification is present. Channel tabs will only ungrey if and when the channel is successfully rejoined after reconnect; query tabs ungrey immediately once reconnected.
• Display tooltips for truncated treelist items.
• Fixed forwarding keyboard events received by the treelist to Konsole widgets and focus adjustment thereafter as well as generally after switching to Konsole tabs by other means.
• Fixed treelist scrollbar not picking up on new palette when the KDE color scheme changes.
• Fixed a bug that could cause a crash when the view treelist would receive keypress events during application shutdown.
• [New since RC1] Fixed a corner case where a server status item could become a child item of another server status item when dragging it below an special application pane item such as DCC Status or Watched Nicks Online.
• [New since RC1] Fixed a crash when using the mouse wheel on the list within ~150ms of a drag and drop operation.

System Tray icon

• Remember and recreate minimized-to-tray state across sessions.
• Added option for hidden-to-tray startup.
• Reload tray icons when the icon theme changes at runtime.
• Added option to not blink the systray icon, but just light it up.

Channel Settings Dialog

• Added a search line to the ban list.
• Fixed sorting the ban list by time set.
• Made the ban list’s “Time Set” column use KDE locale settings for the date format.
• Fixed OK’ing/Cancel’ing/closing the Channel Settings Dialog not dealing with open ban list in-line edits correctly.
• Reset topic editbox when the channel options dialog has been dismissed with cancel.
• Fixed incorrect time display in the topic history list in the Channel Settings dialog.

Server List Dialogs

• Moved the “Show at application startup” option for the Server List dialog to the dialog itself.
• Auto-correct hostnames and passwords entered with preceding or trailing spaces in the Server List dialog.
• Don’t allow impossible ports to be set for servers.
• Sensible default focus in the server list dialog.
• Fixed unresponsive, defective Server List dialog window appearing at application startup using the Beryl or Compiz compositing window managers.

Interface Misc

• Added a “Next Active Tab” keyboard shortcut to jump to the next active tab with the highest priority notification.
• Added a Find Previous standard action.
• Have the “Insert Character” dialog pick up on text view font changes.
• Show correct number of colors in the color chooser dialog.
• Made “Alternate Background” colorchooser disable when unneeded.
• Fixed crash when changing the KDE color scheme while a non-chat tab is open.
• The encoding selection now allows returning to the used identity’s default encoding setting.
• Update actions on charset changes.
• Added Notifications Toggle and Encoding sub-menu to the window menu.
• Moved “Hide Nicklist” menu action from Edit to Settings.
• Fixed the “Automatically join channel on invite” setting not to show an inquiring dialog anyway.
• Fixed saving the state of the invitation dialog option in the Warning Dialogs preferences.
• Added a warning dialog for quitting with active DCC file transfers.
• Return focus to the text display widget after closing the search bar in a log reader view.
• Made pressing Return or Enter in the Log File Viewer’s size spinbox apply the setting, just as pressing the Return button.
• Fixed a bug where the SSL padlock icon would be shown on a non-SSL connection (and clicking would cause a crash).
• Empty topic labels will no longer show empty tooltips, but rather none at all.
• Added a sample 12-hour clock format string to the timestamp format combobox.
• Timestamp format list is no longer localized.
• Robustness improvements and less UI quirks around channel password handling.
• Improved general layout and consistency of tab, chat view, query and topic context menus. Added some missing icons.
• Fixed some bugs of UI actions not being appropriately as their context changes.
• Fixed enabled state of “Close All Open Queries” action not being updated correctly when queries are closed by way of closing a status view tab.
• The window caption is now properly being reset when the last tab is closed.
• Made units in spinboxen in the identity and app preferences UI more consistent.
• Minor fixes to accelerators and tabbing order in various dialogs.

Commands

• Support command aliases in network connect commands.
• Turned parameter-less ‘/away’ into a toggle: Sets away state with default message initially, and unsets away state if already away.
• Added an ‘/aunaway’ command to complement ‘/aaway’ (previously, there was only ‘/aback’).
• Added support for ‘/kill’.
• A ‘/join’ command for an already-joined channel will now focus it.
• Added an ‘/encoding’ command as an alias to ‘/charset’.
• ‘/charset’ and ‘/encoding’ now accept ‘latin-1’ as an alias for ‘iso-8859-1’.
• Improved messages for the ‘/charset’ and ‘/encoding’ commands.
• Rewrote /me parsing to be less hackish and display usage info with an empty parameter.
• ‘/msg <nick>’ is no longer treated as equivalent to ‘/query <nick>’.
• ‘/msg <nick>’ will now error out when lacking a message parameter.
• ‘/query <recipient> [message]’ will now error out when recipient is a channel.
• Added a ‘/queuetuner’ command to bring up the outbound traffic scheduler’s tuning/debug pane.

Notifications

• Seperated query messages and messages containing the user’s nickname into two distinct KNotify events.
• Made the tab notification color of private messages configurable independently from normal messages.
• Don’t highlight own nick on topic created by messages.
• Fixed disabling notifications for a tab not cancelling highlight sounds.
• Fixed a race condition where a highlight’s autotext reply would outrun the original line’s tab notification.
• Fixed actions in queries and DCC chats producing message notification events (rather than the correct private message ones).
• Changed the OSD screensaver check logic to work in KDE 4.
• [New since RC1] Fixed on screen display occassionally reverting to the default position when using the settings dialog to change unrelated settings.

Connection handling

• Improved behavior with regard to reusing existing connections in connection attempts that provide an initial channel to join, such as command line arguments, the DCOP interface, the bookmark system or irc:// links). Previously, the application would have inconsistently either reused an existing or created a new connection.
• Better dialog messages in the interactive variant of the decision to either reuse or create a new connection (from the Server List dialog and the Quick Connect dialog).
• Improved and more consistent display of connection names (i.e. network or server host name) throughout the application.
• Much improved irc:// URL support for connection intanciation, with support added for IPv6 host names and many of the features proposed by the Mirashi specification.
• Eliminated redundant irc:// URL parsing codepaths in favor of a single one.
• Added support for irc:// URLs to the chat views.
• Removed “konversationircprotocolhandler” shell script. The Konversation executable now understands irc:// URLs directly.
• Initiating connections from command line arguments and options now works also when the application is already running.
• Fixed a bug that would cause a connection initiated from command line options not to get past the identity validation stage when the configuration file was unitialized and empty.
• The server list dialog will now always be closed when starting Konversation with command line arguments to initiate a connection, consistent with the configuration-based auto-connect behavior.
• Providing a channel in the creation of a new connection (i.e. via command line arguments, the DCOP interface, the Quick Connect dialog, the bookmark system or irc:// links) now consistently pre-empts the stored auto-join channel list if the target of the connection is a network or the hostname is found to be part of a configured network. Previously, this would only work for Quick Connect and the bookmark system (which caused the infamous Sabayon user flood in #kde due to their “Get Support” desktop link connecting to Freenode, which in an unconfigured Konversation has #kde in its auto-join list).
• Connections now have globally unique IDs.
• The DCOP interface now understands connection IDs in addition to host names.
• The scripting systems now uses globally unique connection IDs rather than server host names to refer to connections, fixing a bug where scripted responses were being handed to all connections sharing a hostname (which was actually intentional in the absence of connection IDs, but undesirable for users).
• Improved iteration behavior over a network’s server list on connection losses.
• The “Reconnect” action now works also when Konversation doesn’t consider the connection to be in a disconnected state.
• Improved the server status view messages related to reconnection attempts.
• Consistently apply the “Reconnect delay” setting (previously confusingly named “Reconnect timeout”), which wasn’t done before.
• Fixed a bug that could cause the connection process to claim that a DNS lookup was successful when it actually wasn’t.
• Fixed opening bookmarks with spaces in the target address name (which may be a network name, and networks may have spaces in their name).
• Properly update the state of the “Add/Remove to Watched Nicknames” nickname context menu actions when the connection isn’t to a config-backed network, in which case there’s no way to store and make use of those list entries.
• Fixed a crash when quitting the application with a resident connection that disconnected due to an SSL error.
• Fixed crashes in the DCOP interface if no connection was present.
• Make the “Reconnect” action available even while ostensibly in the process of connecting.
• Fix possible crash when closing all views and subsequently creating a new connection.
• Fixed crash upon auto-connect at application startup.
• Improved the naming of preferences related to automatic reconnection attempts to be less confusing.
• Made it possible to set the number of automatic reconnection attempts to unlimited.
• Provided better default values to the preferences related to automatic reconnection attempts.
• Fixed crash when opening a Konsole tab and Konsole was not installed.
• Fixed allowing the user to create an infinite loop of showing the SSL connection details dialog upon being presented with the invalid certificate multiple choice dialog at connection time by checking “Do not ask again” and then clicking “Details”.

Identities

• Made it possible to set a Quit message independently from the Part message.
• Saving a newly-created identity is no longer allowed without entering a real name.
• Apply switching the identity in the identity dialog as opened from the network dialog to the network’s settings.
• Have the Edit/Delete/Up/Down buttons for the nickname list of an Identity correctly change state according to the selection

Away system

• Added per-identity support for automatic away on a configurable amount of user desktop inactivity and/or screensaver activation, along with support for automatic return on activity.
• Fixed the “Global Away” toggle to make sense and update its state properly.
• Turned parameter-less ‘/away’ into a toggle: Sets away state with default message initially, and unsets away state if already away.
• Added an ‘/aunaway’ command to complement ‘/aaway’ (previously, there was only ‘/aback’).
• Broadly rewrote away management related code for improved robustness and less duplication and hacks (e.g. no more abuse of multiServerCommand for global away).

DCC

• Massive DCC refactoring and improved reliability.
• Passive DCC support (Reverse DCC RECV, SEND).
• Replaced the DCC Transfer Details dialog with a retractable transfer details pane directly in the DCC Status tab.
• Added DCC transfer average speed reading to the DCC transfer details panel.
• The DCC Status tab now remembers its column widths across sessions.
• Fixed duplicated quotation marks around file names in DCC transfer status messages.
• Fixed “Open File” DCC dialog remembering the last viewed location incorrectly.
• Added an “Open Folder” button to the DCC transfer details panel.
• Added check for whether the URL is well-formed before initiating a DCC send. Fixes a bug of dragging a nickname link in the chat view onto the query chat view drop target starting a DCC transfer that cannot succeed.
• Ported the DCC code away from relying on server group IDs to refer to connections, made it use connection IDs instead. Fixes potential bugs with multiple concurrent connections to the same network.
• Fixed queued DCC transfer items not picking up on download destination directory changes.
• Fixed bug leading to crash upon initiating DCC Chat when “Focus new tabs” was enabled.
• [New since RC1] New transfer items added to the DCC panel’s transfer list are no longer automatically selected, meaning work on other items in the list occuring at the same time no longer gets interrupted.
• [New since RC1] The “Filename:” line in the DCC panel’s detailed info pane is now using text squeezing to avoid an increase in minimum window width with long file names.
• [New since RC1] Failed receives now longer show 833TB/s as their transfer speed.

Blowfish support

• Fixed FiSH-style +p prefix to send clear text to channel despite an encryption key being set.
• Text encoding is now being applied to the cleartext, rather than the ciphertext. This fixes using characters outside the ASCII range with blowfish encryption.
• Fixed CTCP (and thus DCC) requests to nicknames for whom an encryption key is set.
• Added support for encrypted topics.
• If an encryption key is set, a lock icon will now be shown next to the input box.

• Added a ‘/showkey <channel

  query>’ command to show the encryption key for the target in a popup dialog.

Auto-replace

• Improved auto-replace behavior with multiple matches in one line (fixes multiple Wikipedia links).
• Fixed bug that could cause auto-replace to replace the wrong group of the matching string.
• Auto-replace is now case-sensitive in regular expression mode.
• Added regular expression editor button to auto-replace preferences.
• Fixed conditional enabling of the RegExpEditor button in the auto-replace preferences page.

Ignore

• Fixed being asked twice whether to close a query upon ignoring the opponent.
• Fixed crash when opting to close a query upon chosing to ignore the opponent from the context menu of his nickname.

Watched Nicknames

• Improved robustness of the Watched Nicknames Online system.
• The “Offline” branches in the “Watched Nicks Online” list will now be omitted when there are no offline nicks for the respective network.
• Fixed display of WHOIS spam prompted by the Watch List’s WHOIS activity.
• Connections to non-config-backed targets no longer show in Watched Nicks Online.
• [New since RC1] Actually honor the preference to enable/disable the Watched Nicknames Online system, and apply it at runtime.
• [New since RC1] Make sure the periodic Watched Nicknames Online check actually starts running within the same session after adding the first nickname to the list.
• [New since RC1] Fixed a crash on quit with the Watched Nicks Online tab open and there being an open connection to a network that nicks are being watched for.

Channel List

• IRC markup is now removed from content in the Channel List view.
• Speed improvements in Channel List views.
• Fixed keyboard accelerator collisions in Channel List views.
• Allow higher values than 99 in the min/max users filter spin boxes in Channel List views.

Under the Hood / Protocol

• Rewrote the outbound queue scheduling system to be smart enough to reorder outbound traffic to reduce interactive latency while aggressively throttling the rate to prevent flooding. Use ‘/queuetuner’ to tweak.
• Rearranged when and how auto-who is triggered upon channel join a bit, to avoid excessive flooding on multiple concurrent joins in some cases.
• Auto-Who reliability improvements.
• Fixed auto-join with very many channels (the auto-join command would exceed the maximum buffer length; it is now split into multiple commands as needed).
• Fixed bugs around rejoining channels after reconnects related to the cause of the disconnect, channel passwords and picking the actual list of joined channels over the network’s auto-join list.
• Improved behavioral consistency in situations where the auto-join list is preempted by a transitory auto-join channel (bookmarks, etc.).
• Fixed bug that caused the topic state not to be cleared properly prior to rejoining channels during reconnects.
• Fixed onotice payload being cut off after the first word.
• Changed RPL_WHOISOPERATOR handling to internationalize the common case (“is an IRC Operator”) and otherwise passthrough the string sent by the server.
• Fixed parsing of alternate invite format on Asuka ircds (QuakeNet).
• Added support for PRIVMSG from the server.
• Support RPL_UMODEIS.
• Announce ‘k’ channel mode (i.e. channel key) changes in non-raw mode as well.
• The command part of CTCP requests is now always converted to uppercase before sending, as some clients don’t like lower- or mixed-case commands as the user may have entered them.
• Display mode for your nick and channels you’re not in.
• Fixed per-channel encoding settings for the channels of a network being lost when the network is renamed.
• Fixed crash when receiving actions for channels the client is not attending.
• Made newline handling in the DCOP interface more robust, fixing a potential security problem (CVE-2007-4400).
• A few speed optimizations and memory leak fixes.
• [New since RC1] Fixed a crash on quit during KDE logout or when quitting by DCOP.

Included scripts

• Support for KMPlayer in the ‘media’ script (based on the window caption, as KMPlayer has no proper appropriate DCOP interface).
• Added KPlayer support to the ‘media’ script (also caption-based).
• Added support for Audacious to the ‘media’ script.
• Fixed problems in disk space calculation in the ‘sysinfo’ script caused by wrapped df(1) output.
• Added KDE 4 support to the ‘sysinfo’ script.
• Removed some bashisms from the ‘sysinfo’ script.
• Rewrote ‘weather’ script for increased reliability in error handling and better readability.
• Removed broken ‘qurl’ script in favor of new ‘tinyurl’ one.
• Fixed the ‘fortune’ script not working properly when variable expansion is turned off in the preferences.
• [New since RC1] Fixed a bug in the ‘media’ script that caused it to break when querying Audacious with audtool not being available.

Packaging

• [New since RC1] Standards compliancy fixes in the application .desktop file and the nicklist icon theme .desktop files.

Build

• Fixed build with –enable-final.