Looking back

As you might have noticed, it's gotten a bit more quiet here again. The reason for that is that, unfortunately, the 40 crowd-funded days are over (plus a few extra days), and today I'm starting to study computer science at the University of applied sciences in Rapperswil (with a beautiful campus next to the lake).

As probably usual in software development, things took a bit longer than planned - I originally thought I'd have the second month for things other than QtWebEngine, and it didn't turn out that way. I think my guesstimates for everything related to QtWebEngine were roughly accurate, but there was a lot of other work (organizing crowdfunding stuff, taking care of contributions and issues, and the occasional important bugfix/release) which took more time than I imagined.

Still I'm happy with the progress made in these two months. A few features are still missing, but I know about multiple people (myself included) using the QtWebEngine backend as a daily driver and not really missing much.

What's more important is that the big things are out of the way - the last feature I expect to take a longer time to implement are downloads, everything else is something I can also implement whenever I have an hour or two to spare some evening.

A lot changed in those two months! From 5th June when I wrote the first post here until now, 19538 lines were added and 9435 deleted in 375 files. Only looking at the qutebrowser/ subtree (i.e. actual source, without tests/scripts), the numbers are a bit smaller though: 9975 added and 5701 removed lines in 124 files.

What's next

As mentioned above, today I'll start studying, so currently it's quite hard for me to predict how much time I'll be able to spend on qutebrowser in the near future. I expect it to roughly go back to the levels it was before the crowdfunding started, which is still a lot of activity.

As for things I plan to work on: First of all, I want to get downloads and the other missing QtWebEngine features working. However, before that, some other areas (namely error messages and prompts) need some bigger changes, as I don't know which window/tab a download originated from with QtWebEngine.

For messages, this was already done a week ago, along with a new UI for messages and a lot of simplified code. For prompts, there's an issue collecting some ideas and information.

After the remaining QtWebEngine stuff is out of the way, I plan to look at some postponed pull requests.

The next big topic to tackle is the config revolution which changes the way how qutebrowser is configured (splitting the config into a YAML file for the GUI config and a simple Python config for manual configuration).

After that, it's probably time for a qutebrowser v1.0 release!

Stickers and shirts

If your perk only contained stickers and you've not recieved them yet, please let me know.

If you didn't get anything in the crowdfunding but still would like some stickers, please let me know as well - if there's enough interest, I'll set up a way to get stickers with a donation.

As for t-shirts: Don't panic, you didn't miss anything. This was a bigger logistic challenge than I thought it would be, but they're ordered in the meantime. I hope they'll arrive at a friend's place in (southern) Germany this or next week, and then we'll need to find a weekend where we both have the time to send them out to you. Sending them from Germany instead of Switzerland saves me trouble with customs inside the EU and some 500€ in postage, so it's definitely worth the hassle!

Thanks!

Finally, I'd like to thank everyone involved in the crowdfunding again. You all made this possible, and QtWebEngine support would be nowhere where it is without you all. It was a blast, and I hope I'll be able to do something similar again some time in the future.

Thank you!