Release 5.3.2

13th December 2023 at 8:06am

See GitHub for detailed change history of this release

Congratulations to catter-fly for their winning design for the banner for this release (here is the competition thread).

Major Improvements

Conditional Shortcut Syntax

added a new shortcut syntax for concisely expressing if-then-else logic. This is the first of a new type of wikitext syntax based on tokens delimited with <% and %>. We plan to introduce other structures using the same format such as a "case" statement.

These new token-based shortcuts allow a richer structure and expressivity than existing features such as widgets or pragmas. For example:

<% if [<animal>match[Elephant]] %>
  It is an elephant
<% elseif [<animal>match[Giraffe]] %>
	It is a giraffe
<% else %>
	It is completely unknown
<% endif %>

Behind the scenes, the conditional shortcut syntax is rendered as the equivalent ListWidgets.

Explicit Templates for the ListWidget

added support for <$list-template> and <$list-empty> as immediate children of the $ListWidget widget to specify the list item template and/or the empty template.

This new feature is designed to replace a common pattern of using the emptyMessage attribute of the ListWidget to render complex wikitext that thus has to be quoted. Working with wikitext within quotes is awkward and error prone. The new structure can be somewhat faster because it allows the empty message to be parsed in advanced of rendering.

For example:

<$list filter=<<filter>>>
	<$list-template>
		<$text text=<<currentTiddler>>/>
	</$list-template>
	<$list-empty>
		None!
	</$list-empty>
</$list>

Note that the emptyMessage and template attributes take precedence if they are present.

Joiners for the ListWidget

added a join attribute to the $ListWidget widget to insert a short piece of text between list items. This is both easier to use and faster than using the counter attribute for the same purpose. So if your list looked like this:

<$list filter=<<filter>> counter="counter" variable="item">
<$text text=<<item>>/><$list filter="[<counter-last>match[no]]" variable="ignore"><$text text=", "/></$list>
</$list>

You can replace it with:

<$list filter=<<filter>> variable="item" join=", "><$text text=<<item>>/></$list>

If the joiner text that you need is long and awkward to write in an attribute, you can use the new <$list-join> widget. Like <$list-template> and <$list-empty>, it must be an immediate child of the $ListWidget:

<$list filter=<<filter>> variable="item"><$text text=<<item>>/><$list-join>, and <em>also</em> let's not forget </$list-join></$list>

jsonset operator

added jsonset Operator for setting values within JSON objects

QR Code Reader

extended QR Code plugin to be able to read QR codes and a number of other bar code formats

Translation improvements

Improvements to the following translations:

Chinese
Polish
Spanish

Plugin Improvements

fixed Comments Plugin to use predefined palette colours
improved Evernote Importer Plugin to support images and other attachments
added $floating attribute to Dynannotate Plugin to support popups that do not disappear when another part of the screen is clicked. Instead they have to dismissed manually

Widget Improvements

fixed ImageWidget encoding for more image types
extended ImageWidget to add a "usemap" attribute
improved the ScrollableWidget to allow the scroll position to be bound to a tiddler, so that changes to the tiddler affect the scroll position, and vice versa

Usability Improvements

updated editor preview button to automatically focus the editor
improved file type names in the export menu

Hackability Improvements

extended all the relevant core widgets to allow arbitrary data-* attributes and style.* attributes to be applied to the generated DOM nodes. This is useful for passing data to the EventCatcherWidget
extended jsonextract Operator, jsonget Operator, jsonset Operator and jsontype Operator to allow negative indexes into arrays to be counted from the end of the array
improved the default page layout to better support CSS grid and flexbox layouts
improved the editor to use grid layout, simplifying customisation

Bug Fixes

fixed ordering of Vanilla stylesheets
fixed missing closing tag in tag-pill-inner macro
removed invalid "type" attribute from textarea elements generated by the EditTextWidget
fixed editor "type" dropdown state tiddlers
fixed handling of "counter-last" variable when appending items with the ListWidget
fixed upgrade download link in Firefox
fixed refreshing of transcluded functions
fixed resizing of height of textareas in control panel
fixed encodebase64 Operator and decodebase64 Operator to work properly with binary data
fixed WidgetMessage: tm-open-window when opening an existing window to bring it to the front and focus it
fixed behaviour of last Operator when zero items selected
fixed incorrectly setting focus on field name input field when deleting field using the delete field button
fixed Table-of-Contents Macros to not show expander icon for a sublist that has all children excluded
fixed overflow of CodeMirror Plugin editor within grid container
fixed wikitest parser removing whitespace when parsing pragmas
fixed tooltip for editor add field button
fixed plain text parser being susceptible to the CodeBlockWidget being redefined
fixed pragmas not working within the action string of several core macros

Node.js Improvements

fixed a significant flaw in the synchronisation algorithm used by the client-server configuration. The flaw could lead to tiddlers temporarily disappearing from the browser

Performance Improvements

improved performance of predefined patterns with all Operator
updated favicon format to PNG

Developer Improvements

improved global hook handling to support removing hooks
added some useful npm scripts to package.json

Infrastructure Improvements

improved Continuous Integration tests to use Playwright to run our browser-based tests
added an automatic build of the external core TiddlyWiki at https://tiddlywiki.com/empty-external-core.html

Acknowledgements

@Jermolene would like to thank the contributors to this release who have generously given their time to help improve TiddlyWiki: