Attention All Sigil Users
 

It is clear to us, now that the decision to convert Sigil INI preference files to UTF-8 was not a good idea. That combined with other performance-related issues has caused us to make the decision to pull both Sigil v0.9.11 and v0.9.12. Regardless of whether the two issues are related or not, we cannot in good conscience recommend their continued use, and thus have removed the binary downloads from their Github release pages.

In short ... don't use these versions (unless you're willing to work with us to test and further debug the performance issues). If you have good backups of your Sigil v0.9.10 (or earlier) preferences, roll back to Sigil 0.9.10 and restore your backed up preferences. If you don't have backups of your Sigil 0.9.10 (or earlier) preferences, roll back to Sigil 0.9.10 anyway and recreate your preferences as best you can from within Sigil's UI. Those preferences will be usable with the release of Sigil that follows 0.9.12.

We apologize for any and all inconveniences. Stay tuned for a new release (or perhaps a beta version to begin with).

NOTE: this goes for the Legacy Windows version of Sigil as well. Even if it doesn't exhibit the performance issues of the official releases, the code to convert the preferences ini files to utf-8 is present and just as flaky/buggy.

I'm using the legacy .9.12 without noticing any such problems.
Is this ini problem able to randomly corrupt preferences, or is it only when you first install it?

how can i help?

Yes. It can randomly corrupt them. The bigger issue, however, is that your current preferences (even if everything seems to be working just fine) will not be compatible with the next release of the version of Sigil (official or legacy). Installing the next version over top of 0.9.11/12 will likely result in Sigil not running any more.

Unless you heed the warning to have backups of Sigil 0.9.10 (or earlier) preferences ready, you will be forced to delete your current INI files in order to get Sigil running again. Which means manually recreating your preferences.

The upgrade from a working Sigil 0.9.10 (or earlier) to Sigil 0.9.13 (or higher) will be seamless.

Well, since I don't have a backup ini file, my preferences are lost either way.

My last ini backup is from 2014, version .6.2.
I made a backup of the current file while it's apparently still working.
Opening the current ini file, I can see a lot of stuff I don't care about (history, last search/file, etc) and the things I do care about seem readable and I can paste them into a new file when the new version comes, or at least use it for reference. So I'll live on the edge and keep using it.

What about Sigil-clips.ini?
Is that also at risk?
Backed that up now.

It's not about being "at risk." All four INI files will be incompatible with newer versions of Sigil. And don't count on being able to paste utf-8 encoded text into an ascii document without potential problems. You may be alright with stuff like the keyboard shortcut sections, but any search & replace, or clip stuff involving entities will likely cause issues. Hell, much of the content from the default Saved Searches INI from 0.9.11/12 will be incompatible with newer versions if pasted in. It's not the file that's the problem it's the encoding of the file's contents.

Why can't you detect the encoding of the existing INI file? Is that due to QT limitations?

It wouldn't matter. There's no way to guarantee error-free conversion back to ascii with ascii-escaped representations of utf-8 characters (and ONLY utf-8 characters that can't be represented with ascii) without causing worse damage to the INIs.

We messed up. All we can do now is rip the band-aid off and move forward with the correction. If you have preference backups from Sigil 0.9.10, you're golden. If you don't, you'll have some work to do to upgrade to the next version. For that we profusely apologize, but it is what it is. If we had a way to make this painless for everybody, we surely would. But this is why we made the recommendation to back up your preferences for 0.9.10 before we ever released 0.9.11.

Just to clarify:

If I have v0.9.12, and am experiencing no problems, can I simply wait for the next version and THEN trash my INI files before installing it?

Yes. Yes you can.

Thank you. I can live with that!

0.9.9 was the last version before cursor position between Preview and Code view got broken, I think? (just considering options).

Yes. Syncing from Preview to Code View was lost in 0.9.10.

I am sticking with the mac .12 version until .13 is released. I haven't any issues that impact on performance. But I also have a backup of .10 stored in multiple locations. Am I the only one who uses a regular backup regime? I use both Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner. So even if I had not copied /Library/Application Support/sigil-ebook I would have been able to access .10 version through Time Machine or the cloning backup.

I should never have violated my second rule of the internet: don't upgrade until you must!

Damn, damn, damn. I don't even know (or much care) what's an ini file, though I see I have one in my most recent build of WordStar.

You'd care if there WASN'T one, and you had to re-establish your setup every time you ran the program!