Suggestions for Sigil Improvements or New Features

[KevinH]

Sorry, I obviously misread your post. No Worries.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

I won't speculate on why Kovid choose to make it 'before the insertion point'.

Because when it comes to knowing what the character is, before insertion point is far more useful. Think about typing as you type there is no character after the insertion point or in case you are typing in the middle of existing text the character after the insertion point remains fixed. In the calibre editor at least, no clue about sigil, there are various techniques to insert non-ascii characters using shortcuts, snippets, typing html entities and so on, it is extremely useful to be able to see at a glance what character was just inserted while typing.

In contrast showing the character after the insertion point has no actual benefit, it's just a convention. It makes *some* sense if you also have a block cursor in which case it becomes the character *under* the cursor but for an insertion cursor, it's just silly.

[KevinH]

In your opinion. But if I typed a character, I would already know what key I just typed. And at top of file and line beginning, after the insertion point makes more sense. So not silly.

Furthermore the only difference between an insertion point cursor and a block cursor in Qt is cursor shape, i.e. it is not a mode indicator. So "under the cursor" should indicate the char after the insertion point, which in Qt is also the character at the textcursor start position in my opinion. The most common use case is investigating strange diacritics, rare punctuation, and special whitespace chars and for that either before or after the insertion point works.

[KevinH]

Okay for those following along, I just pushed changes to master to allow the Classes Used report to also search in any selectors defined in style tags inside that html file.

I have also pushed changes to allow a user to double click in the Classes Used report and if that class definition is found (even if in that html file's style tags) to open the CodeView editor to it. Similar to how the CSS Selectors Used in CSS files report does.

This completes suggestion 14 in the Summary Report found at https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...8&postcount=83 earlier in this thread.

That just leaves the suggestion 1 to be done (so far).

[DNSB]

Quick question. I've received a couple of PMs from people asking if I can send them links to the Windows version of Sigil with the ongoing changes. I've done this before but thought I would check before doing it again.

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Quick question. I've received a couple of PMs from people asking if I can send them links to the Windows version of Sigil with the ongoing changes. I've done this before but thought I would check before doing it again.

I have no problem with that, as long as they understand this is mainly for testing of the new suggestions and feedback (but should work well generally). As long as they are willing to test and report any issues to help out, the more the merrier.

But do note, all the new translation strings are in English only since nothing here has yet gone to Transifex unlike an actual release of Sigil.

And we are possibly planning to update to Qt 6.10.2 when it gets released and Python 3.14.x before our next actual release so lots more changes on the way. So alert them to update again when an actual release is made hopefully in February or March.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by KevinH

In your opinion. But if I typed a character, I would already know what key I just typed. And at top of file and line beginning, after the insertion point makes more sense. So not silly.

Yeah just like the reverse is your opinion. And I was at pains to point out that in the calibre editor you can enter characters in many ways other than pressing a single key on your keyboard. Which makes knowing what character was just inserted extremely useful.

Furthermore the only difference between an insertion point cursor and a block cursor in Qt is cursor shape, i.e. it is not a mode indicator. So "under the cursor" should indicate the char after the insertion point, which in Qt is also the character at the textcursor start position in my opinion. The most common use case is investigating strange diacritics, rare punctuation, and special whitespace chars and for that either before or after the insertion point works.

Except that as far as I know neither the calibre book editor nor Sigil use the block cursor, so it's irrelevant to this discussion. If there was a vim mode in either it might be relevant, there isnt. For investigating characters, as you say, either convention works. For typing previous character works, next character does not. Seems pretty cut and dried to me, but I am not here to convince you to change your mind, I was simply responding to BR mentioning me.

[KevinH]

Understood. There are a number of ways to add or paste characters into Sigil in addition to typing but most insert strings not single characters making the name of just the last character entered rather pointless for most methods. As for insertion point vs block cursor, Sigil will report on the same character no matter the shape of the actual curser as a cursor is a cursor.

So I think we must agree to disagree.

[KevinH]

Okay, I have now addressed suggestion 1 in the list (add possible shortcut id number to the ClipEditor)

This has been pushed to master.

See the attached image if interested.

[KevinH]

So all items on that Summary have been pushed to master along with a few more bug fixes.

For those who build their own, all testing and feedback about any of these changes/fixes welcome.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by KevinH

Sorry, I obviously misread your post. No Worries.

Me too, sorry - until I looked I hadn't noticed that Sigil has the Line and Col shown in the status line.

[DNSB]

I've already sent this link to the people who PMmed me expressing interest, one of whom suggested other people might be interested.

Please read read KevinH's comments in message #96 in this thread before installing this code.

Anyone who is interested in testing the Windows build of the Sigil beta, here is a link to a compile of the 2026-Jan-19 code: Sigil-2.7.0-Windows-x64-Setup.exe.