New Features or Improvements post Sigil 2.8.1

[3333]

Originally Posted by KevinH

@3333

Thank you for the idea and implementation as it is a very nice feature in general but it is not for Sigil at this time. Sigil has existing methods to view images (double-click, or via pop-up menu View Image) and select images from a list with user controllable thumbnails, neither of which have any long-term memory footprint implications, and neither cause inadvertent visual distractions for some users.

If it at all helps, our users did test your proposed changes and have a few suggestions you may want to incorporate in your own implementation:

- on MacOS arm64 increase the delay to 300ms to better approximate the macOS normal delay and prevent unwanted flashing of images as the cursor is moved back and forth over the images in BookBrowser. That flashing can be dangerous and trigger some individuals.

- small images below the thumbnail size are pixelated when shown in thumbnail form that is larger, so you may want to not scale images whose normal size is smaller than the thumbnail size.

- some users preferred a user setable thumbnail size as they found the thumbnail either too large or too small.

- add a way for the user to completely disable the feature if they find the thumbnails distracting as many did.

Hope something here helps! Thanks again for your suggestion.

Thank you, KevinH, and thank you to everyone who took the time to test the implementation and share feedback.

I have learned quite a lot from the discussions here over the past few days, especially about how you evaluate the balance between a feature itself and the additional code, memory usage, complexity, and long-term maintenance that comes with it.

We will keep this feature in Sigil-Enhanced and continue improving it based on the feedback from this discussion and the testing results.

Thank you again for taking the time to test it and for pointing out these issues and suggestions. We will keep working to improve both the project and the quality of the contributions we prepare in the future.

[KevinH]

Sigil has gotten so large (installed with internal Qt and Python 3.14, it takes close to 500 meg on disk) with features that no one really uses over the last 15 years in my opinion. And unfortunately very few users are aware of even a fraction of them. Adding plugins has helped. As has adding checkpoints, diff comparison, a dry run mode for a user to test replace-all safely before applying it, expanded clips to 60, etc.

So now we are down to adding features only when they help the majority of users and only if it can not be done in a plugin.

Harsh rules. But truly needed at this point. So new features will still be added but they need to be justified along all the dimensions you mentioned.

Thanks again for all the help you have already provided.