Another new Chinese Sigil fork

[KevinH]

If you remember we found a fork of Sigil called "sigil-modified" that ended up being out of date, bug ridden and not adding much value but had some interesting ideas. Furthermore the author of which never contacted us, or contributed anything back.

So there is now a new Chinese fork of Sigil called Sigil-Enhanced that has already added huge amounts of new code to their version of Sigil, even though it started with the old sigil-modified that we found was bug ridden.

It is being developed by a whole company: https://huggingface.co/3tic which according to them is "The AI community building the Future".

Hopefully they have found and fixed those bugs. And of course no-one from that project has contacted us or offered to contribute anything back to Sigil. I guess the whole idea of contributing back that made open source actually work is truly dead.

Point Google Translate at this github site:

https://github.com/3tic-project/Sigil-Enhanced

They seem to want to include a built-in interface to LLMs to automate cleanup tasks. Might be some good ideas there but if so, I hope they greatly improve the code quality from the earlier sigil-modified effort.

If anything appears to be a good idea, do let me know.

One thing I did learn is that a Singleton class that must exist the full time the application exists and is only deleted at application termination can not delete its own instance even if created by new. That is news to me. Especially since no pointers are stored to a Singleton class anyplace else by definition. But changing to a Meyers based Singleton by reference would eliminate the need, preventing any potential destructor recursion. I will look into moving to a Meyers based Singleton pattern in Sigil. So that's a plus.

[DNSB]

I gave a quick test to the release version. The Emmet tool was just as unimpressive as in the test Sigil version and after 5 minutes I disabled autocomplete. Further testing will have to wait.

The use of HarfBuzz looks interesting but since I do not do much in languages other than English, I really don't have many test documents for it.

[KevinH]

Interesting.

There is a whole "opencc" chinese conversion library added to convert between the different regional dialects of chinese and japanese. That at least makes good sense for a specialized Chinese version of Sigil. Same might be true for harfbuzz, but afaik, harfbuzz is already part of Qt.

They have also added a "mcp" interface to LLMs. And added some kind of "Live Plugin" environment but I have no idea of what it can handle or do. This required them to greatly grow the number of installed python modules.

Interestingly they kept the buggy prettifier code we tested that could not even handle inline tags properly, and the broken emmet code, the buggy pre-search feature called FindReplacePlus that caused crashes, the auto complete which was next to worthless when tested because xhtml tags are short, and kept the builtin epub3-itizer code all from "sigil-modified" as well.

So as far as I can tell, unless big improvements were made, these were not promising decisions.

I do think if you could use an LLM to handle complex corrections in the text and clean-ups without exposing that same precious text and ideas to an LLM to be absorbed or stolen, it might prove useful.

And it looks like they have built a whole unarchive zip file protection system to supposedly protect against malicious plugin zip archives. Silly, because any plugin itself must be trusted as it has full runtime privs. Plus our Unzip code safely forces all unzipped files into the target folder preventing them from overwriting anything outside their own folder. Again, a bit of a waste of time. Might make you feel good but truly accomplishes nothing. The plugin python code is running just like any other python program on your system with your full rights. And lots of code can test a zip archive for safety without unpacking it but once unpacked, it can do anything. An macOS and Linux running unzip -t or unzip -lv will show all final paths and file sizes if anyone is worried about a plugin zip file. They should be much more worried about the python code inside if they do not trust the source! My guess is they did this to start commercializing plugins, but I could be wrong.

They also added dragging and dropping resources into CodeView to add images and other resources to an xhtml file. Given how many crashes are caused by dragging and dropping inside Qt Editors over that last 10 years, I hope Qt fixed it.

They seemed to have expanded CV's Undo and Redo capability so that might be useful. And I am sure there must be some interesting changes and bug fixes someplace in their code but with many commit messages in Chinese, I am not sure I would ever find them.

Well good luck to them. I am sure many book authors will just love to hear that their epub editor uses AI and LLM to work.

It would be nice if they at least contributed back to us actual bug fixes they find in our code, (like the potential Singleton destructor recursion issue) but I fear this will be a one-way street like it has been so far.