Weird glitches with Sigil V2.7 and later

[Marg1780]

I'm hoping someone can help me with issues I've been having with the recent versions of Sigil (v2.7-2.8). I'm at a loss. I was a long-time hold-out on the last version which had the beloved Book Viewer, but eventually I bit the bullet and jumped forward to v2.7.6, and am now up at v2.8.1. I knew I'd miss Book Viewer, but I was caught off-guard by a bunch of other weirdnesses which really make the upgrade an unpleasant experience. (I'm running on Windows 11, so some of the glitches may be there, but they're specific to Sigil so I don't know how to tell.)

1) For an ePub3, if I edit the metadata then save it, Sigil wipes out or corrupts custom entries when I save the changes. (It seems to work correctly for ePub2). For an ePub3, if I create a custom "calibre:rating" tag, save it, close/reopen the file, it's either gone entirely (v2.7.6) or corrupted (v2.8.1) into simply a "rating" tag which Calibre (v8.5) doesn't understand. My knowledge of the ePub standard is limited mostly to what I've picked up using Calibre and Sigil (and seaching when I have a question), but I find it really unlikely that custom tags have been eliminated, and I can't figure out any alternative in Sigil for creating one.

2) For some unknown-to-me reason, my clips bar keeps turning itself off. I go into View > Toolbars and click it on at least once a day, but the change simply will not stick. (Clip Bar2 is always visible, but that may be because it is empty.)

3) Also relating to the clips bar is an issue which I've experienced as long as I've been using Sigil, and just gotten used to. I think I bring the basic problem on myself by opening multiple ePubs in parallel, but it was always easy to fix... until now. With 2.8.1, I can't figure out how to get around it, short of re-entering several dozen custom clips manually with high frequency.

The basic problem is that periodically, all my custom clips are wiped out and Sigil returns to the default clips file. (This, I assume is my fault for opening files in parallel. I haven't made any changes to the custom clips in years so I'm not sure *why* it would happen when I'm not modifying them, but now and then Sigil gets confused.) Until now, this wasn't more than a small annoyance. I have a saved copy of my version, so when the master file resets to defaults, I copy/paste my entries into the master file and all is good again. Except that today, it won't let me do that. Every time I open Sigil, the clips file resets and wipes out all the customs. If I manually re-enter a few, they stick; if I copy in all of them, it resets. (I am making the assumption that the format of the clips file hasn't changed; I checked for that and it appears to be exactly the same including all the examples.)

4) Come to think of it, the icon set selection will not stick reliably either. I change it to the most usable of the available trio (for someone with poor eyesight), it sticks for a little while, then it returns to the default by its own choice. I've given up on that one, but it's a pain.

5) Now and then when I open a file in Sigil (maybe 1 time in 20), it will have the "Current File" option selected in the dropdown instead of the normal "All HTML Files". I don't remember ever seeing this issue in the older versions. Similarly the whole "Find/Replace" subwindow comes and goes at random. Open one file, it'll be there at startup, open the next, it'll be missing. I don't think I've ever closed that by choice in all the years I've used the app. And again, this didn't used to happen.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. After years of really loving the app, I'm quickly growing to hate it, or at least to hate all the time I'm spending fighting to accomplish straightforward stuff that's been easy to do with it for years and years.

[DiapDealer]

There should be no damage to your clips by opening files in parallel with Sigil. That's never been my experience after years and years of Sigil use (both old and new). Something else has to be going on there. Many people (myself included) have multiple instance of Sigil running without any issues like this.

As to your number one issue, the allowed metadata (including syntax) in Epub3 has changed drastically from Epub2. I have no idea what custom tags you're using with calibre, but I doubt very highly that they're a part of the epub's internal opf. It's more likely they're used in the external metadata opf that Calibre creates for each book.

All of your other mentioned issues sound to me like they can be attributed to either a corrupt Sigil ini file, or possibly two different installations of Sigil trying to share the same preferences.

You certainly shouldn't be having the troubles your having with the latest Sigil. It's not been the experience for the vast majority of users out there.

[KevinH]

Yes it definitely sounds like something is very broken in either saving to the settings file or reading from the settings file. My guess is some anti-virus or other program is interfering with that.

As for using multiple Sigil programs at the same time, please do understand that a single settings file is shared by all instances of Sigil and are updated/saved upon Sigil exiting.
So if you change a setting in one Sigil program that is running and exit that version, then later exiting a different running version of Sigil without those changes, when its settings are saved on exit, you will lose you earlier changes made in the first version as those of the last version saved will overwrite any earlier changes.

The last exiting Sigil running programs settings will be what gets saved last.

No idea why you are having trouble with clip but again they need to be loaded from a ini file so perhpas the problem is the same mechanism is at work.

As for Sigil's epub3 Metadata Editor, it will not allow nor keep non-spec metadata. So a non-spec "calibre::rating" stored inside a meta with an unknown property is not supported on purpose. I can look into relaxing that constraint but I would need a list of "alternative" metadata that many people want to add, and I can add support in Sigil's epub3 Metadata editor for them.

But Sigil 2.8.1 should no longer mess up custom legal epub3 metadata as that was fixed. If you can get Sigil 2.8.1 to do that, please let us know exactly what you are doing and what you are trying to add to the metadata, so we can recreate it exactly so we can track it down and fix it.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Marg1780

The basic problem is that periodically, all my custom clips are wiped out and Sigil returns to the default clips file. (This, I assume is my fault for opening files in parallel. I haven't made any changes to the custom clips in years so I'm not sure *why* it would happen when I'm not modifying them, but now and then Sigil gets confused.) Until now, this wasn't more than a small annoyance. I have a saved copy of my version, so when the master file resets to defaults, I copy/paste my entries into the master file and all is good again. Except that today, it won't let me do that. Every time I open Sigil, the clips file resets and wipes out all the customs. If I manually re-enter a few, they stick; if I copy in all of them, it resets. (I am making the assumption that the format of the clips file hasn't changed; I checked for that and it appears to be exactly the same including all the examples.)

Copying/pasting manually into Sigil's sigil_clips.ini may actually be part of your problem. The character encoding of Sigil's ini files has changed from earlier versions of Sigil. When updating, Sigil creates new versions of those ini files with suffixes like _v2 or _v6 (_v6 is the latest). You could be copying things with a different character encoding from old versions into the new versions and resulting in corrupted data. Or you could be copying the data into older files that are not being used by Sigil any more. Sigil now has the ability to export/import clips data that should be used to avoid this sort of manual copying and pasting.

I would consider uninstalling Sigil, deleting the Program Files/Sigil folder entirely. Making a backup of your existing Sigil preferences folder and moving/renaming (or deleting) the existing one. Then when you reinstall Sigil and run it for the first time, you will have a fresh install. If it all works properly, you can then work on getting your existing clips imported back into Sigil. I would also suggest exempting your Sigil program (and preferences) folder from any anti-malware protection.

[Marg1780]

Hi, thank you both for responding. (Sorry for the slow response, I've been essentially offline for a couple of days.) Since I wasn't seeing tons of discussions of my issues, I figured it was localized to me, but hadn't been having any luck at all finding information on the possible cause. The information on the ini file changes (which are not at all obvious in Notepad) sounds like the needed solution for the clips issue, which is the worst one for me.

I have been working with the _v6 version since I bought a Win11 laptop. Initially, I wasn't seeing much change in the situation, except that the problem with the clips bar turning itself off spontaneously was new. My custom clips were behaving pretty much as they always have. (I've been using Sigil at least as far back as v0.4.1, though I don't remember when I started using clips.) Now and then, they'd vanish; I'd replace them and go on.

I do recognize that changing a clip when I had ten files open was guaranteed trouble. My clips change very infrequently, and I typically make the change outside of my normal work flow. If I forgot and added a new one unwisely then saw it vanish, I'd have a good idea of the reason.

Can you give me a hint where to find information on the export/import for clips? I don't recognize it in any of the menus, or the Preferences dialog, which makes sense functionally but I'm not sure where else to look. Have you added a configuration utility? I don't get any likely hits when I search the User Guide (2025 09 12, which was the latest when I last looked).

I recognize that the metadata rules for ePub3 are very different, though I've never gotten into them deeply since - until recently - the items I need have always been available via the metadata editor. And they still are, except that while I can still build a custom tag in an ePub3, it is later pruned without warning. The only tag that has no (known to me) replacement is the one which populates the rating field when the ePub is imported into Calibre. It seems odd that custom fields aren't allowed in ePub3 with an assumption that they'll just be ignored unless the book is imported into an app/device that understands them. I think that was the assumption in the early days of the standard.

Yes, a clean install sounds like a necessity, and apparently the amount of internals I need to know has grown greatly. I've always thought of Sigil as a closed-box app, but that approach seems to have become obsolete... Off to find the Preferences folder...