I’ve been taking on a lot more pay-the-bills work as of late, having the pleasure of eviscerating a crusty Perl codebase and replacing it with Python. It’s rewarding and cathartic, but it’s also exhausting so I haven’t been as active as last month.

I pushed a handful of tweaks to how canto-curses deals with readline, so stuff like line-editing and history (arrow keys) work more like you’d expect.

I’ve punted on a couple of things. Disconnect / reconnect, for example. I realized that :reconnect will only do something intelligent if the disconnect happened because of poor network and network socket connections are unsupported (in that they work, but would require more effort to be secure or SSH tricks). Locally running, a disconnect means that the daemon is toast which will either take user intervention (hung) or not, at which point restarting c-c will do basically the same thing. I cleaned up the messages and I’m going to call that good for 0.9.0.

I also nixed :edit which was the only remaining old command I was planning on porting. I realized that it was really just a stopgap I inserted to make editing huge theme strings less painful, but now that sort of thing is better left to plugins.

My list is pretty short now with those taken care of. The abbreviated version is thus:

• Stability. Commands shouldn’t hang c-c on errors and every other bug fix that crops up.
• Better support for running without installation. Stuff like canto-remote shouldn’t be assumed in PATH
• Docs. :help is almost there, but needs yet more polish.
• Plugin and hook audit still needs to be done, this will probably be the very last thing I do.
• Stripping remaining dead command code.
• Fetch + MIME

It’s going to be harder to collect the willpower needed to get started than it will be to bash this stuff out =P.