Saturday, March 5, 2016

Huge New Plover Pre-Release Candidate!!!!

The incomparable Ted, the redoubtable Benoit, and many other people have been working tremendously hard to create the first new version of Plover for over two years, and they've finally come out with a pre-release candidate for testing!!!

Go to the Github for release notes and download links!

Ted says:
With this new "weekly" build of Plover, we hope to start a trend of rapid releases. We'll try to push a new weekly every time there's a new feature, so you might see weekly builds on a daily or biweekly basis, depending on how much actual development gets done. One thing is for sure, though: We won't wait another 2 years (!!!) before getting improvements into your hands. This is a "pre-release", not quite a version 3.0.0 just yet. We want to have the brave among you try it out and let us know if anything broke in a major way.

  • New icon and overhauled GUI
  • Full Unicode support
  • New lookup window
  • New Suggestions window
  • Undo buffer now defaults to 100
  • Delete words on empty buffer
  • New dictionary editor
  • "Add Translation" Transparency
  • Repeat last stroke
  • Uppercase next word
  • GUI for remapping keyboard layout
  • Better portable mode
  • Add multiple dictionaries at once
  • New output modes (Caps, Title, Snake, Camel, and Custom)
  • 20,000 entries added to default dictionary
  • Default dictionary restructuring (Main, Commands, and User)
  • Keystrokes suppressed instead of backspaced in Linux
  • Retrospective capitalize, uppercase, lowercase, toggle asterisk, insert space, and delete space, and currency formatting

Go to the Github for all the details! Then download the new version and tell us what you think! The official release of Plover 3.0 is right around the corner! Help us make it go as smoothly and quickly as possible by reporting any bugs you run across.

Infinite thanks again to Ted, Benoit, and all our other amazing developers. I've been running a version of Plover with several of these features since last Fall, and it's been fantastic to have them, but I can't wait to get my hands on the newest version.

8 comments:

jessic said...

I have just started using the beta today. Love it. No bugs yet, but haven't really dug around in the good stuff to test it yet. Going to use it for a couple of weeks first but hoping I can use this to do a test in realtime coach. Once I used the spacing after the stroke option, I was able to use RTC where I couldn't with the previous version of plover.

gdwarner said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
b. leod said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
b. leod said...


hello, i have a 2015 imac an downloaded your new beta. It worked for
a while then became intermittent and stopped totally.

2016-03-10 00:40:40,187 ERROR: engine initialization failed
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "plover/gui/main.pyc", line 235, in __init__
File "plover/app.pyc", line 44, in init_engine
File "plover/app.pyc", line 66, in update_engine
File "plover/app.pyc", line 179, in set_machine
File "plover/machine/keyboard.pyc", line 57, in start_capture
File "plover/oslayer/osxkeyboardcontrol.pyc", line 219, in __init__
Exception: Enable access for assistive devices.
2016-03-10 00:51:06,033 ERROR: updating engine configuration failed
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "plover/gui/config.pyc", line 171, in _save
File "plover/app.pyc", line 66, in update_engine
File "plover/app.pyc", line 179, in set_machine
File "plover/machine/keyboard.pyc", line 57, in start_capture
File "plover/oslayer/osxkeyboardcontrol.pyc", line 219, in __init__
Exception: Enable access for assistive devices.

Ted Morin said...

That's pretty strange… Maybe you could try a newer build, b.leod? https://github.com/openstenoproject/plover/pull/412#issuecomment-194569352

Also if there's no more to your stack trace, it might be a good idea to just remove and re-add Plover from the assistive devices to see if that helps.

b. leod said...

well that worked. removed all traces of plover from my disk and started from scratch.

me so happy - me so happy!

every little thing works perfectly ... ... ... (as far as I can tell. Witch ain't that far.)

gdwarner said...

This is awesome!

I am working on a transcript right now, and I have the Suggestions Display open, with the "Always on Top" option selected. It's good to have that open, because now I can see some of the things that are in my dictionary that I had forgotten about ... so I have been writing the ones that I find down for later study. Twenty-seven pages of the transcript are done, and I have nearly filled up a strip of steno paper on both sides with notes to study/remember for next time.

Of course, it helps to have a large screen for that ...

Unknown said...

I have the same error... Engine initialization failed....I am using Windows 10, please give me a step by step on how to remove Plover as I am not sure whereabouts in the assistive devices Plover is? Thank You!