rofi/releasenotes/0.15.12/release-0.15.12.markdown

# Release 0.15.12

The 0.15.12 release of **rofi** focusses on improving overall user experience.  These improvements mostly focussed on
three things, first we (tried to) fix the problems with complex keyboard layouts, second we tried to make theming of
**rofi** easier. Also we added several speedups. Below I will highlight these bigger changes in more details

Now that **rofi** reached an acceptable maturity level, we will start using more common
version numbering. Right now rofi uses `0.year.month` for version numbers.
Starting with next version the widely used `major.minor.bugfix` scheme will be used.
This means, that next rofi version will either be

* 0.15.13 (bugfix release)
* 0.16.0 (minor release) or (if no major bugs are discovered most likely)
* 1.0.0 (major release) 

## Keyboard Layouts

**Rofi** used to have problems with keyboard layouts that used modifier keys to switch between different layers.
These problems should now be a thing of the past.

**Note** the syntax for binding keys has slightly changed. The *Mod1*, *Mod2*, etc. keywords are no longer available.
There was no good way to detect how these keys where mapped and if they could be used as modifiers.
E.g. if the right alt (say *Mod3*) is configured to switch between layouts, it cannot work as modifier key to make a `Mod3-p` keybinding.
**Rofi** will now check if the current layout has the *SuperR*,*SuperL*,*AltGr*,*HyperL*,*HyperR* keys available.
If they are available they can be used for keybindings, if not, the user gets a warning.

![Rofi Keyboard Warning](rofi-warning.png)

## Speedups

### DMenu reading from stdin

**Rofi** used to have a custom `fgets` implementation that supported custom separators. The first version was
slow but got improved. Learning about Posix 2000' `getdelim` this is now used and is almost as fast as the latest custom implementation.

Overall this gave a speedup of 6x (from 648 ms for 202000 lines down to 108ms).

### Multi-Core power

Still disabled by default, **rofi** can now spawn multiple threads for filtering rows. Depending on the underlying
hardware we saw a 1.5x speedup running on a dual core ARM and up to a 3.5x speedup on a quadcore (8 threads) i7 CPU.
It uses Glib's GThreadPool and will therefore spawn threads as needed and clean them up again afterwards.

To enable this option pass the `-threads 0` option, this will autodetect the number number of hw-threads. Pass `-threads 4`
to force it to use 4 threads. Setting the number to 1, disables it.


## Themes

**Rofi** color themes can be specified in a lot of detail, including the use of transparency to get desired results.
However color syntax proved to be difficult and testing it can be a hassle. To solve this we added a web frontend for writing
themes (with live preview) and a themes repository.

To make things even easier, you can now take screenshots of **rofi** from within **rofi** with a simple keybinding.

![Rofi Internal Screenshot](rofi-screenshot.png)
 
### Theme repository

This has been requested several times and rofi's website actually has a theming page.. This however got outdated quickly and neither
the themes or the screenshots are correct anymore. The newly added rofi-themes git repository allows you to add themes easily:
Fork the repository and export your current color theme with **rofi -dump-xresources-theme**. Place it in the theme directory
of the repository and run the update script. This will automatically generate screenshots and update the page.
Update your fork and send a pull request. This way your theme will appear on official themes page, once it's merged.

The repository can be found [here](https://github.com/DaveDavenport/rofi-themes/)

![Rofi Theme Site](rofi-theme-site.png)

### Themenator

The second tool is a website allowing you to easily create themes and preview all changes life, the [themenator](https://davedavenport.github.io/rofi/generator.html)
Big thanks to `SardemFF7` who got tired of me complaining, took the very rough prototype and turned it into
something beautiful. 

Hopefully people will make beautiful themes and submit them to the [theme repository](https://github.com/DaveDavenport/rofi-themes/).

![Rofi Themenator](rofi-themenator.png)

## Full ChangeLog

### New features:
- Initial `-dump` command for dmenu mode. (#216)
- Threading support.
    - Parallel checking for ASCII.
    - Parallel string matching.
    - Autodetect number of HW-threads.
    - Disabled by default.
- Highlight multiple selected rows (#287,#293)
- Dmenu can read from file instead of stdin.
- Regex matching (#113)
- Take Screenshot of rofi using keybinding.
- Hotkey for sorting: (#298)
- Option to set scrollbar width.

### Improvements:

- Fix return code of multi-select.
- Update manpage (#289, #291)
- Improve speed of reading stdin in dmenu mode.
- Correctly handle modifier keys now. Should now support most weird keyboard layouts and switching between them.
(#268, #265, #286)
- Correctly set locale, fixing issues with entering special characters. (#282)
- DRun mode support `NoDisplay` setting (#283)
- Pango markup is matched when filtering. (#273)

### Bug fixes:

- Improve error message (#290)
- Correctly switch to next entry on multi-select when list is filtered (#292)
- Switch __FUNCTION__ for __func__. (#288)
- Fix segfault on empty list and moving through it. (#256,#275)
- Fix one off of colors (#269)
- Drun fix uninitialized memory (#285)