Dump of issues

[Biep]

I have several issues I want to report, but no time properly to do so, so here they come in bulk.

• Just typing text, or moving the cursor, or selecting, can take a very long time, with top (yes, I am on Linux) showing almost 100% CPU usage for many seconds. What is going on? Manuskript has no background tasks, so the CPU usage should be around zero, with instant reactivity. (And it is annoying, moving the cursor and then drinking some tea before I actually see the cursor moving.)
• When styling a list through the menu, not all selected lines are actually turned into a list, but only the last one. (Which puzzles me, by the way: the first one would mean the act simply places a - in front of the selection, but here it clearly seeks out the start of the line, but only that one line.)
• The writing target stays at 500 words, even when changing it manually in the pop-up dialogue. I also cannot find where it is stored (I'd love to be able to change it at least by editing a settings file). Also - it would be great if one could tell Manuskript what to count and what not, based on Status, Label, and Compilation. (Don't count ideas, or anything not marked Compile, for instance.)
• Choosing colours is hardly worthwhile, as the colours for links, images, titles, selected text, the text cursor, and so on cannot be chosen, nor are they automatically changed to something contrasting with text and/or background. I like very light blue text on a dark blue background, but this makes links totally, and titles (# Title) virtually unreadable. Having nightlight (shifting away from blue in the evening) enabled makes this even worse. I have tried other colour schemes, but almost nothing seems to work well.
• I often work with a vertically split screen, with to the left a narrow window with special characters and the like - in order to copy those easily into my main text at the right. Often copying does not work the first time, and the previous copy is still on the clipboard. This may be the same issue as the next.
• When right-clicking on an item in the project tree, the chosen action is sometimes performed on the item that was selected before clicking. That is especially annoying when deleting, as there is no simple Undo for these actions.
• Please do add an undo option for actions performed on the project tree.
• Renaming an item in the project tree sometimes results in the name turning into an input field - and immediately reverting to a label field. This may again be an issue of clicking on a non-selected item.
• Text colouring goes wrong with footnotes of the type [^See [This section](#Interesting).] The algorithm gets confused pairing the brackets.
• No way to change the CSS added to an ePub. I want paragraphs indented and without extra space before or after - which I can set in Manuskript, but which doesn't translate into the final ePub.
• When marking some folders "don't compile", the separators between those folders still get into the compiled ePub. In my case they are Newpages, so that a series of uncompiled folders results in a sequence of empty pages.
• Renaming an item in the project tree sometimes results in the name turning into an input field - and immediately reverting to a label field. This may again be an issue of clicking on a non-selected item.
• Position of split edit window is not remembered. I like one very narrow window showing some characters for copying to the other side, but when reopening the project the windows are about the same size.
• When clicking on the POV field, the character list opens and closes again immediately. I have to double-click-and-hold to keep it open and move the cursor to the proper person, where I release to select that person. This is both counterintuitive and impractical, especially with large character lists that need a lot of scrolling.
• When typing in the editor, and switching to the character list or world view and back for reference, the text field loses focus? The cursor becomes invisible, though selected text remains selected, and clikcing the arrow buttons, or typing, does nothing. One has to click in the text field, losing the selection and the previous cursor location.
• Allowing ordered characters could reuse the code for the project tree: "New character" when right-clicking on an existing character. Having "New folder" there too would be fantastic.
• Local word list for spelling correction, to be filled with character names, locations, dialect, and other book-specific words.
• Go to next misspelled word.
• Project crashed after splitting a text at the cursor. I could restart, and the file (that had been shown as split in the tree) was not split.
• When hovering over a link to an image, the image is shown. It would be great if the same could happen for footnotes, when hovering or maybe when clicking. Maybe as a pop-up, or as a tooltip?

Well, that's it. Sorry for the dump - maybe if I find more time in the future I'll split it into neat issues.

[juckendesAuge]

I can confirm 100% utilization under Linux.
Even with a high-performance PC with 64GB of RAM, it takes a while for it to respond again after loading.

[TheJackiMonster]

Manuskript has no background tasks, so the CPU usage should be around zero, with instant reactivity.

Actually Manuskript got a lot of stuff to do in background. For example whenever you type anything it typically takes the changed data from within that widget, converts it into whatever the representation in the data model is, updates all widgets related to changes of that. To clarify this further:

1. You type a character.
2. This changes the content of a text field.
3. This changes the text of a section.
4. This changes the text of the sections chapter.
5. This changes the text of the chapters book.
6. Manuskript calculates all those related word counts (which might be affected by those text changes).
7. All widgets visualizing or displaying such a word count receive the new (or same) value.

That's just one of many things. There's grammar and spelling checks too if enabled which are processed by the CPU. Depending on such things even cursor movement might require CPU processing because we have information for mistakes that appear on events when the cursor is hovering over a flagged word.

Couldn't all this be much more efficient? - Yes, definitely. But the problem is that software tends to get really complex over time when people only add new features on top of each other. So it can't simply be solved. The best I can offer currently is my trial starting to port everything over to GTK while rewriting major parts for the data representation model and IO. You can read into the benefits here for example. From some testing it should make data handling asynchronous and half loading times (potentially even decrease them further).

[Biep]

I suppose a bit of buffering would also help a lot - only change word counts after, say, a second of non-typing.
Anyway - thanks for all the work you are putting in this!

[SpeedyDoggo]

I assume by writing target you mean the one that shows up in focus mode. I don't believe there is a setting to change the default and it unfortunately will reset whenever you leave focus mode. Luckily, when I was using focus mode more, I did actually change the default value for that so I can tell you exactly where that is:
It's stored in manuskript/ui/tools/targets_ui.py and the specific variable you're changing is self.session_target.setProperty("value", 500.0) with 500 being changed to whatever you want the new default to be. You'll have to run Manuskript from source after making that modification, but there is a guide for that somewhere in this repo.

(As a side note, I would love the ability not to include folders that aren't marked for compilation in the total wordcount. Maybe I'll get a bug in my brain and finally figure out how to modify the options menu and try to incorporate a few of these QoL features.)