Amenbo 30.0.0 — a look you can hand to someone

Amenbo can be dressed in a skin now. The colour half arrived in 29.3.0 and materials — background pictures, icons, a typeface — are new in 30.0.0. The changes from 29.0.0 through 29.3.0 also landed by this version.

Skins — changing how it looks

Settings > Appearance has a “Skin” row. Four skins ship with the build.

Picking one is a try-on: the screen redraws in that skin and nothing is settled until “Use this one” is pressed. Backing out returns the previous look.

To take a skin off, pick “None (the colours Amenbo ships with)”. If a skin left the screen unreadable and Settings cannot be reached, the amenbo skin use none command takes it off from a terminal.

What a skin can carry

A skin is one zip file holding skin.yaml plus the materials it names.

• colours — ground, text, accent, borders; the whole set the screen uses
• sizes — one multiplier each for text, spacing, corner radius and shadow
• frame — line style (solid / double / none) and width
• typeface — one woff2, up to 2MB
• background pictures — one each behind four places: the app’s own ground, a pane’s ground, sunken areas such as input fields, and cards. Fit is contain / cover / tile; position is one of nine spots
• icons — any of the 51 icons the window draws can be replaced with your own image; the colour follows the text beside it

Background pictures, icons and the move to zip are new in 30.0.0.

Handing a skin to someone

“Write one out” produces a zip with every settable name in it, filled in from the skin currently worn if there is one. You do not start from an empty file. The receiver drops the file on Settings > “Add a skin”.

• Before anything is taken in, the panel lists what is inside the file — each picture’s and the typeface’s filename, size, and where it is used.
• Colour readability is measured and reported — how many pairings fall below the floor. It does not stop the import. A place with a picture behind it is not measured, because what is under the text is not a colour.
• A name already held is refused with both versions named, so you see which is there and which is arriving.
• “Hand this one on” writes out the file exactly as it arrived, materials and all, so the person you gave it to can pass it on again.

Search and replace across a whole folder (29.1.0)

Search a folder for a word. Hits are grouped per file, and pressing one opens that place.

• Replace across the results. Files you do not want touched can be dropped from the list.
• Before writing, it asks: “Replace N places in M files?”
• It writes to the files, and there is no undo here — the only way back is git, when the folder is under git.
• Files that changed after the search are left alone, and it says how many it left alone.

There is also a find panel for the file that is open — match case, whole word, regular expressions — and the folder tree can be narrowed by name.

Decisions have a “being written” stage (29.0.0)

A decision is a draft while it is being written; “Finish writing” settles it.

A task whose premise is a decision still being written is not started until that decision is settled. Work no longer begins on a premise that is not fixed yet.

Editing a settled decision is treated as correcting wording, and the decision date does not change. To overturn what was decided, supersede it with a new decision.

Everything else

• “Terminal” is now called “Workspace” — a change to what the screen calls it, nothing else.
• A pane keeps the name and the count it was given while you were looking elsewhere — the name an AI gave the pane on another page, and the tasks and decisions that session filed in the meantime, are both there when you come back to that page.
• Settings opens straight away — the problem check no longer runs when you open it, only when you press “Check”. The app no longer freezes while the check runs.
• A list of thousands of tasks opens all the way — only the rows on screen are drawn.
• The Viewer takes a server name — for standing up a second server on the same account.
• Controls that were too small to press were widened to a finger-sized target.

For anyone who made a skin in 29.3.0

The skin format is now a zip. A bare .yaml is no longer taken in. Put your file into a zip; the file inside is named skin.yaml. Writing out a template changed too — it now takes a destination.

Getting it

Open the installer for your OS from the latest release. No admin rights are needed.

• macOS — .pkg, one for Apple silicon and one for Intel (GUI and CLI come together)
• Windows — setup .exe (GUI and CLI come together)
• Linux — the GUI is an AppImage; the amenbo command comes from the CLI installer

To update: on the GUI, the “a newer version is available” banner applies it in place. If you installed only the CLI, the amenbo update --apply command swaps it.

Coming from 28.2.0 or earlier, the stored data format moves up — the first launch on this version migrates it, and a backup from before the migration is kept automatically. Once migrated, an earlier version can no longer open it. If you are already on 29.x, there is no migration. The GUI and the CLI are updated together by the same installer, so do not leave one of them on the old version.

New here? See Start.