@ stacks

Stacks is a modern clipboard manager. It's built to help you manage your code snippets, screenshots, and other copied items in a clean, organized fashion. If you're new here and want to know how Stacks can fit into your workflow, find out more on the main page.

Release: v0.13.1

Wed, Nov 22 2023

I know, it's been a while, but a new release is here!

This release includes:
  • A handy new feature, and
  • Significantly enhanced performance, especially in navigating through large stacks
First, let's talk about the new feature.

New → Stack

It's a small addition, instead of "New Note" the top right now just reads "New". Pressing ⌘-n brings up a mini menu where you can choose between creating a new note, as usual, or a new stack.
This feature is ideal when you're working on a task with a stack of related clippings and suddenly need to shave a yak. With ⌘-n, ↓, and ⏎, you can quickly start an empty stack for the new task. To return to your previous task, ←, ↓ and ⌘-t, and your original stack will be topmost, ready for more clippings.

Telemetry and improved performance

Release v0.11.1 marked the beginning of an updated preview that displays all items in a Stack, as opposed to showing a preview for only the actively selected clip.
back in v0.10.0 only a single clip was previewed at a time
v0.11.1
Initially just an experiment, I was pleasantly surprised by the comprehensive overview it provided of the clippings in their current context. This approach also introduces the idea of treating a stack of clips more like a single document, opening up possibilities for future enhancements.

For simplicity, the initial implementation rendered a preview of every item in a stack upon every navigation move. Surprisingly, performance remained snappy in general, but with larger stacks, particularly those containing images, navigation started to feel sluggish.

Telemetry

To address this, I integrated telemetry into the app, giving the dev logs a much-needed overhaul. The previous logs looked like this:

This gave me a chance to explore the Rust tracing ecosystem (which is fantastic), I've revamped the dev logs to this:

This makes development nicer, which is a good segue to mention that the project is actively seeking contributors who use Windows and Linux as their daily driver. If you have a keen interest in clipboard managers and would like to contribute support for these platforms, I'd love to hear from you! Stacks is built on the brilliant Tauri framework, so adding this support should be relatively straightforward.

With telemetry in place, I was able to tackle performance issues more effectively.

Performance

Previously, a Stack with a few images would bog down navigation, with each keypress taking over 600 ms, resulting in a sluggish experience.
Now, for the same Stack, the UI responds to navigation keystrokes in just a few milliseconds, creating a much snappier experience.

That's all for release v0.13.1. If you haven't tried Stacks yet, you can grab an installer here.

✌🏻 @ndyg