autodoc/docs/CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

All notable user-visible changes are recorded here. The format follows Keep-a-Changelog conventions; versions follow semver.

[Unreleased]

Changed

• Click-capture pipeline rearchitected for Folge-like recording. This is the milestone where fast, real-world recording works end to end: every mouse click during a session becomes exactly one saved step, the red marker lands on the exact click position (verified at 0.00% offset across scaled and multi-monitor displays), and the screenshot shows the screen at the click rather than after it.
  • Continuous capture now runs in a hidden worker process that samples a desktop media stream per display into a timestamped ring buffer, so the main process stays responsive and OS click events are never delayed by capture work. Falls back to the legacy in-process loop where streams cannot start (portal-less Wayland/WSLg).
  • Each click is paired with the newest frame captured at or before its hook timestamp (strict timing, capture.strictClickFrames, default on): a frame whose grab started after the click is never used.
  • Physical→DIP coordinate conversion is multi-monitor and scale-factor aware (screen.screenToDipPoint on Windows, display-geometry math elsewhere), fixing marker drift on displays scaled away from 100%.
  • A configurable click-lead (capture.clickLeadMs, default 120ms) prefers a frame captured a little before each click so the saved step shows what the user was about to act on, not the click's onset; the stream sampling cadence was tightened to 50ms so a frame near that target always exists. The lead is a preference, not a gate: selection falls back to the newest frame still before the click, so it never forces a post-click screenshot.
  • The frame recorder now warms up before the window hides at recording start, instead of after. Previously the first click of a session could beat the ~1s warmup and fall back to a post-click shot — "the first screenshot is late" — while every later click was fine. Now frames are buffering by the time the window tucks away, so the first click is served a pre-click frame like the rest.
  • The whole click→screenshot→step pipeline is guarded end to end by tests/checks/test_click_capture_selftest.sh, which runs a real Electron session and asserts marker accuracy, no dropped burst clicks, the first click of a session captured, and the debounce — so this behavior fails the suite if it ever regresses.

Added

• Click debounce (capture.clickDebounceMs, default 200ms). Clicks of the same mouse button closer together than the window collapse into one step, so accidental fast or double clicks don't each become a step, while any two deliberate clicks spaced further apart both register. It is a leading-edge debounce measured from the last accepted click, so a run of fast clicks can't push the next real click out. Set it to 0 to capture every click. Backed by behavioral unit tests that drive click sequences through real timestamps (not keyword checks) plus an end-to-end self-test scenario.

Fixed

• Restarting a recording no longer drops clicks or "stops after one click." While the recorder warmed up at the start of a session the window was still visible, so clicks over it were skipped and clicks elsewhere were shot post-click — and on a restart the backend start could take several seconds, stretching that bad window out. Recording is now "armed" only once the window is actually hidden and the buffer is primed: clicks during warmup are cleanly ignored (the window is covering the user's work anyway), the window hides within a bounded time even if the backend is slow to start, and a slow start left over from a finished session can no longer block the next session from starting its own.
• Fast click bursts no longer lose screenshots. Finishing or pausing a recording used to cancel every screenshot still being encoded, so a quick series of clicks saved only the first two or three. The capture worker now drains on stop — frames already captured for queued clicks finish encoding and are saved — so all clicks are recorded even on machines where PNG encoding takes seconds. Verified end to end: an 8-click burst followed by an immediate finish saves all 8.
• Screenshots taken after the click instead of at it. A slow PNG encode was being mistaken for a dead capture worker, which kicked the click over to a fallback that shot the screen after the click. The worker now acknowledges frame selection immediately and ships the encoded image separately, so a slow encode no longer triggers the post-click fallback.
• Windows continuous click capture now uses a low-level mouse hook instead of timer polling, so normal left-clicks are not missed when the app or target system is under load. Click captures also preserve the original click timestamp through the queue and choose a buffered frame from before the click when one is available, keeping the marker aligned with the click-time cursor position.

[0.1.0] - 2026-06-10

Initial release.

Added

• Welcome screen on launch: app title with three actions — New Capture (creates a guide, opens the editor, and starts a capture session), Existing Workspace (guide library), and Settings. The brand button returns to the welcome screen from any view.
• Capture menu in the editor topbar: full screen / window / region / 3-second delay, paste image as step, import images, and capture session start/finish — capture no longer requires the global hotkey.
• Continuous capture sessions: steps are grabbed on every OS click where the platform supports it (xinput on X11, PowerShell on Windows), with interval auto-capture (3/5/10 s) as the always-works fallback when click detection or global hotkeys are unavailable (e.g. WSLg/Wayland). The REC bar shows the live count and trigger, with Shoot / Auto / Pause / Finish controls.
• Recording sessions tuck the window away once and control everything from a red tray icon (capture now / pause / open / finish) instead of hiding the window for every shot — the app stays reachable mid-session, opening it auto-pauses capture, and per-shot latency drops because the hide-repaint wait is gone. Automatic captures also stand down whenever the cursor is over a visible StepForge window.
• New captures and newly added steps are now selected in the editor.
• The app hides its own window during capture so screenshots show your work, not StepForge; hotkey captures restore the window without stealing focus.
• Blocks panel: add and edit informational text blocks, code blocks, and tables directly on a step.
• Focused-view zoom and pan sliders.
• Guide-level placeholders editor (More ▾ → Guide placeholders).
• Backups & snapshots dialog with one-click undoable restore.
• Export dialog: editable per-format options, save-as-template, and a template manager (rename / duplicate / delete / share as .sfglt); Preview now opens the generated file in the default viewer.
• Apply an annotation's style to all annotations of the same type in the step or the whole guide.
• Keyboard shortcuts: tool keys (S R O L A T G N B H M U C), PageUp/ PageDown step navigation, Ctrl+= / Ctrl+- / Ctrl+0 zoom, annotation copy/paste (Ctrl+C/V), Ctrl+Delete deletes the step, Shift+arrows fast-nudge — plus a shortcuts reference dialog.
• Library guide cards now show a description preview and are larger; a "Select" toggle enables multi-select with a bulk action bar (select all, favorite/unfavorite, move to folder, delete).
• Right-click "Move to folder" on a guide no longer lists its current folder, and "Move to no folder" only appears when the guide is currently in a folder.
• Opening a guide from the library (card click, search result, or "Open guide" from the right-click menu) now arms a paused capture session for it, so the red REC bar appears immediately with a "Start recording" option to resume capturing more steps.
• Editor step list: a "Select" toggle enables multi-select (checkboxes) with a "Select all" / "Delete" bar for removing several steps at once.
• The library's "Select" toggle and bulk action bar now also work in the Trash, with "Restore" and "Delete forever" actions for the selected items.

Fixed

• Renderer scripts no longer collide in the shared global scope (the app previously failed to boot with a blank window).
• Focused-view toggle persists correctly (step.focusedView.enabled).
• Annotation style edits no longer steal input focus on each keystroke.
• Step list stays in sync after saves and undo/redo.
• Escape deselects the active annotation instead of deleting it.
• Modal dialogs (confirm/prompt/etc.) no longer resolve as cancelled when an action button is clicked — openModal's teardown was firing the dialog's default-cancel callback before the button's own resolution could win. This was most visible as the step "Delete" button silently doing nothing.
• New Capture no longer hides the app window ~1.2s after starting; a session now starts paused and the window only tucks away once the user presses "Start recording" in the capture bar, so the app doesn't vanish out from under you.
• The capture status bar (REC count / Shoot / Auto / Pause / Finish) is now shown only in the editor view; it no longer appears over the library when a session is still running in the background.
• Click-triggered captures now grab the cursor position at the instant of the click (instead of from the cache's last refresh, up to ~75ms earlier) and use it for the click-marker placement, and the click-capture cache is armed as soon as recording starts so the very first click is captured instantly.
• Settings no longer fails to open if app-settings.json or placeholders.json was previously corrupted (e.g. left containing the literal text "undefined" by an old bug); a corrupted file is now treated as empty instead of crashing the dialog, and is overwritten with valid JSON the next time settings are saved.
• Click captures now line up with the click. While recording, a continuous screen-grab loop keeps the latest frame buffered, and each click becomes a step from a frame grabbed at (or moments before) the click instant, with the marker at the click-time cursor position — a frame older than 600ms is never used. Fast clicks are no longer dropped: a click that lands while a grab is in flight waits for that frame instead of being discarded, and the click debounce was lowered from 700ms to 150ms. Pausing stops the loop and discards the buffered frame, so resuming can never reuse a stale pre-pause screenshot.

Added (initial feature set)

• Guide library with folders, favorites, title + full-text search, and a quick-actions palette.
• Capture engine: full-screen / active-window / region capture, delay, pause/resume, global hotkeys, click markers, clipboard paste, image import.
• Three-pane editor: step tree with substeps, statuses, hidden/skipped steps, focused view, autosave, undo/redo.
• Annotation canvas: rect, oval, line, arrow, text, tooltip, numbered marker, blur, highlight, magnify, crop; normalized JSON scene graph.
• Rich text descriptions, informational text blocks, code blocks, tables, step links, and placeholders (global / guide / system scope).
• Single-file .sfgz share archives, linked guides with lock files, snapshot backups and restore.
• Exporters: JSON, Markdown, Simple HTML, Rich HTML, PDF, animated GIF, image bundle, DOCX, PPTX; per-format templates shareable as .sfglt.
• System/light/dark theming, keyboard shortcuts, settings dialog.
• Offline guarantee: zero network code paths.