🎁 My Great Big Software Wishlist

Having recently switched over a fair portion of my tech setup to more ethical and/or open source solutions, which often tend to care more about the wishes of the communities that surround them than their commericial counterparts, I have amassed a great big wishlist of things I hope to see in the products I have been using.

Espanso

I am super excited for the espanso 2.0 release, which is a major refactor of the already excellent espanso software, which has become a real life-saver for writing LaTeX and in general switching over to using more unicode symbols.

I have transitioned to using a US keyboard layout almost exclusively, as I find my native Danish layout to be fairly cramped, especially when writing code or math. As a result, I would need to change back to the Danish keyboard layout when needing to write æ, ø, å. Instead, I can just use espanso!

Update

Espanso v2 has been released and it is predictably amazing. Federico Terzi is an amazingly friendly developer and takes great care of the community he has built.

Update 2

It seems that Espanso development has significantly slowed, which is a great shame. Hopefully development will pick back up again and some of the wishes listed below can become reality.

Wishlist:

• 2.0.0 release (issue)
• More customizable packages
• Native jsonnet support? (issue)
• Scripting (issue)
• Improved Emoji rendering, ideally with OpenMoji (issue)
• Additional search terms for matches (issue)

Anki

Anki is a super neat piece of software for spaced repetition.

The internals have been getting an overhaul for a while, which is great, but what I am really hoping for is a few UX improvements. Currently the interface feels a bit dated, and I am really not a fan of the HTML formatting of the cards, which will sometimes include hidden tags that break MathJax.

Wishlist:

• Markdown cards
• More first-class MathJax support and configurability
• Integration of most popular addons into core of Anki
• Native REST API

MathJax

MathJax development is slowly progressing - the contour integral issue, for example, is from 2013. I much prefer the extensibility and style to KaTeX, and it seems like release 3.2 of MathJax will finally get it up to par with the 2.7 release (Python deja vu…)

Wishlist:

• 3.2 Release
• 4.0 Release
• 2.x Deprecation
• 3.x Deprecation
• Newline support - (issue)
• Contour integral support - (issue)
• Better Unicode support - (issue)
• Support for the siunitx package (issue)
• Support for the xparse package (issue)
• Support for the xypic package (external)
• Support for the img package (external)

Obsidian

Obsidian is great for writing notes and is super customizable. It is still early days for Obsidian, which hasn’t yet reached version 1.0.0.

Wishlist:

• Documented API
• Improvements to Graph View
• WYSIWYG (with good MathJax support)
• Natively customizable MathJax
• Open source/partial open source (ideally, though as long as devs keep staying awesome, I am happy)
• LivePreview Tables - (issue)
• Rich Notion-like / Rich tables
  • Native sortable tables like the Sortable plugin
• Better formatting toggles like ObsidianTweaks
• Better native templating system
  • Should be similar to Templater.
• Native dataviews like the Dataview plugin
• Metadata improvements
• Native folder notes similar to AidenLx’s plugin
• Calendar Core Plugin similar to Liam Cain’s plugin
• Native Hot Reload support like the Hot Reload plugin
• Native Kanban
• Improve native periodic notes to match functionality of Liam Cain’s plugin
• Reimplement Quick Switcher and Command Palette as a single interface like VSCode, adding relevant extra functionality. Similar to QuickSwitcher++
• Native functionality mimicking the Reveal Active File plugin
• Better word count like the Better Word Count plugin
• SCSS support in snippets (and themes?)
• Nicer live-preview of callouts with actual live rendering and drop-down for callout types
• Reopen last closed tab(s) (default keybinding: CTRL+SHIFT+T)
• Native plugin and theme pre-release system
  • Should be similar to Obsidian43-BRAT
  • Implement named transclusion blocks – (issue)

Google Calendar

Currently I am using Google Calendar to at least attempt at managing my life, not always with the greatest of success, but making the effort nonetheless.

It really feels like very little development has gone into improving the UX of Google Calendar in the past 5 years, with new features added only very rarely.

Google is famously slow at implementing features that users desperately desire, so I expect much of this won’t be on the cards for the foreseeable future.

Wishlist:

• Dark mode — it is 2022 and there really is no excuse for this
• Duplicate events using CTRL-C, CTRL-V
• Prebuilt blocks that can be dragged in using a widget
• Ability to edit basic things like title or duration in left-click modal

Proton Calendar

I am really hoping to switch away from Google Calendar soon, but until ProtonCalendar supports subscribing to .ical calendars, I don’t think I’ll be able to 😞.

Wishlist:

• Calendar subscription (Limited to 5)
• Increase Calendar subscription limit to 25
• Support colored events - (issue)
• Implement a right-click menu
• Ability to change title and time directly in left-click modal

Cron Calendar

Some of my complaints about Google Calendar have been fixed by the Cron Calendar software, but this comes with its own trade-offs.

Wishlist:

• More colours! 7 simply is not enough, especially not compared to the 11 of Google Calendar
  • Ideally these would be customizable and namable
• Custom themes
  • I don’t particularly like the default dark mode theme and their choice of fonts. It would be really cool to be able to apply different themes to the Calendar, ideally customizable ones
• Undo
  • It is just completely weird and unintuitive to use an application that does not support the ubituitous CTRL+z undo shortcut
• Participants without e-mails
  • I would like to add participants to the participant box without notifying them. Allow arbitrary strings to be put in this field.
• Markdown descriptions
  • The description field should support Markdown formats (including math?)
• Prebuilt blocks that can be dragged in using a widget

Proton Mail

Wishlist:

• Full release of ProtonMail 4.0
• Full release of ProtonMail 5.0
• Maintain and update the UserVoice (Also applied to ProtonCalendar)

Concepts.app

Wishlist:

• Full subscription sync between Windows and Android
• Feature parity between Android, Windows, and iOS.
• Easily copy selection to clipboard as PNG image on Android

Cryptomator

Link: Cryptomator

Wishlist:

• Document provider on Android (issue)
• PIN protection on Android (issue)

Hugo

Wishlist:

• Native support for .ipynb Jupyter Notebooks (issue)

Wowchemy

Link: Wowchemy

Wishlist:

• Redesign using Tailwind CSS - (issue)
• Prettier checkboxes - (PR)
• Refactoring of colours and styling - (issue)
• Better Jupyter Notebook support

gWSL

Wishlist:

• Non-insiders release of gWSL

MountainDuck

I use MountainDuck for part of my data to store encrypted Cryptomator vaults on Google Drive, but I find that it isn’t super stable. This is a bit frustrating, as the software is not free.

Wishlist:

• Fix of memory leaks
• More stable user experience
• Faster syncs

OpenMoji

It would be fantastic to be able to use colored OpenMoji on this website. It will likely be a while before sufficient tooling and browser support will enable that, unfortunately.

Wishlist:

• Unicode 14.0
• Unicode 15.0 - (issue)
• Usable in modern browsers - (PR)

CSS Font Module 4 Specification

I passionately despise the monochrome Unicode 1.1 emojis that seem to crop up everywhere. GitLab made an excellent blog post about their struggles with it, yet somehow in 2022 a good solution has yet to be specified and implemented.

There is a very promising property, font-variation-emoji, that is part of the CSS Font Module 4 Specification draft, but even though the solution was proposed in 2017, it still has not made its way into browsers. Argh!

Wishlist:

• Finalisation of CSS Font Module 4 Specification - (issue)
• Implementation of CSS Font Module 4 Specification in major browsers

Aysu Split Keyboard

I recently took a plunge into the literature surrounding custom and exotic keyboards, and now I desperately want to get my hands on an Aysu keyboard from SplitKB and begin practicing the Colemak DH keyboard layout.

Ideally I wouldn’t mind spinning up my own custom keyboard hardware at some point, but that won’t be in the near future.

Wishlist:

• Elora released
• Aysu released

Windows

I am sure you’ll be familiar with love-hate relationships – my relationship with Microsoft’s Windows OS is somewhat like that, except love is perhaps better expressed as skeptical agreement. It is very much a working relationship, but not much more than that.

While we all patiently wait for the famed Year of the Linux Desktop, I figure it might be best to add a few Windows items to my wishlist in the meantime.

Windows keyboard support is absolutely horrific and custom layouts require using an ancient piece of broken-on-arrival software called MSKLC (MicroSoft Keyboard Layout Creator). Additionally Windows has yet to adopt the fairly popular Colemak keyboard layout along with it’s variants. Somehow it’s commitment to user accessibility does not extend into the realm of typing ergonomics.

Wishlist:

• Colemak keyboard layouts in Windows
  • Not just “Colemak vanilla”, also Colemak-CAW (Colemak wide mod DH) and Colemak DH.
• A proper keyboard layout editor and manager
• Fix keyboard layout switcher
  • Remove ‘parasitic’ keyboard layouts
  • Allow user to specify exactly the layouts to put in the switcher. Don’t guesstimate based on languages of people nearby, region, languages, et cetera!
• Stop pushing Edge - you made a Chromium browser, we get it!