Foxl v0.4.12: The Quiet Fixes

Foxl v0.4.12 is a batch of fixes for small things that were quietly wrong - a stray strikethrough in the middle of a sentence, a background reply you couldn't tell was still running, a keyboard that stuttered, and phone notifications that answered to your desktop's settings instead of your phone's. None of these were dramatic on their own. Together they were the difference between the app feeling careful and feeling almost-right.

A single tilde stops striking through your text

Chat and Notes render Markdown, and Markdown turns text between tildes into strikethrough. The catch: the renderer was treating a single tilde as a strikethrough marker. So a normal sentence using tildes as a range - "rank 0~7 on one server, rank 8~15 on the next" - had everything between the two tildes struck through, and the sentence became unreadable for no reason the writer could see.

Strikethrough now requires the standard double tilde (~~like this~~). A lone ~ is left exactly as typed. The fix went to every place Foxl renders Markdown - the chat, the Foxl Code chat, and all three Notes surfaces - so ranges, approximate values, and file globs read as plain text everywhere.

You can see which chats are still answering

Replies in Foxl keep running when you switch to another conversation - that has always been true, the work does not stop just because you looked away. What was missing was any sign of it. Now every conversation with a reply in progress shows a small spinner next to its name in the sidebar, whether that chat is open in front of you or working in the background. On desktop the spinner steps aside for the delete button when you hover the row - same spot, no layout jump - and on mobile it simply stays put.

The keyboard docks smoothly on mobile

When you tap the composer on a phone, the app shrinks to sit the input neatly on top of the rising keyboard. It used to stutter, because the app was animating its own height - a layout property, which forces the browser to re-lay-out the entire screen on every one of the 250 milliseconds of the animation. No amount of tuning makes that smooth. The composer now rides the keyboard on a transform the graphics compositor handles directly, and the real layout change happens exactly once, at the instant the keyboard settles. This is the standard technique for keyboard docking in embedded web views; Foxl now uses it.

Your phone has its own notification settings

Notification settings on mobile used to be a window into your desktop's settings, which is the wrong thing entirely - your desktop's local notifications never leave that machine, and your phone couldn't turn them on or off in any way that mattered. Mobile now has its own Notifications screen: whether iOS has allowed notifications for Foxl (with a one-tap request, or a pointer into system Settings if you previously declined), and per-kind toggles for chat-reply and scheduled-task pushes. Those toggles live on the relay - the thing that actually sends the push - so turning one off takes effect immediately for every device signed into your account. Desktop notification settings are unchanged and stay where they were.

And one thing you'll never see

Under the hood we also closed a developer-only bug in the relay's test harness that could exhaust the machine's network sockets during a long test run. It never affected the shipped app, but it was disruptive to work on Foxl, and now it can't recur - the tests refuse to spin up their own server unless a developer explicitly starts one. We mention it only because "small things quietly wrong" is the theme of this release, and this was one of them.

Upgrading

The web app updates automatically. The desktop app updates itself, or you can grab the latest build from the Foxl homepage. The full list of changes is always in the changelog.