Quilltap 4.8.4

Quilltap 4.8.4 Release Notes

A housekeeping release, and an unusually modest one. Nothing in the software itself has changed — not a line of it. What changed is a test that had taken to reporting the weather rather than the facts, and the correction is offered here chiefly so that the version numbers continue to mean something.

The continuous-integration job went red twice running, both times on the same assertion: a check that the composer's emoji typeahead stays entirely dormant when the feature is switched off, and — the interesting half — does not go fetching the emoji dataset on the off chance. Locally it passed every single time. On the build machine it did not. That asymmetry is nearly always a clue, and on this occasion it was the whole story.

The typeahead reads its feature flag from the chat-settings query, and while that query is still in flight it assumes the feature is on: a deliberate and harmless optimism, which does mean that a colon typed in the very first instant still warms the dataset. The test had attempted to wait that instant out by sleeping for zero milliseconds, which sounds like a contradiction and is in truth a wager. The settings query announces itself on one sort of timer; the test harness drains its work on another; and which of the pair goes first is settled entirely by how busy the machine happens to be at that moment. An idle laptop won the wager every time it was offered. A loaded build runner, having other commitments, lost it.

The wager has been called off rather than improved upon. The harness now puts the settings in place before the editor is ever mounted, so the flag is in force on the first render and no timer is consulted at all. Both typeahead suites have been moved onto it. One of them — the Unicode picker's assurance that it never fetches anything from a mere space bar — proves to have been passing even in a world where the feature was switched off entirely, which is the species of test that offers comfort rather than information. It now states its assumptions aloud and means what it says.

Anyone running 4.8.3 and finding it agreeable may skip this release with a clear conscience. It is here for the tidiness of the record.

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What Changed

• internal (Foundry): Deflaked the two composer-typeahead settings-flag tests that had been failing intermittently in CI. CharTypeaheadPlugin falls back to enabled while the chat-settings query is in flight, and the tests tried to wait that window out with a zero-millisecond sleep — a race between TanStack Query's setTimeout(…, 0) notification and React's async act draining through a setImmediate-class task, whose ordering depends on machine load. renderPluginEditor now takes a chatSettings option that seeds the settings query cache before mount, so the flag is in effect on the first render and no timer is involved. The Unicode suite's "never fetched from the space bar" case now seeds the flag on, where it previously passed even with the feature disabled. No production code changed. (#37)

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Installation

Desktop App

Download from the quilltap-shell releases page:

macOS:

1. Download the .dmg file and open it
2. Drag Quilltap to your Applications folder
3. Launch Quilltap from Applications

Windows:

1. Download and run the .exe installer
2. If SmartScreen warns about an unknown publisher, click "More info" → "Run anyway"
3. Launch Quilltap from the Start Menu or desktop shortcut

Linux:

1. Download the .AppImage file, make it executable (chmod +x), and run it
2. Or install the .deb package: sudo dpkg -i quilltap_*.deb

Node.js (any platform)

npx quilltap

Or install globally:

npm install -g quilltap
quilltap

Open http://localhost:3000 in your browser. Requires Node.js 24+. First run downloads ~150–250 MB and caches locally.

Docker

docker pull foundry9/quilltap:4.8.4

Or use the startup scripts:

# Linux / macOS
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/foundry-9/quilltap-server/refs/heads/main/scripts/start-quilltap.sh | bash

# Windows (PowerShell)
irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/foundry-9/quilltap-server/refs/heads/main/scripts/start-quilltap.ps1 | iex

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A release about the difference between a test that passes and a test that is right. The one we had was passing on a laptop that happened to have nothing better to do.

It is no longer consulting the timing of the room to decide what it believes.

Installation

Desktop App (recommended)

The Quilltap desktop app (Electron) is available from
quilltap-shell 4.1.12.
Download the release for your platform (macOS, Windows, or Linux).

The quilltap-linux-arm64.tar.gz and quilltap-linux-amd64.tar.gz rootfs
tarballs attached to this release are used by the shell's Lima (macOS) and WSL2 (Windows) VM modes.

Node.js (any platform)

npm install -g quilltap
quilltap

On first run, the CLI downloads the application files (~150-250 MB)
and caches them locally. Subsequent launches start instantly.

Docker

docker pull foundry9/quilltap:4.8.4

See the README for setup instructions.