Release notes
It reads documents now, not skills
The application was Skills Viewer and read a folder of Claude skills. It has been
rebranded PlainSight and now reads a folder of documents; however, you can
view individual files as well; e.g. txt, pdf, docx or md.
The Claude skills folder is still where the chooser opens, because it is where
this began and is still what most people point it at; it is an offer rather than a limit.
Everything followed from that. The package, the settings directory, the
uninstall entry, the flatpak identifier and the artwork were all renamed. The
vocabulary changed with it: a skill is a document, a catalogue is a library.
Five kinds of file
Markdown and plain text were the two it read. It now reads five:
- Markdown and plain text, as before.
- HTML, shown as the page it already is. Both
.htmland.htm. - Word, turned into HTML as it is read, so headings, lists, tables and
emphasis arrive looking like everything else here. - PDF, read back into the document its page was laid out to be, with its
pages marked.
A PDF holds no headings, no paragraphs and no lists; it holds glyphs, each with
a place, a size and a face. Ask it for the words alone and a CV arrives as a
wall of monospace with every heading, every bold phrase and every bullet gone.
So the sizes and the faces are read the way your eye reads them: a line set
larger than the body is a heading, a line in bold is emphasised, a line opening
with a bullet is an item; lines of body text running on are one paragraph.
PDF is still worth being plain about. That is a reading of the page rather than
anything the file says, because the file does not say: no fonts, no rules and
no pictures come across. A form, a payslip or an invoice says much of what it
says by where it puts things, so reading one back as prose turns its grid into
reading order. That is the right way round for documents people read; the grid
is what a PDF viewer is for.
Where a PDF is a scan, a picture of a page rather than the words on it, no text
can be taken at all and it says so instead of showing you an empty page. One
that is password protected says that instead, on the row in the tree before
you open it.
A guide, first on the Help menu
It names every picture in the two trays, each entry carrying the real icon the
tray draws rather than a description of it, so a control you have just met can
be identified rather than guessed at. Then it says the one thing no screen can
state while it is happening: what each kind of document becomes on the way to
the reading pane.
Anything a control says for itself is left to the control, since every button
already carries a tooltip. A help screen nobody finishes explains nothing.
It runs nothing and fetches nothing
Two things worth knowing now that it opens files other people send you.
Scripts inside a document are dropped rather than run, so a document cannot act
on your machine. Anything needing a script runtime is inert.
Nothing is fetched on a document's behalf. A picture stored beside the document
is shown; one held at a web address is not fetched and not shown, because the
reading surface has no way to reach the network at all. The application still
makes exactly one request of its own: the update check, nothing else.
It opens a folder without reading it
A folder used to be listed by reading every file in it. Now a listing opens each
file and reads what it says about itself, while the text is fetched for the one
document you pick.
That was invisible while everything was Markdown. It is not invisible with PDFs:
listing forty of twelve pages each takes 7ms where reading them all takes
515ms; the folder is re-read every time the window comes back to the front.
Smaller things
- Nothing is read until you choose a folder. There is no default root and no
first-run scan, so a fresh install has looked at nothing on the machine. - Nothing is selected until you select it. The pane opens empty and says so
rather than choosing a document for you. - The left pane is the tree your folders actually are, to whatever depth
they go, with a count on each folder and one arrow per folder rather than two. - Open a single document from a new button beside the folder one. It reads
that one file and lists no directory around it, so whatever sits beside it on
disk stays unread. It stays open, too: the folder is read again every time the
window comes forward, while closing the chooser is what brings it forward, so
the file used to be replaced by the chosen folder in the same moment it opened.
The file itself is what gets re-read now, so it is as current as a folder is. - Pointing at a folder that is not a Claude skills folder no longer walks a
sibling directory beside it. Exactly one directory is read: the one you chose. - The Linux build works again. Reading Word documents brought in lxml,
which publishes no wheel for the one platform tag the flatpak script asked
for, so fetching the wheels failed before the build started. Three tags are
asked for now. The interface licence was never copied into the bundle either,
so that button showed the combined licence text instead. - The macOS image ships the licence files, which it never did; the Windows
build always has. Both take them from the same list now.