Skills Viewer v1.0.0

Release notes

The first release of Skills Viewer, which exists to make your skills visible.
They sit in directories you rarely open and Claude reads them without ever
showing them to you, so a set you built up over months is one you have never
actually seen. This finds every one of them on your machine, puts them in a
single list and renders the one you pick. Nothing is changed by looking:
editing is handed to an editor you choose.

Reading your skills

Skills Viewer looks in the usual place for your operating system and lists what
it finds there. A skill is a directory holding a SKILL.md; a loose SKILL.md
at the top of the tree counts as one too. Directories with no skill document in
them, along with hidden and cache directories, are passed over rather than
listed as empty entries.

The list sits on the left and the skill you pick is rendered on the right, with
the fields it declares and the names of any files that travel with it. Browse to
a different folder whenever you want; the choice is remembered.

Skills you wrote and skills that arrived with a plugin are listed separately,
under a heading each with an arrow that opens and closes the group. Enter or
Space works the arrow from the keyboard; a group you close stays closed when
the library is read again. Where everything came from one place there is
nothing to separate, so the headings do not appear at all.

The plugins are read from the tree beside your skills folder, at whatever depth
they sit; each row says which plugin it came with. That is how three skills
all called the same thing stay tellable apart.

The grouping is by where a skill was read from rather than by who wrote it,
because nothing on disk records authorship. One consequence is worth knowing: a
skill somebody else wrote that sits in your own skills folder is listed among
yours. Skills a session supplies without a file on disk are not there at all,
since there is nothing to find.

Long text is set to be read rather than merely displayed. Lines are held to a
readable length, so widening the window gives you margins instead of lines your
eye loses its place on. There is real space between paragraphs and around
headings. A licence, which arrives already wrapped, is left exactly as it came.

A passage too long to take in at once is given somewhere for the eye to rest:
it is shown in groups of whole sentences with a gap between them. Where a
passage is really an inventory, a run of entries with barely a full stop in it,
the gaps fall at the divisions its author already wrote instead.

Nothing is added, removed or reordered to do that. The break goes between two
sentences that were already next to each other, exactly as a line break goes
between two words that were already next to each other. Your files are never touched,
nor even opened for writing.

A field long enough to be a document in its own right is not left sitting above
the skill. Anything past a few lines is lifted out of the heading and given its
own section after the text, so the skill you opened is the first thing you meet
rather than the last.

A skill whose document cannot be read is still listed, with the reason shown in
place of the text. You neither caused that nor can fix it from here, so it is
reported rather than hidden or raised as a dialog.

The library is re-read whenever the window is activated, so leaving to edit a
skill and coming back shows the current text. There is no watcher and no polling.

Light and dark

A toggle sits beside the help button and wears the appearance it would move to,
so the sun shows while you are in the dark. The choice is remembered between
runs; each appearance has its own ring and warning colours rather than sharing
one pair that only reads well against a single background. The setup program
carries the same toggle and the same two marks.

Reading without a mouse

The reading pane reads itself down the page slowly, holds at the end, rewinds
and repeats. Touch the scrollbar, the wheel or the keys and it hands control
straight back, then picks up from wherever you left it rather than starting
again. The same applies in the About and licence dialogs.

Every control is reachable from the keyboard through one explicit ring: Tab and
Right step forward, Shift+Tab and Left step back; both wrap. The skill list
is a single stop whose rows are walked with Up and Down. A control that cannot
do anything is skipped rather than sitting in the ring as a dead stop.

Home and End reach the top and the foot of whatever you are reading and so do
Ctrl+Home and Ctrl+End, in the reading pane and in both dialogs alike. The jump
holds where it lands rather than being carried straight back down. Clicking the
text focuses it, so those keys work on the thing you are actually looking at.

A green outline marks a control you have reached, never a region of text. The
skill list and the reading pane both leave it to what is inside them: the row
you are on and the words you are reading. Clicking a skill to read it used to
draw a rectangle round the whole page, which said nothing you could act on.

Your place in a skill is kept. The library is re-read whenever the window comes
forward; that no longer sends the page back to the top. A skill you edited
on disk is redrawn, one you did not is left exactly where you were.

Editing

On Windows an editor is already chosen for you: Notepad++ where you have it,
otherwise the Notepad every machine ships with. Pick a different one and Skills
Viewer remembers that instead. The view in editor button
stays disabled until there is genuinely something to do: a skill selected, an
editor chosen and that editor still where you left it. Skills Viewer is not a
text editor and never writes to a skill itself.

Text you can actually read

The top tray now carries a text size control, to the right of the view in
editor button behind a hairline that keeps the editor controls together. It
steps through three sizes: medium, large, then extra large, wrapping back to
medium so the button always does something. Like the light and dark toggle
beside it, it wears the size it would move to rather than the one you are in,
so the picture answers what happens if you press it.

The size reaches everything, the trays, the tree and the skill you are reading,
because it lives in the one stylesheet the whole application is painted from.
It is remembered between runs.

Your place is kept

Switching between light and dark no longer throws you back to the top of a
skill you were halfway down; nor does changing the text size. The page is
genuinely redrawn either way, since a document keeps the colours and the size
it was drawn under; you are put back on the words you were reading.

The place is the words rather than the pixel, which is what makes it survive a
change of size: at a larger size the lines break elsewhere, so the same point
down the page would be different text.

Keeping up to date

The help button in the top tray now drops a short menu: About Skills Viewer,
then Check for Updates. The check is also made quietly a few seconds after the
window opens and once a day after that. It speaks only when there is a newer
release to tell you about; a check that finds nothing passes without a word, as
does one that cannot reach GitHub at all. Ask for one from the menu and it answers
either way, so you are never left wondering whether it ran.

When there is something newer, you are offered three things: the file for the
machine you are on, the choice to skip that release for good, then Later. Download hands the
address to your browser; nothing is fetched by Skills Viewer itself. Skip
remembers that one release only, so the next one still reaches you.

What it does not do

It makes one network request of its own and no other: it asks GitHub whether a
newer release has been published, a few seconds after opening, once a day while
it stays open and whenever you ask from the Help menu. Nothing about you goes
with it. Everything else it hands to your desktop as an address for your browser
to fetch: the donate button, a link you click inside a skill you are reading,
then the Download button on an update prompt.

Skills Viewer is free and stays free: no paid tier, no licence key and no
feature held back behind a donation.

It is designed for Claude AI by Anthropic and for no other AI. It is not
affiliated with Anthropic and is not endorsed by them.

Colour you can actually read

Every colour pairing that carries text is measured against the readability
ratio rather than judged by eye, in the application and in the setup program
alike; a test holds each of them there.

Three pairings in the application were under the bar and every one looked
deliberate: the row you have selected, every heading inside a skill and a link
in the light theme. Dark and light now name their own selection fill, because
one accent cannot do both jobs: a heading wants the lighter violet while white
text on a selected row wants the darker.

The setup program had two, the go-ahead button and the one that removes things.
The go-ahead now reads in blue on the same purple it always had.

Installing

Windows gets a setup program that installs into your own account, so Windows
never asks for an administrator; it removes cleanly from the Apps list. Starting
the application from the end of setup brings it to the front rather than leaving
it behind whatever else was open. Linux and macOS builds are written and ship as
a flatpak and a signed disk image.