arboretum/packages/desktop/CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

Notable changes to the Arboretum desktop app (packages/desktop). The daemon and the VS Code extension keep their own changelogs in packages/server/CHANGELOG.md and packages/vscode/CHANGELOG.md.

0.2.5

Ships the daemon 3.7.1, and finishes the job started in 0.2.4: an update installed while the app runs now applies itself.

• The restart after an update no longer needs you. 0.2.4 detected that the binary had been replaced and offered a Restart now dialog. That still made the user do the work. The app now restarts on its own when it costs nothing, which is the common case, and only asks when there is something to lose: the dialog appears when live sessions would be interrupted (it says how many), or when the daemon cannot be reached to find out. A previous Later is final for that version, so nothing ever restarts behind your back.
• The update is now noticed while the window is open. Detection used to run only when the window was re-shown (tray, Dock, second launch), so an update installed during a working session could go unnoticed indefinitely. A cheap stat every 30 s covers it, by polling rather than fs.watch, because a package replacing the binary or a whole directory often produces no watch event at all.

0.2.4

Ships the daemon 3.7.0: terminals no longer go black, they can sit side by side in resizable columns, and the Changes view follows the terminal you are working in. This release also carries the start-up fixes below, which is what makes an update installed over a running app recover on its own.

• The app could refuse to start after an update, silently. Installing a new version replaces the files on disk but leaves the running app alone: its daemon kept port 7317, so the version you just installed hit EADDRINUSE, its daemon died before the handshake, and the shell logged the failure to a console nobody sees and quit. Clicking the launcher appeared to do nothing at all. Three fixes:
  • Every start-up failure now opens a dialog with Retry / Show log / Quit instead of vanishing, and the daemon's output is kept in <userData>/logs/daemon.log. A daemon that dies after start-up is reported too, with an offer to restart it, instead of leaving a dead window on screen.
  • A busy port is diagnosed, not just fatal (src/main/port-guard.ts). The daemon we spawn is recorded in <userData>/daemon/daemon.json, so an orphaned daemon (its Electron gone after a crash, a kill -9 or an upgrade) is reclaimed - SIGTERM then SIGKILL, waiting for the port to be effectively free - while a live sibling instance or third-party server is reported with the action that unblocks it, and never killed.
  • An update installed while the app runs is announced (src/main/upgrade-watch.ts). Until now the single-instance lock quietly routed you back to the old version's window; the shell now notices its own binary changed on disk and offers Restart now, which stops the daemon before relaunching.
• ARBORETUM_DESKTOP_PORT picks another port, for machines where a service or terminal daemon owns 7317 permanently.

0.2.3

Ships the daemon 3.6.0. Files open again (the editor area could stay blank), and uncommitted work gets a real surface in the centre of the IDE: one block per project, with staging, commit and push. The Electron shell itself is unchanged.

0.2.2

• Clipboard bridge. The renderer cannot use navigator.clipboard (Electron rejects it with NotAllowedError), so copying a terminal selection did nothing in the app even after 0.2.1. The preload now exposes arboretumDesktop.clipboard, relaying to Electron's clipboard module over IPC (read and write, writes capped at 1M chars). Ships the daemon 3.5.1, whose SPA uses that bridge first.

0.2.1

Ships the daemon 3.5.0, which fixes the black window seen after updating the app.

• Black window after an update, fixed. The window loaded an index.html kept from the previous version (revalidated as 304 because the tarball mtime is constant, so the etag did not change) whose /assets/<hash> files no longer existed. Nothing painted. If you hit it before updating, the app repairs itself now; clearing ~/.config/Arboretum/Partitions/arboretum/Cache was the manual fix.
• Copy & paste in session terminals. Ctrl+Shift+C / Ctrl+Shift+V (Cmd+C / Cmd+V on macOS); the Edit menu's Copy also works on a terminal selection now. Ctrl+C still interrupts.
• Browse the files of a group's worktrees straight from the Groups panel.

The Electron shell itself is unchanged.

0.2.0

Distribution release: the Linux launcher icon finally shows up, Windows becomes a first-class target, and the embedded runtime loses a third of its weight.

• Launcher icon fixed (Linux). Earlier packages installed a single 895×895 icon. That size is not declared in hicolor/index.theme, so by the freedesktop spec every desktop environment ignored it and the launcher fell back to a generic icon. The build now generates the standard set (16 → 512) plus a proper .ico for Windows, and forces executableName: arboretum (the scoped package name was producing @arboretumdesktop as binary, .desktop file and icon name).
• Package metadata. A non-empty short description in apt show (deb.synopsis was missing), Section: devel instead of default, a single-line Comment in the desktop entry (it was multi-line, hence invalid), plus GenericName and Keywords for search.
• Windows. Build scripts run on a Windows host again (npm/npx are .cmd shims that execFileSync cannot resolve; the Node extraction used unzip and bash -c cp/rm, none of which exist there). The daemon side gained what it needed to actually work: where.exe to find the Claude CLI, PowerShell as the launch shell, a .cmd askpass so HTTPS clone/push with a token works, and taskkill /T so stopping a terminal takes its whole process tree down. CI has a windows-latest job, enabled by the ENABLE_WINDOWS_BUILD repository variable, see docs/CI_RUNNERS.md.
• Auto-update repaired. Shipped binaries point at a desktop-latest release that never existed, so no client could ever see an update. The release workflow now recreates that floating release on every version and attaches the latest*.yml files and installers to it, with .blockmaps for differential updates and SHA256SUMS.
• Smaller download. The bundled Node runtime is pruned to the binary and its licence (no headers, no docs, no npm/corepack): ~205 MB → ~118 MB. Nothing at runtime used them, the daemon's dependencies being installed at build time.
• macOS integration. An application menu (without it ⌘C / ⌘V / ⌘A were not bound anywhere in the app), app.on('activate') so the Dock icon brings back a hidden window, and a monochrome template tray icon that follows the menu-bar theme.
• PATH enrichment on Windows. %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs and %APPDATA%\npm are added to the daemon's PATH, where the Claude CLI and global npm binaries live (this was POSIX-only).

0.1.3

Ships the 3.3.0 daemon ("Start the project": launch commands and multi-terminal boot).

0.1.2

Ships the 3.2.0 daemon (Emerald visual overhaul, light and dark themes).

0.1.1

• Fixed the missing window/launcher logo under Debian and Wayland by pinning the runtime app id (app.setName('Arboretum')) to the StartupWMClass written in the desktop entry.

0.1.0

First desktop release: an Electron shell that runs the daemon as a child process and opens its UI already authenticated, with a bundled Node runtime, a tray icon, launch-at-login and auto-update.