After 8 months of work, I am proud to announce the new v3 release 🎉. The entire frontend and api backend is rewritten from scratch, fixing the most annoying bugs with really large channels. The new version is fast.
Not entirely bug free, but much better than v2, so let's call it stable :). As always, please report any bugs you find (or give feedback) on the issue tracker or Tyrrr's Discord Server -> #dce-frontend channel.
New features
- virtual scroll replaced with cursor based pagination to speed up the loading of large channels (and to make it possible to load channels with more than 210 000 messages)
- old messages are not unloaded yet - if you scroll too far, click on the timestamp on any message to reload the channel view
- it looks even more like the discord desktop client (or it used to, before the discord changed its design again)
- direct messages on homepage
- autocomplete without using filters
- threads split view
- new (local) search history
- new grouped image galleries
- new music player
- channel pin button
- rewritten docs to make it (hopefully) easier to understand for both users and developers
- simplified Windows build - github actions now just calls the batch script
src\BUILD_RELEASE.bat, so you can build your own binaries without a complicated setup- python now uses venv instead of global packages on Windows
- project restructured to make dev and build folders more similar - this will allows us to create configuration files to configure the app without the need to recompile it. The configuration script was temporarily removed and will be replaced with configuration file.
- removed http-server dependency, simplifying the architecture. v3 now just won't render assets if path to them exceeds 260 characters (windows only). The fix is easy - move DCEF closer to the root of the drive. Related nginx issue. The registry tweak is still required.
- removed support for RPI 4B (RPI 4B doesn't support AVX, but RPI 5 does)
- removed themes (for now), only gray theme is available
- search results direction reversed
- force-kill all processes on exit on Windows (v2 sometimes left some processes running)
- frontend now uses svelte5 rc instead of svelte4
- and many more small changes...
Migration guide
Windows - delete everything except exports folder, then copy everything (except exports folder) from the release zip to the DCEF folder. If some assets are not loading, move DCEF closer to the root of the drive.
Linux (docker) - just pull the new image and restart it with the same command as before.