As I type this, 0.28.1 release has just been built and packaged on Github. The main reason for the next-day bugfix release was to address a rather embarrassing stack overflow bug in the UI that appears to have been caused by some leftover temporary code. It impacted those with saved filters containing a timestamp criterion.
The time between releases stretched out to 5 months this time. As many of you may be aware, I’ve been struggling a bit for the past 12 months, and this has had a severe impact on my ability to work on stash. Things have been improving significantly over the past month or so (I can partly attribute this to limiting my exposure of world news and social media), and I’m beginning to feel more confident about committing more effort into stash. My hope is that the time between releases will begin to shrink from now on.
This leads into the next topic of discussion: plans for 0.29. My main focus for this release is the query functionality in the UI. This part of the UI has bothered me for a long time. The query pages and filtering code have been reworked multiple times, and this part of the codebase has been an absolute bear to work with. With more recent refactors, I believe the time has come to tackle it properly.
Since I started on stash, I have found the UX for browsing the stash library to be rather painful. It has improved over the years, but it’s never felt smooth.
(For a look at the most recent rework of the filter UI, see the UI filter builder PR from early 2023. Before this, you would have to click on the add filter button for every criterion you wanted to add 
)
My goal for this work is as follows:
- make simple filtering more streamlined with most common filter criteria available with a hideable sidebar
- repurpose the current filter dialog into a more formula-like filter builder
- improve the criteria subsystem to allow for multiple criteria of the same type.
This is a mockup of the filter builder I’m imagining:
As mentioned in my previous entry, I have been working on a sidebar for the Scenes page. The work has been bogged down due to the ItemList part of the code, and I’ve sunk a lot of hours with many aborted attempts at refactoring bits of code that are tied up in a lot of places. The Criterion/CriterionOption classes similarly need a bit of rework as well.
My hope is that 0.29 will see stash being a lot easier to filter and browse.