Changelog

All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file.

The format is based on Keep a Changelog, and this project adheres to Semantic Versioning.

[0.8.0] - 2023-03-25

we now use the XDG Base Directory Specification to store cache data in $XDG_CACHE_HOME
changed minimum supported Python version to 3.7, since 3.6 is EOL

we now use scdoc to generate man pages (it was previously written in Markdown and converted using pandoc)
use black to format source code

parsedatetime, the library that implemented NLP mode, was throwing a pytz warning about using zoneinfo instead of localize; we filter out this message for now; we will wait until parsedatetime fix this later, or else move to dateparse for parsing of dates

fix open files bug caused by urwid.raw_display: multiple calls to urwid.raw_display.Screen() were causing many files (pipes) to be left open; this was causing crashes on systems where the ulimit for the number of open file descriptors was set low (e.g. 256); we now only call this function once

the key for current time is now “n”, it was “N” previously, which is now used for NLP mode, see below for more info
the keys “P” (delete city from top of stack) and “Z” (set top of stack to base city) now allow you to select a city, see index mode below for more info
minor online help updates/clarifications

index mode: when hitting “P” (pop/delete) or “Z” (set base city), the cities are now labeled [0-9a-zA-Z], and you can apply the function to the selected city
wall clock mode: upon startup, or pressing “n” to get the current time will put zeitzono into “wall clock mode” where the current time is displayed in realtime; a “[C]” is displayed next to the base time to indicate this; entering any time manipulation command or going into NLP mode turns this off; hit “n” again to return to wall clock mode
NLP mode: pressing “N” in the main window will prompt for a human readable date/time which will be parsed and apply to the base time (e.g: “today”, “last Friday at 4am”, “july 4th, 1776 at 9am”, etc.)
literal search: adding a single quote to the beginning of any search pattern will not search alternative names (searching for “apple” brings up NYC because “The Big Apple” is an alternative name for NYC, “’apple” will suppress this)
man page: we now include a man page in the distribution tarball

backend database
- previously we were using a sqlite3 database backend to store data
- as it turns out this slows down searching considerably
- we switched to a denormalized flat file database and completely rewrote the ZeitzonoDB module
- this has brought search times down from 300ms on average to about 50ms, which is below the 100ms “instantaneous” threshhold
city search terms
- in addition to being much faster, the new database backend has removed restrictions on searching
- previously you could only search one or two terms and possibly a third against the country/admin codes
- now you can search for as many terms as you like of either type (to search for country/admin codes, prefix them with a colon)
- this allows for some interesting search capabilities: to search for all cities in the Candian province of British Columbia, search for “:canada :british”; to search for all cities in Dallas County in the US state of Texas: “:texas :dallas”
screen-size based search result limits: when a search is done that brings back many results, we would previously truncate to 25 results shown on screeen; we changed that max to 300 and display as much as the screen can hold up to that limit

feature to sort cities based on UTC offset
add –list–cache switch which allows cached cities (and local times) to be listed on the command line

update set_time_nlp() in ZeitzonoTime; this function is not yet used, but in a future version we will allow “natural language input” of datetimes that can be parsed easily

moved zeitzono binary to bin dir; this fixes build issues on Cygwin and MacOS X and allows zeitzono to be run on those systems