Squeak 6.1 Release Notes

These release notes are optimized for viewing inside Squeak, as they contain a lot of interactive examples. On this page, interactive links open in SqueakJS, which is a browser-based Smalltalk VM with some limitations. For the best experience, download Squeak and read the release notes there. *** Squeak 6.1 "Vanessa" Release Notes *** As Squeak approaches its 30th anniversary, we are proud to announce the next version of the system, Squeak 6.1. Some highlights of this release are: A new tree browser, which enables navigation through classes and categories using refurbished hierarchical morphs, The return of Objectland (also known as the "Worlds of Squeak"), Several changes and fixes for the kernel infrastructure for simulating, unwinding, and scheduling processes and reshaping classes, Miscellaneous improvements and additions to the toolset and user interface for inspecting, debugging, profiling, and versioning code. Please find below a detailed listing of all the changes, which includes notes on Major Deprecations, Known Issues, and Compatibility Notes at the bottom. About these release notes. Phew, what a release! Since the last release 4 years ago, we have merged 1700+ patches with 9000+ method changes. Beyond documenting technical changes in detail, these notes highlight the bigger picture and the overall impact of major developments. Along the way, you will find plenty of links to code pointers and interactive examples. Thus, these release notes serve not only as a changelog but also as a hands-on guide to exploring new features and mechanisms in Squeak. Click here to view an outline of this document. In memory of Vanessa Freudenberg (1972-2025). /^(o.o)^\ /^(o.o)^\ /^(o.o)^\ /^(o.o)^\ /^(o.o)^\ Detailed Improvements in Language, Tools, and the Environment ~~~ GUI Frameworks ~~~ Morphic (up to Morphic-ct.2218/MorphicTests-ct.97) Major overhaul of tree morphs: Improves colors and mouse and keyboard shortcuts for navigating trees. Revises type-to-filter similar to lists, highlights search terms, and enables searching single columns via [TAB]. Adds a configurable filter mode to search within the current selection, all visible nodes, or the entire tree. Introduces a recursive "find"/"find again" feature available via [CMD] + [F]/[CMD] + [G]. Adds a flag for automatic expansion of trees. Improves support for drag'n'drop by automatically expanding nodes during dragging after one second of hovering. Miscellaneous stability and performance improvements for layouting, rendering, and event handling in trees. In the world, supports dropping of class references, system and method categories, and inspector and explorer fields to display them in a new window/widget. For mouse interactions, adds new preferences to customize the double-click time and drag thresholds. In the docking bar window menu, adds an item to collapse windows. Makes "find workspace" easier to use by expanding the selected window if collapsed. Reorders and decorates items in the help menu. Text editors: Underlines links (like this one!) during hovering and makes clicking and text selection through them more convenient. When enclosing/unenclosing a selection in single/double quotes, nested quotes are now automatically escaped/unescaped. Morphic API: Allows morphs to opt out of individual halo events and to specify a balloon text via a block instead of a selector. Menu construction: Adds new utilities for adding item groups and temporarily switching action targets during construction. #addList: now interprets backslashes in help tuples as line breaks. Automatically trims trailing lines between menu items. Revises the debug menus of several morphs by adding a time-profiler shortcut for buttons, providing access to the list and tree contents, and making existing "browse action" and "debug action" commands faster and more reliable. Honors the preference "Open Tools Attached to Mouse Cursor" in Morph>>openAsTool. Lots of UI tweaks and stability improvements: Improves theme support for progress bars, text morph menus, and dialog windows. Improves high-DPI support for buttons, scroll panes, sliders, menus, multi-selection lists, trees, drop-shadows, the scratch pad, the keyboard exerciser, and others. Improves multilingual support in different places. Fixes slips regarding the world display depth menu, clock configuration changes, search-bar print-its, project view morph styling, and transcript counting. Fixes an issue when profiling code where user events were swallowed. Several layouting fixes regarding proportional layouts, text morphs, scroll panes, and transformation morphs. Fixes rendering issues with transform morphs, polygons, multi-selection lists, and trees. Fixes scrolling in nested scroll panes. In text morphs, improves stability of text selection and tweaks indentation regarding empty and blank lines. Fixes "browse senders" of true, false, and nil, adds missing access to workspace bindings during accept-its, and improves robustness of editor history. Fixes bugs in construction of text containers and conversion of paragraphs to texts. In lists, fixes automatic selection before dragging an item. Fixes incorrect yellow-button menu invocation on buttons and lists. Fixes a bug during menu construction, which depended on uninitialized state. Fixes scaling of color forms. Fixes introspection of event handlers in morph meta-menus. Improves compatibility between old and new balloon morphs. Fixes a remarkable slip that (1) prevented collapsed windows from applying a new UI theme and (2) introduced a possibly significant memory leak of windows. Fixes an issue on macOS where calling the VM with additional command line arguments or plugging in external devices led to an incorrect "The VM is configured as a singleton application" warning. Improves stability and backward compatibility when loading morphs from files. Fixes cross-compatibility and concurrency issues with MVC. Improves reliability of halos. Improves performance of large tree widgets, transformation morphs, and animated GIFs. Miscellaneous clean-ups and documentation improvements for input events, editor attributes, and others. MorphicExtras (up to MorphicExtras-ct.360) Introduces Objectland, which is a reconstruction of the famous "Worlds of Squeak" from 2003 and offers a colorful collection of examples that demonstrate the multifarious capabilities of Squeak. Re-adds the classic Etoys race car example and adds several new examples. After 18 years of spotless, clean Squeak, reintroduces and updates the famous BlobMorph. For webcams, adds a mirror option and extends interface for double-buffering. Improves UI and stability of webcam morph. Improves instrument menu of score players. Fixes the "preserve trash" preference and improves the robustness of the piano keyboard. Improves high-DPI support for the objects tool, several of its tools such as event recorders, score players, recording controls, and piano keyboards, and several EToys-related morphs. Etoys (up to EToys-ct.532) Restores and revises a tutorial on painting and creating scripts in Etoys. Adds an undo button to FreeCell. Improves state indication in Tetris. Improves instrument menu of the midi input morph. Improves robustness of the players gallery, the spectrum analyzer, and the midi input morph. Fixes changing the heading of a player. Clean-ups and fixes for cards and stacks. Improves high-DPI support for Etoys icons, tile morphs and script editors, all games, the objects tool, the spectrum analyzer, file lists, watches, and calendars. Minor speedups for Kedama and players. Several clean-ups and refactorings that improve overall modularity and avoid unintended dependencies of other packages on Etoys. ST80 (up to ST80-mt.311) Adds a close item to the world menu. Improves high-DPI support for system views. Adds View>>imageForm for taking a screenshot of a view and displays it in inspectors. Adds editor shortcut [CMD] + [SHIFT] + [D] for "debug it" (already exists in Morphic). Miscellaneous fixes and stability improvements: Ensures confirmation dialog before closing the current MVC project. Prevents unexpected author-initials dialog when opening the ST80 world menu for the first time. Avoids an issue with stale deferred actions in an empty MVC world, which caused emergency debuggers to appear only after pressing a mouse button. In text editors, fixes pretty-printing and spawning if no compatible model is available. Gently handles nil selection provided by the model. Fixes an issue with recently introduced keyboard shortcuts. Repairs folder choosers. CommandLine (up to CommandLine-eem.27) Repairs the preference "Save snapshot of image on failure". Improves UIManager support for various file dialogs, font dialogs, confirmations, and requests. For interactive dialog requests, improves the error message before quitting. ~~~ Programming & Tools ~~~ Tools (up to Tools-mt.1366/ToolsTests-ct.137) Introduces a new tree browser, which displays system categories, classes, and message categories in hierarchical panes and integrates Monticello packages. There are also five new preferences for configuring its appearance. Reworks drag'n'drop for tree browsers and traditional browsers to support all meaningful combinations of panes for copying or moving classes, methods, and categories. Adds double-click support for hierarchy tree browsers to switch the central class. This is especially fun for multi-inheritance hierarchies with traits. In the class pane menu, adds new items for generating a new class or trait. In the message category menu, adds items to browse all [related] message categories in the system. In the annotation pane of class definitions, adds a shortcut for reading the full class comment. Simplifies extension point for custom browsers to register as hierarchy browsers. Improves multi-environment support for all kinds of browsers and message sets. In the Message Names tool, shows the definition, comment, and hierarchy for class results.