Features

Everything it does.

All of it in service of one thing: showing you a set of documents you own but have never seen together.

The short version is here. What it reads and how the tree and the page work each have a page of their own with the whole of it.

Reading it your way

  • Light and dark, switched from the tray and remembered between runs.
  • Three text sizes, stepped by one button that always shows the size it would move to.
  • Changing either keeps your place: you stay on the words you were reading rather than being thrown to the top.
  • Full keyboard navigation, as one explicit ring that wraps at both ends.

Editing, elsewhere

  • Open the selected document in the editor you choose; on Windows one is already picked for you.
  • The control stays disabled until there is genuinely something to do: a document selected, an editor chosen and that editor still where you left it.
  • Come back to the window and the library is re-read, so an edit made outside shows up without a refresh button.
  • It never writes to a document you point it at. A structural test holds the source to that rather than leaving it to discipline: each part of the program is granted the ways of writing it needs by name and any other it can see fails the build. The only files it writes are its own: its settings and the release notes you import.

Finding out how it works

  • A guide sits first on the Help menu. It names every picture in the two trays with the icon itself rather than with a description of it, so a control you have just met can be identified rather than guessed at.
  • Then it says the one thing no screen can state while it is happening: what each of the five kinds of document becomes on the way to the pane.
  • Everything a control can say for itself is left to the control, so every button carries its own tooltip and the guide stays short enough to finish.
  • Those tooltips show whenever you hover over the window, even while you are working in another program and PlainSight is not the active one.

Staying current

  • Asks GitHub whether a newer release exists, a few seconds after opening and once a day after that.
  • It speaks only when there is something to download. Ask from the Help menu and it answers either way.
  • Skip a release and it is never mentioned again; the next one still reaches you.
  • That and an import you asked for are the only requests it makes; nothing about you goes with either.

Bringing in a project's release notes

  • The third button in the top tray imports a GitHub repository's published release notes as a folder of Markdown. Copy the address from your browser, press the button, paste and press Enter: the address box opens with its default already selected, so the paste replaces it.
  • The folder opens on the newest release, the rest listed newest first by publication date whatever their tags are called.
  • Each release is one file: a short header with its title, tag, release day and a link back to GitHub, a clear mark on a pre-release, then GitHub's notes unchanged. A release published with no notes still gets its page; drafts are left out.
  • The address can be the full one, github.com/owner/repository, the short owner/repository or a page inside the repository such as its releases. Anything that names no repository is refused with the reason before GitHub is asked anything.
  • Import the same repository again and its folder catches up: new releases are added and changed ones rewritten, while a file you edited since is kept as you left it and named so you know. A release removed from GitHub keeps its notes.
  • A first import appears whole or not at all; a refresh that fails leaves every file readable. When something goes wrong it says what, down to the time GitHub's hourly allowance for requests without an account comes back.
  • No GitHub account is needed. The folders live beside PlainSight's settings, one per repository beneath its owner.
In detail

A page for each part.

What it reads

Markdown, plain text, HTML, Word and PDF beneath the folder you point it at; a single document opens from the second button.

The page covers what each kind becomes on the way to the pane, why opening a folder does not read them and why nothing a document carries is run or fetched.

Explore what it reads

The tree and the page

How the tree mirrors your folders: arrows, counts, what is hidden by default and the one button that shows it all again.

Then how the document you pick is read: its fields laid out plainly, a readable line length, code and diagrams drawn whole, the page reading itself down and the count at the foot of the window.

Explore the tree and the page

Download Why it exists