Updates
Yardsort tells you when a newer version exists, and — where it can — installs it for you.
How you find out
Shortly after starting, and once a day, Yardsort reads a small file from its GitHub releases to see whether a newer version exists. Returning to the window looks again if the last check is a day old, which is how a machine that spent the night asleep finds out. If a newer version exists, an update pill appears beside Settings at the foot of the projects panel; press it to see what the update is. Nothing is downloaded until you ask for it.
You can also look right now: Settings → General → Check now, which shows the version you are running too. To stop the automatic check, untick Check for updates automatically there.
That file is the only thing Yardsort itself ever fetches from the network, and it sends nothing about you or your work.
Installing
Press the update pill. The dialog shows the release notes and, if terminals are running, how many will be stopped by the restart. Install and restart downloads the update, verifies it, installs it and starts the new version.
- Your agents' conversations survive. The restart stops running terminals, but afterwards you pick the workspace and press Resume — see Terminals & sessions.
- Updates are verified. Each one is cryptographically signed by the project, and Yardsort refuses anything whose signature does not match the key it was built with.
- Later closes the dialog; the pill stays beside Settings until you update.
Which copies update themselves
| How you installed it | What happens |
|---|---|
macOS app (.dmg) | Updates itself. |
Windows installer (-setup.exe, .msi) | Updates itself; Windows may show the installer's progress briefly. |
| Linux AppImage | Updates itself, replacing the AppImage file in place. Updating from 0.20.1 or earlier: quit and start Yardsort again once afterwards (see below). |
Linux .deb / .rpm, or the AUR package | Told, not updated. Those files belong to your package manager, and an app must not change them behind its back. Update the way you installed — yay -Syu, or download the new .deb/.rpm from the release page the dialog links to. |
A build you made yourself (just dev, just build) | Never updates itself. |
The ys command comes with the app, so it is updated with it: through your package
manager, through the link into the macOS app, or — for an AppImage or on Windows — by Yardsort
replacing the copy it installed the next time it starts. See Installing ys.
If it goes wrong
- "Could not check for updates" — you are offline, or GitHub is unreachable. The automatic check stays silent about this; you only see it after pressing Check now.
- The install fails — nothing has been changed; your current version keeps working. Try again, or download the release by hand from the link in the dialog.
- On Linux, after updating from 0.20.1 or earlier, quit Yardsort and start it again once. Those versions started the new one with their own libraries still on its search path, so the freshly installed version ran partly out of the old copy — on a laptop with two GPUs, drawing on the wrong one — until it was started afresh. Later versions start the new one with the environment you launched the old one with, and there is nothing to do.
- On Linux, the AppImage cannot be replaced — it must be somewhere you can write to. If it
lives in a system folder, move it to your home directory. The quick start's
app menu setup puts it in
~/Applicationsunder a fixed name, which also keeps its menu entry working across updates.