End of the 2024 was busy over at Penpot Desktop. Welcome to the first update in the 2025.
Development Upgrades
With the Q1 planned out, I decided to dedicate the remaining free time slots from the end of the last year to behind the scenes improvements and nice-to-have features.
Penpot Desktop received:
- Clean up of the dependencies. - Removed packages that were replaceable with native features, not worth the risk associated with a dependency, or unused.
- Migration to ES modules. - It’s related to development environment, but modular, clearly-structured code helps with bringing you new features - a win for everyone.
- Code formatting and linting. - Another set of tools that help in development.
- The context menu for quick tab management. - It gives you an option to reload or duplicate a tab, or batch close [other, right, left] tabs in relation to the targeted one. See preview.
- The light/dark mode support. - The Theme setting lets you choose the preferred interface’s colour scheme. It offers options to hard set a theme (light or dark), follow an operating system, or follow an active Penpot project. See preview.
The Start
In January I immediately moved to work on the Road to 1.0. The most recent release added a side bar to hold the settings available so far - see preview. However, in the future, it will provide space for more controls of dynamic aspects of the app. Which means that support for multiple instances is really close.
There are also some surprise features on the radar. For example, file-based configuration, which will let you move Penpot Desktop’s configuration between devices, share it with a team, or include in a back-up.
Follow The Journey
I will be posting more about ongoing development of Penpot Desktop. If you would like to see short and more frequent updates, I’m trying out BlueSky and Mastodon.
Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed the update. Stay tuned for the next one.
