The state of Onyx

It’s been about two weeks after the new WhatsApp update broke Onyx. Thankfully, the update wasn’t as bad as I initially expected. Still, it took hours of work to fix every little thing, and I’m not sure if we got them all, but it’s looking damn good.

To all the people that reported issues via e-mail, GitHub, and even USo, and waited patiently – thank you! To everyone on USo – I’m sorry, but I cannot log into the forum in order to reply to your feedback. It’s weird and it sucks, but I don’t know what to do about it.

That said, here is the real reason why I wanted to write this post. Things are going to change. The 2.0 version will hopefully be more maintainable and easier to work with. Fairly soon I will add a link for those that’d like to test the alpha version. It’ll be available in this Pull Request^🔗.

I’m still in the process of figuring everything out and it’s quite a lot of fun. Writing good old CSS in this particular situation became too much of a hassle. Also, the upcoming version will be written in a smarter way that will hopefully be more resistant to updates. It might end up badly, who knows, but right now it’s the best shot we have.

The transition should be seamless for people that have Onyx installed from userstyles.org^🔗 meanwhile the ones that installed Onyx from GitHub might have to re-install it manually in the worst case, but I’ll inform everyone when the time comes. Also, the USo version will lack some features for sure, just like it does right now, but the core features will remain.

Finally, a little over 2 years ago I published Onyx and it’s been such a crazy ride ever since. Seeing all the other themes implementing features similar to the ones found in Onyx is inspiring, and even more so after seeing it being used as a part of 3rd party extensions and apps. Getting contributions, suggestions, bug reports, etc. is really motivating. Cheers, everyone, and stay awesome!