Darshan Upadhyay
The merge count is approaching 2,500, performance work is in full swing, the ruler is getting a redesign, and the forum is buzzing with new faces. Here’s what happened this week.
The Numbers
This week: 349 commits merged by 42 contributors, with 226 open changes in review. All-time since April 2nd: 2,499 commits merged from 63 contributors.
GitHub PR migration is progressing steadily — down to 54 open PRs on the old main branch, 6 fewer than last week.
3 new contributors this week: Ardev Prisec, cookiespter, and xzlhxc.
Top Reviewers
For the first time, the TC meeting tracked the top 10 reviewers — because merging code matters just as much as writing it:
Caolán McNamara (70), Szymon Kłos (47), Miklos Vajna (42), Noel Grandin (32), Mike Kaganski (14), Stephan Bergmann (11), Tor Lillqvist (11), Mohit Marathe (8), Michael Stahl (7), Tomaž Vajngerl (7).
Reviewing is the unglamorous engine that keeps an open source project moving. Thank you.
Performance: Hunting Regressions
Performance got serious attention this week:
Typing and Comment Anchors: Szymon is tackling the performance regression — slowness when typing near comment anchors. This was flagged during testing calls and is actively being worked on.
Impress SlideTransitionPane: Caolán found that the SlideTransitionPane was refreshing on every shape change — unnecessary work that slowed things down. The fix stops those redundant refreshes.
CI Build Speed Boost: Caolán discovered an opportunity to enable ccache properly in CI builds — a quick tweak that should noticeably speed up build times going forward.
OUString UTF-8 Investigation: Noel has proposed changing OUString’s underlying storage from UTF-16 to UTF-8. Stephan is measuring the cost and benefit, using perf probe on kernel do_wp_page to check dirty pages. This is deep, foundational work that could improve performance across the entire engine.
Ruler Redesign: A Real Plan
The UX/UI Design Meeting turned the ruler discussion into a concrete development plan. Ivana’s design proposal was accepted, and the team mapped out the implementation:
- Change mouse cursors on hover to make interactive zones obvious
- Replace indicator SVG icons with Ivana’s new designs
- Add hover states so icons change on interaction
- Tooltips that update live while dragging
- Future possibility: converting the ruler to a canvas section for better frame rates
For tab stops, the first step is a simple tooltip on empty ruler space: “Double-click to insert a tab stop. Right-click for more options.” — practical discoverability without overcomplicating the UI.
The discussion turned into action — seven new issues were filed straight from the meeting:
- Ruler: change mouse cursor on hover and update indicator SVG icons
- Ruler: review, rebase and test tooltip implementation
- Ruler: add hint tooltip for inserting tab stops
- Contextual tabs: allow two contextual tabs visible at once
- Tabbed view: refresh several notebookbar icons
- References tab: fix odd break
- CURSORS: Create new cursors
If any of these interest you, they’re a great place to start contributing.
Autofilter Popup: A Fresh Approach
The team is rethinking the autofilter popup to make it faster and cleaner — especially when dealing with hundreds of entries. The plan is to replace the current tree widget with a simpler HTML list or table, and to improve button placement. Szymon shared a mockup with buttons repositioned to the top, and Pedro is creating a task to explore adding a proper resizer. Sometimes stepping back and simplifying is the best path forward.
Slide Sections: New Icons and Features
Mohit is building out Impress slide sections — the context menu now includes Expand All, Collapse All, and Remove Section & Slides. Ivana designed new icons for the section operations, already submitted to Gerrit.
What Developers Are Building
Vector Rendering Test Framework: Tomaž is building a test framework alongside the JS vector renderer — testing each primitive as it’s added. Systematic quality from the start.
Tracked Changes Undo: Attila is working on an improved approach to the tracked changes undo list — adapting the logic for the optimized new branch architecture where only changed lines are updated. A deeper fix for a smarter codebase.
A11y Coverage Expanding: Caolán’s accessibility work for Impress now covers notebookbar, sidebars, and common dialogs — all merged or in review. Next up: Impress-specific dialogs.
Dark Mode Scrollbar Fix: Darshan fixed invisible scrollbars in Calc and Impress dark mode — the fix that makes daily use much better.
Cell Appearance Sidebar: Darshan collapsed the Cell Appearance sidebar panel into a single row, cleaning up the Calc sidebar layout.
Slide Size Copy: Miklos is handling a case where copying slides between presentations with different slide sizes wasn’t handled properly.
RTF Import Fix: Michael S. continues working on RTF — this week tackling linked paragraph/character styles and the difference between fake properties from table styles vs. real properties.
The Forum: New Voices
The forum keeps growing with real discussions from real users:
Sven82 made their first post — getting SharePoint SE working with Collabora Online with a German GUI. Welcome to the community!
Regina jumped into a deep technical discussion about SmartArt on the forum — and it turned into real collaboration. Armin Le Grand shared a detailed breakdown of the three major areas of SmartArt work (model, UI, and layout algorithms), estimating the feature is roughly 50% complete. Regina has already been researching the OOXML SmartArt spec, building test cases, and offered to help reverse-engineer the undocumented layout algorithm — the hardest part of the puzzle. This is open source at its best.
People are also trying Collabora Office builds and giving feedback about missing instructions on the community page — and those gaps are being filled in real time.
Community Contributions Beyond Code
Andreas Kainz shared thoughtful design ideas on GitHub that sparked discussion about UI improvements.
Yatharth Yadav added a copy button for terminal commands on the community page — a small usability improvement that helps every new contributor who follows the setup instructions.
These aren’t headline features, but they’re the kind of contributions that make a project welcoming.
Community Calls
Three weekly calls, all with published minutes:
- TC Meeting (May 27) — CI updates, performance regressions, OUString UTF-8, top reviewers
- Collabora Online Weekly Meeting (May 28) — 7 attendees including João (welcome!) — PR migration, contributor updates
- UX/UI Design Meeting — 8 attendees — ruler development plan, autofilter rework, slide sections, icon tasks
All minutes on the forum under meeting-minutes.
Get Involved
63 contributors and growing. New people are landing patches, filing bugs, improving the community page, and joining the conversation every week.
- Community page: collaboraonline.github.io/post/communicate/
- Design system: collaboraoffice.org/design-with-us
- Forum: forum.collaboraonline.com
- Chat on Matrix: #cool-dev:matrix.org
- Browse open changes: gerrit.collaboraoffice.com
See you in the code.
