What changed in YEN

Voice is easier to trust and easier to see. On macOS 26, an audio-conversion failure now preserves your partial words, stops cleanly, and prepares the recognizer for your next attempt. A larger layered rainbow waveform responds while YEN listens, then yields to the stable processing state. Thanks to Jon Tippens for helping improve Voice through direct feedback.

Images stay where terminal programs put them. Relative placements now work correctly, images scroll or clip at terminal margins, and incomplete transfers are discarded instead of appearing half-drawn. Backspace, Delete, and other control keys also remain physical keys for programs using the extended keyboard protocol, while wrapped copies keep their wrap.

The website now explains when Apple Speech stays on-device and when older macOS versions can use Apple's service. It also states YEN's system requirements, proprietary license, privacy boundaries, and network services consistently, so the product and its documentation tell the same clear story.

This week starts with something you feel before you type a single character: YEN opens noticeably faster. The engine's latest maintenance pass warms up the graphics pipeline while the app is still launching, resolves the emoji font directly instead of searching for it, and skips loading windows that have nothing to show — upstream measured roughly 15% off launch time and 27% off the wait for the first frame. Nothing about the terminal changed once it is open; the time between clicking the icon and seeing your prompt simply shrank.

Accuracy came along for the ride. Programs that send images to the terminal in several passes — plotting tools, image previewers over SSH — could leave a retransmitted image stacked on top of its earlier self, and now the newest copy cleanly replaces the old one.

In-terminal search got steadier too. The find bar now keeps what you typed and what is selected moving as one, so editing your search never leaves a stale selection behind, and on macOS 15 the field avoids a system text-editing crash by taking a plainer input path.

Midweek brought interruptions and input into focus. When a program in a window you are not looking at asks to read your clipboard, the confirmation now waits until you switch to that window instead of stealing your attention mid-thought. Launching YEN from the command line with -e no longer mistakes the command's file paths for documents to open, and Unicode hex input accepts the full range of characters — emoji included.

Speed you notice when the screen is full of emoji or CJK text followed: grapheme-heavy output and wide-character reflow on resize are much faster, so dense logs stay responsive when you change the window size. Translation updates for Danish, Latvian, Polish, and Turkish, more reliable dynamic tab stops, a patched Git TUI, and a refreshed system-info tool rode along.

The week closes with the engine's usual maintenance pass and the bundled file browser jumping up several releases, keeping the tools underneath current without asking anything of you. A follow-up maintenance pass on the engine landed the same week, keeping things current between releases.

Settings now preserve every repeated value you chose, including keyboard shortcuts, individual theme colors, and fallback fonts. Removing a global shortcut removes it completely, search finds more of what you expect, and layout presets report their result in the terminal instead of a footer you may already have closed. The Keyboard tab itself also got more dependable this week: it could open with an empty shortcut list until you switched away and back, and now loads reliably the first time.

Menus read faster too. Every item YEN owns now carries an icon — opening the file browser, taking a screenshot, the split layout presets, the whole Find submenu, and the window controls for selecting and resizing splits — so you find a command by its shape instead of reading down the list. Updates are easier to control from the command palette, large images arrive intact across multiple messages, and windows recover their drawing pace after sleep, lock, or a display change. Notification focus and command-palette actions also stay attached to the correct pane while macOS moves a native tab.

The checks behind each download received the same attention. Empty scans now fail instead of looking clean, vendor downloads carry immutable provenance, prerelease Xcode toolchains cannot enter a shipping build, and theme checks no longer depend on leftover artifacts. These changes stay out of your way, but they make every update easier to trust.

Scrollback now behaves the way you always assumed it did. YEN used to cap terminal history by how much memory it consumed, which meant the amount of work you could scroll back through quietly changed with your window width and the weight of each line. Set the limit in lines instead and "keep my last fifty thousand lines" means exactly that — or set either limit to unlimited and keep everything. The renderer follows the same thinking, reserving only the graphics memory it actually needs when the grid grows rather than twice that much, and tracing box- and line-drawing characters along a more precise inset path so the borders and table rules your tools draw all day line up cleanly at any font size.

The rest of the week was precision of a different kind. Clicking a file path at the end of a line no longer picks up the trailing space and sends you somewhere that does not exist, and links in your scrollback now survive a window resize intact. Programs can ask whether the terminal is actually visible, so the tools you leave running can wait until you are looking before they say anything. A failed update check tells you so instead of failing quietly, output that arrives in fragments replays in the right order, and a failed terminal-description cache over SSH no longer drops you into a session where colors and keys misbehave without explanation. Find, Reload Configuration, Change Tab Title and Terminal Read-only had gone missing from the menu bar, and they are back. SVG files preview more accurately in the file browser.

The week also closed underneath the product rather than in it. The verification that stands between a change and the build you install was audited end to end and tightened: several checks that could report success without having actually inspected anything now fail loudly instead. You will not see any of it. That is the point — it is the difference between a release that passed its checks and one that merely did not fail them.

Every sliding surface in YEN now moves as one system. Quick Terminal, Git Drawer, Tab Sidebar, and Scratchpad park, slide, and finish on the same sequence in both directions, including under Reduce Motion — and Quick Terminal is full-width again, without the stray black bar. Open any of them and the workspace feels native rather than assembled.

Underneath, a memory-efficiency pass made long sessions genuinely lighter: retain cycles closed in theme preview and dictation, a bounded background-wallpaper cache that can no longer accumulate large decodes, and merge-conflict data freed the moment you close the workspace.

The week closed on quieter correctness. Tab teardown finishes in the right order instead of deferring cleanup, and programs that ask the terminal to describe its own cursor and underline state finally get accurate answers, so editors and shells restore exactly what you were looking at.

A week spent making the native workspace hold up under real pressure. A deep audit ran through the app and its fixes shipped as they landed: Scratchpad protects unreadable notes, unusual Git filenames fail safely, review logs and background images survive concurrency, screenshots preserve exact pixels without overwrite races, and rejected shortcuts explain themselves — to sighted users and VoiceOver alike.

The daily surfaces sharpened in the same stretch. Command Palette takes focus immediately and closes cleanly, the Tab Sidebar keeps its full-height frame, Settings became modular and faster, in-terminal search got more precise, nushell completions arrived, and Dynamic Type support means the UI respects your system text size.

Even the supply chain tightened — dependencies are now scanned before they install. Individually minor, together the difference between a workspace you tolerate and one you trust.

Updating YEN became almost free. Delta patches arrived, so an update downloads a fraction of its former size, and the auto-updater took a security refresh — staying current now costs you seconds and asks for very little trust.

Accessibility and control moved with it: Reduce Motion support arrived without giving up performance, padding settings gained stepper arrows, Launch at Login moved into General settings where you would actually look for it, and a friendly toast now explains why a disabled panel hotkey did nothing instead of leaving a silent mystery key.

A pinned tab-sidebar memory leak was closed, a logger crash risk removed from the app lifecycle, and a 38-commit engine sync landed underneath — fourteen builds that made both the product and the act of receiving it lighter.

The Git drawer became a genuinely fast keyboard-first workspace. j/k navigation now respects diff focus so movement goes where your eyes are, the diff pane sticks to the top and copies as plain text, copy-on-select works the instant you highlight — in the drawer and in Scratchpad — and the header names your folder and branch. You can review real changes without touching the mouse or leaving the terminal.

The same precision carried through the rest of the app: multi-file clipboard paste just works, selection gestures feel natural, Quick Terminal and side panels anchor exactly where you expect, text rendering stays crisp under load, and heavy diff previews and background images stay smooth.

Refreshed built-in themes closed the loop — a week that made the daily review-and-ship cycle feel like it belongs to the terminal.

Git work started feeling native to YEN rather than bolted on. The Git drawer gained a Quick Terminal-style slide, native diff coloring, stash listings, and a header that shows your folder and branch at a glance; its diffs, shortcuts, and overlay rendering were each fixed in turn as the week iterated on it build by build.

Editor handoff moved off the main thread — open a large conflict review and YEN stays responsive while it loads — and a controller leak and an unbounded merge-conflict preview were closed in the same pass.

Eleven builds, nearly all of them on one surface: by the end of the week the drawer had stopped being a panel and started being a place.

A short week about keeping fast workflows inside the lines. Quick Terminal now stays on-screen where you put it, and Shortcuts captures cleaner terminal output with correct color handling, so the automations you build on YEN read the way they should.

A terminal-engine maintenance update and a refreshed bundled JSON tool keep the small machinery behind that everyday automation dependable.

Customizing YEN stopped feeling administrative. Settings tabs render eagerly so switching is instant, input outlines got brighter and more legible, copy was streamlined, shortcut feedback sharpened, and navigation and the theme catalog were refined — ten builds, most of them aimed at the panel you tune the product from.

The terminal followed. Layout presets now target the tab you are focused on, so arranging splits does exactly what you meant; click reporting and shell integration became more accurate; the increase-font-size shortcut works again.

Faster file previews and an updated file finder rounded out a week aimed squarely at immediacy — change a thing, feel it land, move on.

A concentrated week of making edges unbreakable. A memory-safety issue in terminal selection was fixed, a browser-link crash was eliminated, the Tab Sidebar toggle stopped crashing, and Quick Terminal splits were repaired — four different moments of it-should-never-do-that, all closed.

System information renders correctly again, color schemes were refreshed alongside a 13-commit engine update, and the release gates underneath were hardened to fail closed — a check that cannot run now reads as a failure, never as a pass.

Steadier from click to command, and wired to stay that way.

A foundation week, moved in one clean batch: a 22-commit terminal-engine refresh, a newer fuzzy finder, and updated Git tooling, folded in and verified.

Nothing asks you to relearn anything. Search, rendering, and source control are simply current — and the days-long run of engine refreshes behind them is the quiet contract that YEN never drifts far from its foundation's best work.

Small interactions, made dependable. Open Terminal Here now works reliably from Finder's Services menu, nested splits resize predictably instead of fighting you, and focus and quit handling finally feel settled — no more windows that refuse to let go.

Smoother search plus a refreshed fuzzy finder and bundled tooling keep the find-anything loop quick from the moment a window opens. A week of small certainties, which is what daily tools are made of.

Your workspace now remembers more of what makes it yours: window transparency persists across tabs and windows instead of quietly resetting. Set it once and it stays set — every new tab, every new window.

The bundled system-info tool was refreshed in the same stretch, so what YEN reports about your Mac keeps matching reality.

File work got faster where you feel it most: previews. Arrow through a directory and the gap between finding a file and understanding it shrank noticeably, because the refreshed file browser answers before you have finished asking.

Normalized macOS paths and a new locale carry that same experience cleanly into more environments.

Your Mac's hardware moved into view: Apple Silicon GPU monitoring arrived in the bundled system monitor, putting live GPU telemetry a keystroke away in the same place you already watch CPU and memory.

Around it, the surfaces you touch constantly each got more certain. Tab Sidebar clicks register immediately, Settings deep links scroll to the right row, the sidebar stopped collapsing under you, IME input and the copy menu behave, middle-click actions work, Command Palette focus is predictable, and running yen agents bare now explains itself instead of doing nothing.

Nothing here changes what YEN is. All of it changes how often YEN does exactly what you meant on the first try.

Typography led the week: a 37-commit terminal-engine sync brought OpenType font validation, so more of the fonts you actually want to run — with their ligatures and alternates — render correctly instead of silently degrading.

The advanced workflows around the terminal got sturdier in the same stretch. Browser split-window lifecycles were hardened after an audit, scriptability grew, search reached further, the shell's IDE-detection payload was hardened, and accessibility took another pass.

If you push YEN past being just a terminal window — fonts, automation, embedded browsing — this was the week those edges stopped feeling experimental.

The surfaces you only notice when they fail, tightened. UTF-8 handling got faster, viewport bugs were fixed, browser windows layer correctly, Settings stopped misbehaving across open-close cycles, and menu shortcuts fire reliably every time.

No headline. Just five builds of the discipline that keeps a terminal composed under everyday pressure — which is most of what anyone means when they call software solid.

Long sessions got measurably lighter. A tab memory leak was closed, hidden surfaces — the tabs and splits you are not currently looking at — stopped holding memory they did not need, and the app download itself shrank. Keep YEN open for days with a dozen tabs and the difference is real.

Scratchpad picked up copy-on-select, the review workspace took a polish pass, the dock icon learned Tahoe's conventions, and a run of engine refreshes kept the foundation current. Lean was the theme, and it held from the download to the hundredth hour of uptime.

Speed you can feel at the prompt. IDE detection results are now cached, so the shell prompt that used to pay for detection on every launch renders noticeably faster — the kind of change you notice in the first minute and then never think about again.

Trust moved with it: app intents were hardened twice over with explicit trust gating, and the diff renderer behind code review is now built from source, trimming an outside dependency from the supply chain. Fixes across delete-key mapping, menu shortcuts, Settings typography and sidebar layout, notifications, and bundled tools cleared friction from a dozen small places.

A week without a headline feature — just a terminal that starts faster, asks better questions before granting access, and gets out of your way.

YEN crossed 1.0. The milestone build itself was deliberately unglamorous — a terminal-engine sync and vendor refresh — because the point of 1.0 was that nothing needed to be special about it: the product underneath had already become dependable.

The week around it belonged to wallpaper. A scope toggle chooses whether a background fills the whole window or each split, iCloud-stored images gained download retry, titlebar transparency and whole-window display were fixed, and a flicker on config changes was eliminated — five releases of persistence until backgrounds simply worked.

The updater also learned manners: it now asks permission before checking automatically. A restored Settings design brought back the cleaner, familiar layout, and IDE detection got faster. Eighteen builds, one number rollover, and a workspace that finally felt ready to call home.

The final approach to 1.0 read like a checklist of power-user respect. Keybind conflict detection became layout-aware, so it catches the collisions your physical keyboard would actually produce rather than theoretical ones. Split panes gained labels that keep complex arrangements readable at a glance, and notifications learned to coalesce instead of stacking.

Fullscreen behavior and notch handling were fixed, IDE detection hardened, sharing improved, and Settings took another polish pass — the elaborate setups YEN now supports became easier to operate with confidence. Everything about the week said the same thing: the milestone was close, and it would be earned rather than declared.

The biggest step yet toward YEN as a terminal-first IDE. One release brought the Tab Sidebar, a pull-request review workspace, and a merge-conflict workspace — review a PR, resolve its conflicts, and ship it without leaving the app or losing your place. The rest of the week was spent making that leap land: presentation-lifecycle fixes, restore-state fixes, command-palette hardening.

Getting YEN got easier too — a Homebrew cask joined the redesigned DMG installer — and living with it got calmer: Scratchpad learned click-away dismissal, notifications were hardened, document attachments arrived, and security hardening ran through the same builds.

Fifteen releases in seven days, most of them iterations on one ambition: serious Git work, inside the terminal, that feels native rather than embedded.

Scratchpad arrived — a global, always-there note surface you can summon from anywhere in the app, the fastest way yet to get a thought out of your head without leaving the terminal. The same week folded a full Git TUI into YEN, branded and wired with yengit aliases, so staging, diffing, and committing gained a serious keyboard-driven home.

System information gained colorized ASCII art and a better layout, the file browser recovered its Git status colors and became harder to break, and dictation kept hardening. A new app icon landed alongside a run of Tahoe fixes — Finder chrome, About-window borders, full-bleed rendering — so YEN looks right on the next macOS before most people are running it.

Forty-five builds also left the release machine stronger than they found it: automatic artifact cleanup, DMG installer reliability, provenance and concurrency guards. Breadth was the theme; the reliability work is what made the breadth safe to lean on daily.

Personality week. Palette skins and sound packs arrived, so YEN could start looking and sounding like yours; a Settings toolbar tied the growing options together, and theme overrides began persisting the way you would expect. The file browser learned to preview more of what you point it at, including native archive previews that let you look inside a compressed file without extracting anything.

Dictation was rebuilt on Apple's newer speech engine and then hardened: clearer permission prompts, recovery from a legacy disabled state, safer sound import. Window standards, border hardening, split transparency, and a run of Settings fixes kept the native workspace tightening while the personality layer grew.

Beneath both, the pipeline learned to prove its own provenance — a vendor-audit gate, entitlement hardening, memory-lifecycle work across the overlay stack — because a product this configurable is only fun if the foundation refuses to wobble.

The week YEN turned configuration into a playground. Tabbed Settings arrived with a keyboard-shortcut editor that catches conflicts before you save them, notification sounds gained a picker, and ten split-layout presets landed on Cmd + Option + 1-0 — with customization, so the arrangement you actually work in is one keystroke away.

The Tab Sidebar made its first appearance, the menu-bar icon gained a click menu, and hands-free pointer control arrived alongside an Experimental tab to hold it — early, ambitious input work shipped honestly as an experiment. Escape-aware wrapping and an escape-sequence leak fix kept the terminal itself precise underneath the new surfaces.

The releases also started carrying their own proof: build verification grew to 29 branding checks, versioning moved to three digits, and DMG hosting moved to the cloud. Thirty-one builds in a week, most of them shaping how YEN feels to own rather than just to open.

One build, one promise kept: press the dictation shortcut and YEN now shows a clear recording indicator, so you know it is listening before you start talking.

Speaking to your terminal only works if you trust the microphone state — this closed that gap, and removed the one real hesitation in using your voice at the prompt.

A deliberately boring week, which was the point. A stabilizing build settled daily usage, and a zsh title-handling fix stopped window titles from drifting out of sync with what the shell was actually doing.

Small fixes, but the kind you feel every session: the terminal starts predictable and stays that way.

A quiet holiday week with two changes worth knowing about. The terminal engine moved forward with performance improvements, so the core of what YEN does — drawing your text fast — got faster still.

And YEN's orange arrived in the system UI: the brand accent now colors the moments macOS speaks for the app, a small signature that keeps YEN recognizably itself even inside a system dialog.

With launch behind it, this week was about being able to trust the machine that makes the releases. The build workflow was simplified, hardened with explicit file permissions, cured of shell-compatibility landmines, and documented end to end — and when something does look wrong, new CLI diagnostic tools and cache-clearing commands give you a way to see it and fix it rather than reinstall and hope.

The product moved too. YEN switched to DMG distribution — the drag-to-Applications install Mac users expect — and to Apple Silicon-only builds, making downloads smaller and faster. A config-driven theme system replaced hard-coded colors, the update architecture lost a layer of complexity, and the CLI's terminal UI finished its third build-out phase.

None of this is a feature you can point at. It is the reason the next several hundred releases could ship at the rate they did.

The week everything had to become real. YEN had been a fast terminal build; this week it became software you could hand to a stranger. Builds were signed and notarized with Apple, produced for both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, and wired into an auto-updater that could deliver the next version by itself — then that updater was tested, broken, and fixed in public across a dozen point releases until installing an update and relaunching just worked.

The terminal grew up alongside the packaging. The startup wrapper moved inside the app bundle so shell integration survives login, YEN's default theme actually shipped as the default, a status bar arrived, and the welcome banner learned to report the version you are really running. Versioning itself was overhauled until one source of truth drove the app, the site, and the update feed.

Around it, the distribution surface took shape: direct versioned download links so it is crystal clear which build you are getting, a custom 404 page, a consistent mobile site, and build verification that explains what went wrong instead of leaving you to guess. Eighty-nine builds in seven days — the pace of a product finding out, in a hurry, what shipping means.