# Changelog All notable changes to Sherpa Manager are recorded here. The format follows [Keep a Changelog](https://keepachangelog.com/en/1.1.0/), and releases follow [Semantic Versioning](https://semver.org/spec/v2.0.0.html). Starting with 1.0, breaking changes to supported profile data require a major version change and documented migration guidance. Releases are published from tags of the form `v`. The tag, the `` in [Directory.Build.props](Directory.Build.props), and the heading in this file must all agree; the release workflow fails the build when they do not. ## 1.0.0 First stable release, including the v0.7 interface and display-switching features. Existing v0.7.2 profiles remain compatible; no profile migration is required. ### Added - **Settings -> Start minimized**, beneath the Windows startup option. When Windows starts Sherpa at sign-in it opens minimized: in the tray if Sherpa is kept there, on the taskbar otherwise. Opening Sherpa yourself still shows the window. The startup entry carries a `--minimized` switch, and uninstalling still removes the entry the installation created. - Compact profile sections for Display, Audio & shortcuts, and Applications. Smaller desktops retain readable controls without page scrollbars; larger windows retain the full overview and aligned display/audio cards. - Per-monitor DPI awareness and window fitting after monitor, taskbar, and scaling changes. Dialogs fit smaller work areas while retaining their actions. ### Fixed - Long display summaries no longer push the rollback countdown or confirmation actions out of view. Paged content overlaps between pages so controls at a page boundary can be read and used. - The package smoke test now uses a disposable profile directory and checks compiled dialogs and embedded logos. It never loads personal profiles, changes monitors, or activates a startup profile, and works without NVIDIA hardware. - Uninstall removes the current user's Windows startup entry only when it points to the installation being removed. Startup entries for another copy and saved profiles are preserved. - The installer can be compiled directly in the Inno Setup IDE. It reads the published application version and rejects a stale build that does not match `Directory.Build.props`. ### Changed - Release builds validate all four version fields and require matching changelog notes. Each published executable is checked for its x64 architecture, embedded version, and successful smoke-test exit before packaging proceeds. - Simplified the README and included a first-run guide with downloads. - The workflow creates a stable draft for review and uses a pinned, hash-verified installer compiler. Archives include the first-run guide and license. ## 0.7.2 Everything since v0.5.8: HDR and multi-GPU machines are understood, switches are faster and confirm what they change, Windows installed in any language is handled, and the interface is redesigned. ### Added - HDR is captured with a profile and restored with it. Advanced colour is not carried by the display layout itself, so applying a layout previously said nothing about HDR and left it wherever Windows had put it. Each display's state is now recorded at capture and put back once the layout has settled, matched by monitor device path rather than by the adapter ids the profile was saved with. A profile saved before this existed says nothing about HDR rather than saying it was off, so it never switches HDR off for a display someone set up by hand. A display that cannot do HDR, a driver that will not answer, and a Windows too old to know the request are all reported as warnings at most, and never fail a display change that otherwise worked. - Machines with more than one graphics adapter are understood. The adapters actually driving the displays are recorded with each layout, identified by their PCI vendor, and a profile that manages NVIDIA Surround now says so up front when none of the displays is on the NVIDIA card. NVAPI answers for the card whether or not it is driving anything, so on a laptop with switchable graphics, or a desktop with a monitor plugged into the motherboard rather than the card, the profile used to look fine and then fail at the display step with a bare driver error. A second adapter that drives no displays is not a problem and is not reported as one. A layout captured on a multi-adapter machine also records what it found in the diagnostics log, so a report from another PC says what graphics it has. ### Changed - A profile that manages NVIDIA Surround no longer rebuilds a grid the driver is already displaying. Turning Surround off had always returned early when it was already off; turning it on did not, so activating a Surround profile while already in that exact arrangement spent about three and a half seconds rebuilding the topology, with the screens going black, to arrive where it already was. It now compares the live grid against the wanted one in full — panel order, bezel correction, resolution, refresh, rotation and overlap — and skips only when every part matches. Being enabled is not enough on its own, because Surround can be on with an entirely different arrangement. - Waiting for the displays to settle now ends when they have settled. It was a flat delay, three seconds by default, spent in full whether Windows had finished rearranging in two hundred milliseconds or was still going at the end — on a measured switch that was three of fifteen seconds, mostly for nothing. Sherpa now watches the desktop arrangement and continues once it has held still for a moment, and the setting becomes the longest it is willing to wait rather than the time it always waits. It is never slower than before, and the switch reports how long it actually took. **Settings -> Wait after display changes** is now **Wait for displays to settle, at most**. - Refreshed the interface around GridSherpa's charcoal surfaces, violet accents, typography, and consistent card spacing. Added scalable line icons to navigation, section headings, and common actions. - The profile overview and settings fit without page scrollbars at a minimum 1200×880 window size. The display card matches the combined audio and quick-switching height. The application table receives the remaining space and owns the scrollbars. - Settings are grouped into window and startup, display safety, application launch, and diagnostics, with status and recent switches always visible. - Unified text fields, dropdowns, scrollbars, button states, and keyboard focus. Dropdowns now honor vertical spacing and clip long selected device names. - Dialogs share the same spacing and control styles. The application picker keeps its actions separate at minimum width; display confirmation sizes to its content so the rollback countdown and both actions remain visible. Display diagrams scale down to fit narrower windows. - Long dialog and profile lists use Previous/Next actions while retaining list virtualization. Reordering has explicit Locked/Unlocked labels and a filled active state. iRacing uses the supplied stacked color logo, shown whole and transparent on the sidebar; ACC uses the supplied Assetto Corsa Competizione logo the same way, for a profile named "ACC" or "Assetto Corsa Competizione"; Work uses a suitcase icon. All three are drawn at the same width. - The window opens tall enough to show five applications without paging (1240×956, up from 1240×900, which showed four). The display summary box is now a fixed two lines: it used to size to its text, so selecting a profile with a captured layout made the card a line taller and cost the application table a row. The 1200×880 minimum is unchanged. - Capturing over an existing saved display layout asks for confirmation before changing the snapshot, verification, or Surround preference. Cancel preserves all three. - Added off-screen layout regression checks and optional PNG previews for standard and compact windows. Display switching and profile data formats are unchanged. ### Fixed - An audio change that Windows accepts but does not make is now reported instead of passing as a success. Setting a default audio device has no documented API, so Sherpa calls one method at a fixed position in an interface Microsoft never documented; a Windows version that shifts that layout would land the call on a different method, which can return success having changed nothing. The default is now read back after the change, and a switch that did not take is reported as a warning naming the device still in use. It never fails the profile switch. The diagnostics record the Windows build alongside it, since that is the first thing worth knowing in a report from a machine the developer does not have. - Desktop shortcuts keep a profile name written in any script. They were created through the Windows scripting object, which converts text through the system's code page, so a profile named in Cyrillic on a Western-code-page Windows became question marks in both the file name and the `--activate` argument the shortcut passes back, leaving a shortcut that matched no profile. Shortcuts are now written through the shell's Unicode interface, which is also what Sherpa already used to read them. - Uninstaller entries are recognised on a Windows installed in any language. They were filtered by looking for English words in the Start menu label, which does nothing against "Deinstallieren" or "Удалить программу"; the executable behind the entry is checked as well, and installers do not translate that. - The Start menu folders are asked for directly instead of built by appending "Programs" to the Start menu path, and a rejected profile's backup file is timestamped with a fixed calendar, so it does not come out dated 2569 on a Windows set to Thai. - A single very wide monitor is no longer described as possibly several monitors combined by the driver. The test for "wider than any one panel" sat at 3:1, which a 49-inch 32:9 monitor exceeds at 3.56, so its owner was told their one monitor might be a combined layout. It now sits between the widest panel made and three panels side by side, which are 5.33. Two panels combined are the same shape as one 32:9 monitor and are still not detected; describing every 32:9 owner's monitor wrongly is the worse of the two mistakes. ## 0.5.8 Quality-of-life release. ### Added - Applications that will not work are flagged in the profile editor: the row number is replaced by a warning marker, the reason is in its tooltip, and a count appears beside the Applications heading. A flagged entry takes no number, so the numbers that remain read as the sequence that will run. Covers an executable or shortcut that cannot be resolved, a working directory that does not exist, and an entry that starts the same thing as an earlier one and would be skipped. The same rules the activation preview applies, so the two cannot disagree. - **Recent switches**, a button beside the status bar, shows what recent profile switches actually did: every step in the order it happened, the seconds it took, warnings highlighted, and the outcome. **Copy** puts one switch on the clipboard as text for a bug report. The history is built from the same messages shown during the switch, so it cannot drift from what was seen, and cancelled or failed switches are recorded too. Kept in memory for the session; the rotating diagnostic log remains the record that survives a restart. Each switch is numbered for the session and drawn as a card with a coloured edge, so a long run of switches stays readable: purple when it succeeded, amber when it finished with warnings, red when it failed. The newest carries a badge, and each shows both the clock time and how long ago it was. - **+ Add app** now opens a searchable list of the applications installed on this PC, read from the Start menu the way Windows reads it, with icons and the publisher each one came from. Type to filter by name, publisher, or path; choose several at once; the name, target, arguments, and working directory are filled in from the shortcut. Uninstallers, help links, and shortcuts whose target has gone are left out, and two shortcuts to the same executable become one entry unless they pass different arguments. Not everything installed has a Start menu entry, and a game launched through a protocol address is not a file at all, so the same window still offers choosing a file and adding an empty row by hand. - Applications can be reordered by dragging a row, not only with the arrow buttons. Dragging is locked by default so a stray drag while editing cannot silently change the launch order; a padlock button beside the arrows unlocks it, and the choice is remembered. The padlock is drawn from the setting it controls, and its two states differ in colour as well as glyph, because an open and a closed padlock look nearly the same at that size. - **Settings -> Wait after display changes**, applied between the display layout and any application being started or closed. Windows returns from the topology call before the monitors have finished re-syncing, and an application started into that window can open on the wrong monitor or at the wrong size. Defaults to 3000 ms; set it to 0 for the previous behaviour. - `SHERPA_TEST_FILTER` runs a subset of the test executable by name substring. - Per-profile audio output and input. A profile can make a chosen playback and recording device the Windows default when it activates, covering both ordinary playback and communications. The switch happens before applications start, because most sim and voice applications read the default output once at launch and never look again. When the profile also changes displays, Sherpa waits up to 15 seconds for the chosen device to appear: a monitor's audio endpoint does not exist until Windows has finished enabling that monitor, and it arrives some time after the display itself is usable. A device that is not connected, or a switch Windows refuses, is reported as a warning and never fails the profile switch. Output and input are independent: a profile may set either, both, or neither. - Launch order. Applications start in the order listed, now numbered in the grid, and by default each one waits for the previous to start before it begins. "Start this after that" is expressed by putting it lower in the list; there is nothing else to configure. **Settings -> Before starting the next app, wait for** raises that to the previous application's window appearing or responding, or turns waiting off, with a timeout. Applications Sherpa cannot track, such as scripts and protocol URLs, are never waited for, since no rule could ever be satisfied for them. A wait that times out is a warning: later applications still start. ### Changed - The application columns no longer sort when their headers are clicked. Sorting the view showed an order that was not the order applications start in, which made the launch order unreadable. - The status bar keeps showing the result of a switch. Window minimizing and application closing are watched for up to 45 seconds afterwards, and a successful outcome from one of those watchers used to replace the result with a note about a single application. Only failures from them take the status bar now. - A profile's closing message names the switch — "Switched to iRacing" — rather than reading "iRacing is ready", which was indistinguishable from the readiness message of an application that shares the profile's name. - The status bar reports the result of a switch rather than its last progress message, and colours it: plain when a switch succeeded, amber when it finished with warnings or was cancelled, red when it failed, with the error text included. Individual warnings are reported as they happen and kept in the switch history, so the closing message counts them instead of concatenating them into a line too long to read. - The per-application launch delay is hidden by default and enabled from **Settings -> Show the per-application launch delay column**. Order and readiness cover almost everything; a fixed delay is only needed for scripts, protocol URLs, and other targets Sherpa cannot detect. Existing delays keep working whether or not the column is shown. - The application version is shown in the bottom right corner of the window, so a bug report can name the exact build without opening Settings. - **View layout** in the profile editor draws the monitors a profile will arrange, to scale and in their real positions, with the primary display highlighted and each panel labelled with its resolution, refresh rate, and rotation. Captured NVIDIA Surround grids are shown alongside: topology, per-display mode, bezel correction, colour depth, and panel order. The dialog sizes itself to its content, up to the height of the screen, so the layout is not hidden behind a scrollbar. - Duplicating a profile no longer copies its global shortcut, since two profiles cannot own one combination. - Renaming, duplicating, and deleting a profile are reachable without scrolling. Right-clicking a profile in the list offers Rename, Duplicate, and Delete; previously those buttons sat below the application list where they were easy to miss. The profile name field is underlined so it reads as editable. - Context menus follow the Sherpa dark theme instead of the Windows light chrome, which rendered light text on a white background. - Right-clicking a profile now selects it, so the menu always acts on the profile that was clicked rather than the one previously selected. - Refusing to delete the last remaining profile now says so instead of doing nothing when the button is clicked. ### Fixed - Waiting for an application to start now waits for something. The default rule was satisfied as soon as a matching process existed, which is true the instant an application is launched, so every application in a profile started at once and the order was decorative. Measured against a fixture that sleeps three seconds before opening, the process was there after 262ms and actually ready after 3,324ms. The rule now waits for the process to finish starting and reach its message loop, which also holds for tray applications that never show a window; anything without a message loop, such as a console application, is treated as ready immediately, as before. The setting is relabelled "It to finish starting". - The warning flags and the launch order now follow the application list as it is edited. They were refreshed by each editor action asking for it, and two actions never did: browsing for an executable left the new entry unnumbered and unchecked for problems, and the up and down buttons left the numbering stale. The list is watched instead, so an editor action added later cannot forget. - Per-profile audio output had no effect. The audio service was created after the services that consume it, so both the activation and the preview received null and skipped the step silently. Activation now records whether an audio device was requested and whether the service was available, so a skipped step is visible in diagnostics instead of looking like a switch that did not work. - Tooltips follow the Sherpa theme instead of the Windows default light one. They are drawn from WPF's own style rather than the window's, so a dark application shows light tooltips until it says otherwise. Long text now wraps within a bounded width rather than stretching across the screen. - Dialogs use the dark title bar instead of the Windows default white one. Only the main window opted in, so every dialog Sherpa opened had a white caption above dark content. - Global shortcuts. Click **Set shortcut** on a profile and press the keys you want, such as Ctrl+Alt+W; the combination is recorded as you press it rather than typed out. It then activates that profile from anywhere in Windows. A combination another application already owns, or one claimed by two profiles, is reported and skipped rather than failing silently. - `SherpaManager.exe --activate ` switches by name, matched without case sensitivity. If Sherpa Manager is already running, the request is handed to the running copy instead of starting a second one that would fight it for the display. `--help` lists the arguments. - **Create desktop shortcut**, which writes a desktop shortcut that activates the selected profile. - **Settings -> Start Sherpa Manager when Windows starts**, registered per user so it needs no administrator rights. - **Settings -> Activate at startup**, which applies a chosen profile when Sherpa Manager launches. - **Browse** no longer leaves an empty application row behind when the file dialog is cancelled. The row is created only once a file has been chosen. - **NVIDIA settings** opens the NVIDIA app directly on **System -> Display**, where Surround is configured, using the `nvidiaapp://route/#nvapp/...` scheme NVIDIA registers. Older systems still get NVIDIA Control Panel. Messages that told you to open NVIDIA Control Panel now name the NVIDIA app, since recent drivers no longer install a Control Panel. - **NVIDIA settings** detects which NVIDIA software is actually installed: the NVIDIA app, the driver-installed Control Panel in either of its two locations, or the Store-packaged Control Panel. Every candidate is verified before it is launched, including that the registered protocol handler still points at a file that exists. - **NVIDIA settings** opens the NVIDIA app instead of the Documents folder. It targeted the old NVIDIA Control Panel Store package by identifier; on machines where NVIDIA has replaced the Control Panel with the NVIDIA app that package no longer exists, and asking Explorer to open an unknown identifier silently opens Documents rather than failing. Sherpa now locates the installed application and says so plainly when there is none. - An application started minimized can be opened again. The window watcher polls for up to 45 seconds so a launcher that opens its real window late is still minimized, but it used to re-minimize every matching window on every poll, including one the user had just restored. It now acts on each window once. ## 0.4.6 ### Added - An activation preview. Before a profile switch runs, Sherpa shows what it would do: monitors that will be enabled or disabled, resolution, refresh rate, rotation and primary-display changes, the NVIDIA Surround transition, and which applications will start, stay running, or be closed. Missing executables and missing working directories are reported as problems before anything is applied rather than as warnings afterwards. - **Settings -> Show what a profile switch will change before it runs**, on by default, along with a **Do not show this again** option in the preview itself. ### Changed - The bug report template now asks for the **Settings -> Copy diagnostics** report, how Sherpa Manager was installed, and how the reporter recovered from any bad display state. It also restates what the diagnostics report can contain so reporters can review it before pasting. - Release notes point at the installer for checksum verification, matching the download the README recommends. ## 0.4.5 ### Added - x64 release packaging: a tag-triggered workflow that publishes framework-dependent and self-contained `win-x64` ZIP archives with a `SHA256SUMS.txt` checksum file. - A Windows installer (`...-win-x64-setup.exe`). It installs per user by default so no administrator prompt appears, offers an all-users install, creates Start Menu and optional desktop shortcuts, and registers an uninstaller. Captured profiles and display snapshots under `%APPDATA%\SherpaManager` are left in place when uninstalling. - A portable single-file build (`...-win-x64-portable.exe`). One executable, no unpacking and no separately installed .NET runtime. - This changelog. ### Changed - The supported platform is now declared explicitly. All projects build as x64 via `Directory.Build.props`, matching the `nvapi64.dll` binding that NVIDIA Surround support depends on. - The product version is defined once in `Directory.Build.props` instead of per project. ### Fixed - The version reported by the application, the diagnostics report, and the bug report template said `0.2.0` while the project had reached 0.4.4. All three now report the real version. ## 0.4.4 ### Added - Diagnostics: rotating local JSONL logs, capture of Windows/AppDomain/WPF dispatcher and background-task exceptions, activation timing, Windows and NVAPI result codes, topology records, and process-matching decisions. - **Settings → Copy diagnostics** for producing a shareable report. - Paths and command-line arguments are redacted from diagnostics by default. ## 0.4.3.1 ### Changed - Documentation updates. ## 0.4.3 ### Fixed - The saved display verification is invalidated when the environment fingerprint changes. Monitor, GPU, port, driver, Windows, resolution, refresh-rate, and Surround changes require the confirmation countdown again rather than reusing a stale confirmation. ## 0.4.2 ### Added - Crash recovery: interrupted display transactions are detected on the next launch and offered for restore, covering the case where the live countdown could not run because the process or system stopped mid-transaction. ## 0.4.1 ### Added - A Cancel button on the busy overlay, with Escape support, that restores the previous display layout and application state. ## Earlier releases Versions before 0.4.1 predate this changelog and are not itemized here. See the commit history for details.