🐦 Hachidori 0.3.0
A cleaner Settings page, word highlighting that follows your Anki progress, and new tools for mining Netflix subtitles. This release also improves dictionary imports, pronunciation controls and troubleshooting. Every Advanced feature switch starts off, including “Use less ram by default”; your explicitly saved choices are preserved.
✨ Settings, easier to find and use
Settings has a new layout built around clear rows, grouped controls and switches. Dictionaries and Reading keep their related tasks together, while each option keeps its explanation close by. (#543)
- Start with the features you choose. All experimental features default off. Enable the ones you want under Advanced → Experimental features. (#556)
- Choose your memory tradeoff. Advanced → Memory lets you keep dictionary hash indexes in memory for lookup speed or read them from disk to save RAM. Use less ram by default is now off unless you have explicitly saved another choice. When enabled, Automatic hash storage shares a 65 MiB resident budget across the library; Low memory mode keeps its separate 32 MiB budget. (#497, #530, #556)
- Clear imported dictionaries or reset your counts. Settings now offers Remove all imported dictionaries and Reset lookup counts, with confirmation before clearing them. Your personal dictionary stays unless you also choose to erase its source; Anki notes and retained backups stay intact. (#514)
📖 See the words you know
The experimental Word highlighting feature marks Japanese words by their Anki status: unknown, learning or known. Enable it in Advanced → Experimental features, then turn on Reading → Word highlighting → Highlight words by Anki status. Choose which statuses to show and whether to use underlines, text colour or backgrounds. (#525, #526, #528)
Hachidori uses your installed dictionaries to split the text and its cached Anki index to check the words. Opening a page does not contact Anki. In the popup, Mark as known and Ignore let you set a word's status yourself; keyboard shortcuts are available too. (#529)
🎬 Experimental Netflix mining
Turn on Netflix mining under Advanced → Experimental features to pause playback while hovering a subtitle and use the whole subtitle line as your mined sentence. Anki field templates can also include:
{sentence-audio}— audio for the subtitle line, taken from a rolling 30-second buffer of what you have heard.{gif}— a looping GIF of the line.
When a line has not been heard in full, Hachidori can play on or replay it once to finish the clip. Hover pause also works on pages that were already open when you enabled the feature. Reload Netflix after enabling it so the playing episode's subtitle timing is available for media mining. (#518, #521, #527, #545, #550)
The separate Netflix preview screenshots switch can use a timeline preview for {screenshot} when ordinary capture is black. These previews have lower resolution and show a nearby moment rather than the exact frame. (#532)
These integrations are experimental: Netflix may change its subtitle and preview interfaces, and protected playback can produce silent audio or black captures. Missing media is reported as a warning on a note saved with its other fields.
📚 More dictionaries, smoother lookups
- More archives import correctly. Added support for kanji frequency lists and the NHK pitch archive, dictionary titles containing slashes, escaped bank filenames and Zip64 archives. (#517, #524)
- Every frequency dictionary gets its label. Frequency tags now identify their source dictionary in the popup. (#509)
- Tune hover timing. No-key lookups now have configurable page-hover and definition-hover scan delays. (#515)
- Pronunciation choices stay beside the audio button. The chooser opens next to the button you used and stays within the popup. (#513)
- Quieter audio failures. A failed pronunciation no longer interrupts reading; Audio → Test explains the error when you need it. (#511)
- Screenshots survive page navigation. Anki screenshot mining works after sites change their URL without a full reload. (#508, #523)
🛠️ Better bug reports
Advanced → Troubleshooting → Get debug info downloads a report with the extension's recent logs, engine state, installation and service details, settings, and stored-file information. The AnkiConnect API key is removed. Personal dictionary entries, lookup history and Anki notes are left out. (#519, #522)
📦 Downloads
*-chrome.zip: extract it, openchrome://extensions, enable Developer mode, choose Load unpacked, and select the extracted folder. For an existing unpacked installation, replace its files and click Reload.*-source.zip: the matching complete source, including the engine and bundled dependency sources.*-SHA256SUMS.txt: checksums for both packages.
Chrome 128 or newer is supported. Existing dictionaries and saved settings are retained; the default changes apply when you have not saved a choice.
Full changelog: 0.2.3...0.3.0