Qaze v1.3 is finally here, packed with a lot of exciting new features! In addition to enhanced tools for managing NATS resources, this update significantly improves the user experience with support for tabs, split views, powerful shortcuts, and much more.
With this release, I want to say thank you to all the amazing customers and NATS community members who have supported Qaze over the past year. As of today, Qaze has paying customers from nearly 30 different countries, which makes me incredibly proud.
A video that covers all new features is in the works. Please follow the social channels for updates.
New View Engine to Support Tabs & Split Views
The most significant change in Qaze 1.3 is the completely redesigned view engine that now supports tabs and split views. These powerfuls feature allows you to work with multiple NATS resources simultaneously, boosting your productivity when managing NATS clusters.
The view state is saved per connection and is also restored when you start Qaze.
To enhance keyboard navigation, numerous shortcuts have been added. Detailed documentation will be available soon.
Side Panels
In addition to tabs, there is a new concept called “Side Panels.” When you click on a stream message, it opens the message in a new tab.
If you press Alt while clicking on the stream message, it opens the message in the same tab as a horizontal panel. When pressing Alt+Shift, it opens as a vertical panel. This allows you to view your stream message list and a single message simultaneously.
Stream Message Transformation
When using non text-based message payloads in streams (like Protobuf, Messagepack), Qaze wasn’t really useful to inspect stream messages.
With Qaze v1.3, you can now run a shell command before showing the message data, which is really powerful. You can configure a general command in the connection settings, and you can also override the global settings for individual streams, giving you full flexibility. The command gets access to the stream name, the subject of the message, and the payload. This allows you to use one central script to transform your messages.
On Windows, you have the option to configure the shell in the app settings. You can use cmd.exe, PowerShell or WSL. For Mac and Linux, the configured shell is used automatically.
A detailed video how to use this feature will be up in the coming days.
KV Watching
If you want to know which changes happen in your KV buckets, the new Watch feature helps you analyze this.
You can track all key changes in a real-time list and inspect the values of the keys. You can even leave the tab - the watching will still be active in the background and also visible in the activity bar in the sidebar.
Direct Connections without a NATS CLI Dependency
Until version 1.2, you needed NATS CLI to be able to use Qaze. Starting with v1.3, you can now configure “standard” connections that connect to you NATS clusters directly.
The following authentication strategies are supported:
- Unauthenticated
- Username/password
- Credentials File
- Token
- NKey
Even though its really useful to reuse NATS CLI contexts when you are already working with NATS CLI, I think it makes sense to have the flexibility how you want to manage your connections.
Streams: Last Message By Subject
The message inspector got a new feature. Besides finding stream messages by sequence, you can now fetch the last message by subject.
Why did this release take so long?
That is a good question! After the last release, I started working on a super secret feature that will be part of Qaze v2. During this phase, I noticed that the current architecture wasn’t optimal for the needs of this upcoming feature. So, I decided to pause its development and revisited many parts of the application, which led to partial rewrites that took a lot of time.
Let’s take a look at the Git diff stats:
Now that the major refactoring is complete, I can focus on many other NATS-related features again. The plan is to release updates more frequently in the coming months by shipping smaller versions. Simultaneously, work on the super secret feature, which will be Qaze v2, will continue over the next few months.
Wrap Up
I hope that you like the new release and I’m excited about what’s coming this year. As always, the blog post does not cover all features - check out the Changelog for all the details.
To organize feedback better and to give you a better option to post feature requests, Qaze has now a new place for that: https://qaze.featurebase.app/
This site also has a roadmap, so you can transparently see what I’m currently working on and what’s next. Feel free to comment and upvote, so I can prioritize features that are important. If you want to chat in general, you can also join the Discord community.
