What's new in flua — 0.1.127 through 0.1.137

Eleven releases in five days — the usual changelog is in the repo, but here is the human version of what actually changed and why you should care. The short version: the VS Code extension grew up, proxy mode stopped mangling your UI text, and a pile of small things stopped being annoying.

The big one: flua lives inside VS Code now

flua started as a command-line engine — and stays one, because agents and scripts need that. But the releases from 0.1.136 on add the app layer on top: a flua icon in the activity bar with an HC3 hub view.

• Browse the controller. The tree lists your hub's QuickApps — name, type, id, room — with filter and sort, and a refresh button. It shows the hub's model and firmware, and flags a QA with "hub newer" when your downloaded copy has fallen behind.
• The whole loop, without leaving the editor. Click a QA: View (.fqa) opens it in the package viewer; Download unpacks it into your workspace; then edit, Run (UI) with F5's viewer, and Update uploads it back. Download folders are remembered, so Run/Update/Pack just work the second time.
• A cache that respects your controller. Downloads are stored in the extension's local cache, keyed by hub and QA, with the hub's own modified-timestamp deciding freshness — repeat views and downloads never re-export from the HC3, cached packages open offline, and entries unused for 30 days prune themselves.
• Completions that know your house. Inside fibaro.call(/fibaro.getValue(, device IDs complete with names and rooms; global variables, scene IDs, and custom events complete in their calls — fed by your real hub, or by a seed/db file for a simulated house with no controller at all. One command writes a HT.kitchen.light home table.
• Several controllers? Named profiles. flua --tool hub add cottage http://192.168.2.30 admin stores it once; the hub view's switch button (or hub switch cottage) rewrites the .env chain — and a --project switch pins just one folder. Passwords stay in a 0600 file, never in the extension.

Everything the tree does is a --tool command first (hubList, house, hub), so agents get the same surface as the GUI — that's the design rule, and it holds.

Proxy mode: your UI text stopped turning into garbage

Several releases hardened proxy mode — the QA runs on your laptop while the device lives on the HC3. The headline fix: non-ASCII survives. UI labels with ▲ ▼ °C ∞ were being stored by the HC3 as mangled Latin-1 whenever flua escaped them as JSON sequences; flua now sends raw UTF-8 everywhere, uploads and updates alike. Related fixes landed around it: updateView and updateProperty from the proxy now reach the live HC3 UI through the proxy's own QA, half-created devices from failed uploads are reported instead of piling up, proxy cleanup failures abort with a clear message, and a firmware that answers uploads with a bare id or Latin-1-encoded text is handled.

Two developer niceties in the same stretch: _FLUA.mainPath gives a QA the directory its main file lives in, so io.open(_FLUA.mainPath .. "zones.json") finds sibling data files from any working directory; and one HC3 quirk is now documented in the notes (the classic web UI does not re-render a slider's value on updateView — the new mobile view does, and a reload shows the stored value, so it's a display bug, not your code).

Small fixes you will feel

• downloadFQA works again on every firmware — it now sends the empty-object body the HC3 expects and falls back to the deprecated export endpoint, like downloadQA always did.
• Device actions route correctly — deviceAction dispatches by id through the QA's global onAction, and booting targets wait instead of vanishing.
• Ctrl-C says goodbye — a friendly 👋 instead of a bare traceback.
• Log tags no longer double the id — -e snippets log as [QA5000], not [QA50005000].
• --file names follow the HC3 editor's rule, and --tool ui --device can fetch a device's UI back into --%%u rows.

Under the hood

CI runs the suite on Python 3.11–3.15; the 3.15 track was 3× slower because it compiled lupa from source every run — a poisoned cache held a lupa version flua deliberately excludes. Fixed and pinned; the track now runs in ~1m15s like the others. And the project's positioning got written down: flua is the engine, wizards and views are apps on top of it — the extension is the first one, not the last.

The full series lives in the forum index (posts 01–32) — the newest, "Your QA workflow inside VS Code", shows the extension's pieces in action. If something here misbehaves for you, the troubleshooting post tells you where to look first, and the feedback loop post tells you how to make it our problem, not yours.