On this page
EdgeSnap 0.53 beta came out on 11 November 2026, two days after 0.52. They are two small releases close together, and both come from faults that showed on AmigaOS 4: horizontal lines the preview frame left on windows, and a freeze of the whole system when one of two side-by-side windows was closed. On MorphOS and AROS, 0.53 differs from 0.52 only in its version number.
The lines the frame left behind
On AmigaOS 4 without compositing, and with windows dragged with their contents, the preview frame left horizontal lines on the windows. Every drag added more, until a window could not be read. The fault showed on a Sam460ex with a Radeon RX, and I reproduced it in the virtual machine.
The cause is in how I draw the frame: I paint it straight into the screen’s own pixels. In that combination Intuition moves a window by copying its pixels on the screen, including those of the frame lying over it at that moment. The strips travelled with the window and stayed on it.
Building the frame out of windows instead of screen pixels was no way out: a window opened during a drag only appears on release.
What changes in 0.53
In that one combination EdgeSnap no longer draws a frame during the drag. The window still snaps where you let it go. The two settings are read at the start of every drag, so turning compositing on, or dragging windows as an outline, brings the frame back at once.
The settings involved are in the AmigaOS 4 GUI preferences: “Drag window with contents” on the Controls page and compositing on the Effects page. Someone who ticked the frame’s box and does not see it could take that for a fault, so the EdgeSnap preferences window on AmigaOS 4 explains it with a line under “Show the preview frame” for as long as the frame is being left out.
Nothing else changes. The library is still edgesnap.library 2.27.
0.52: the freeze on closing a paired window
Version 0.52, released on 9 November, fixed a more serious problem. On AmigaOS 4, closing one of two side-by-side windows with its close gadget could freeze the whole system. That gadget sits right beside the seam the two windows share.
At every mouse release EdgeSnap asked Intuition to put the seam’s handle back in front of the higher window of the pair, even when it was already there. The release of that click, though, is exactly the moment the window goes. Now the handle is moved only when it has to be, the two windows are looked up on their screen first, and the release waits a moment before the seam is asked for again.
Version 0.52 also brought edgesnap.library 2.27, which tells apart a window opened where another was just closed. In the AmigaOS 4 virtual machine, a window closed and another opened straight after get the same memory back, address and layer included, and the new one inherited what belonged to the old one. An exclusion, a layout group or a seam token no longer passes to the new window, as long as the pointer has moved in between. A window opened in place of another with nothing in between still cannot be told apart, and the library’s public header says so.
The preferences also have a Project menu with About… and Support development…; the second item puts the Patreon or the Ko-fi link on the clipboard.
What they were tested on
The 0.53 fix was checked on the machine that showed the lines, the Sam460ex with a Radeon RX, and under emulation on AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition Update 3, where I also installed the package on a clean system. I did not test the MorphOS and AROS builds again: they are the 0.52 programs with a new version number.
I checked 0.52 on MorphOS 3.20 on a Power Mac G5, and under emulation on AmigaOS 4.1, MorphOS and AROS One 1.3 x86_64. I installed the package over an earlier version on AmigaOS 4.1 and on AROS One. The aarch64 and i386 builds come from the same sources.
Download and update
The four archives of the 0.53 release on GitHub:
- EdgeSnap-0.53.lha: AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS
- EdgeSnap-0.53-AROS64.lha: AROS x86_64 ABIv11
- EdgeSnap-0.53-AROS-aarch64.lha: AROS aarch64 (Raspberry Pi)
- EdgeSnap-0.53-AROS-i386.lha: AROS i386 ABI v0
The release notes give the md5 of each archive. EdgeSnap is also distributed on Aminet, OS4Depot, MorphOS-Storage and the AROS Archives, which update on their own schedule: as I write, not all of them show 0.53 yet, so check the version on the page before downloading from there.
Updating is installing again: unpack the archive and double-click Install. The running copy is stopped and no reboot is needed, except on AROS for the Raspberry Pi, where a new library takes over at the next boot.
EdgeSnap remains free and open source under the MIT licence, and reports go through the issues of the repository. If the program is new to you, the article on 0.5 covers zones, hotkeys and the ARexx port; for AmigaOS 3.x on the 68k there is the separate EdgeSnap classic branch.
Cover and diagram: conceptual illustrations generated with OpenAI, not screenshots of the program.