VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.22wmf16 branch deployment on Thursday 5 September. In the week since 1.22wmf15, the team worked on some interface changes, fixing bugs, and stability & performance improvements to VisualEditor.
In new features, we have changed the toolbar to be simpler, shorter, and to have the ability to have drop-down groups with descriptions. At least initially, we have moved all but the most basic tools into a single drop-down, including inserting media, templates and other transclusions, and references & reference lists. As part of this, the controls to add <u> (underline), <sub> (subscript), and <sup> (superscript), <s> (strikethrough) and <u> (underline) annotations to text will now be available to all users in the drop-down.
We also added a set of keyboard shortcuts for setting the block formatting: Ctrl+0 sets a block as a paragraph; Ctrl+1 up to Ctrl+6 sets it as a Heading 1 ("Page title") to Heading 6 ("Sub-heading 4"); Ctrl+7 sets it as pre-formatted (bug 33512). The help/'beta' menu now exposes the build number next to the "Leave feedback" link, so users can give better reports about issues they encounter (bug 53050).
When inserting a new link into a blank location, we now additionally suggest lower-case link anchors as well as the upper-case equivalent if you've typed that in, so typing in "iPhone" will prompt "iPhone" as well as "IPhone" (bug 50452). Inserting media files when some content is selected no longer replaces the content, but puts the media item at the end of the selection instead (bug 52460). Inserting a link, reference or media file will now put the cursor after the new content again (bug 53560).
In the reference dialog, the 'Use existing reference' button is now disabled on pages which don't yet have a reference (bug 51848). Newly-added references or reference groups no longer need the page to be saved before they can be re-used (bugs 51689 and 52000). The template parameter filter in the transclusion dialog now searches both parameter name and label (bug 51670).
We fixed a few errors with copy and paste; copying over nodes (like references or templates) no longer inserts additional newlines on paste (bug 53364), and if you copied an item and then changed it, or pasted it and changed the copy, you would get the changed item (and not what you copied) on the next paste (bug 52271). The names of languages listed in the "languages" (langlinks) panel in the Page settings dialog now display as RTL when appropriate (bug 53503).
Finally, our Google Summer of Code students neared completion of their work. The Math and SyntaxHighlight extension editors have both made excellent process, and the team hosted in San Francisco Moriel Schottlender, lead on the tool for setting text language details, for in-depth discussions of how we might improve the back-end to support the tool better.
A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.22/wmf16 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period are on Bugzilla's list.