ChatKeeper Roadmap

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Upcoming Features

ChatKeeper 1.2 Roadmap as of March 26, 2025:

The fun never stops!

Yesterday morning (March 25) I finished testing the exporting of DALL-E generated images to go along with the markdown. It was working great and marked the end of the last change for this release, so I could move on to pre-release testing and ship it!

And then... Introducing 4o Image Generation

OpenAI started rolling out a new image generator. It looks pretty great, actually, and I tested it as soon as it was enabled on my account. And the export format is different from that for DALL-E images. Sigh.

It would obviously be really lame to release ChatKeeper's new image export feature without supporting the new image generator.

So with some extra coffee and some quality time exploring the 39 MB .json file in my own personal export, I now know what I need to change to support this new image generator, and work is underway. The good news is that it won't take too long and I expect to have this working by the weekend so I can get back to pre-release testing.

ChatGPT's json export format continues to surprise with new inconsistencies, the handling of which is the bulk of the work in maintaining ChatKeeper. This new feature contains at least three decent surprises and complications, keeping things interesting.

• ☐ Add support for new 4o Image Generation Almost there!
• 🗹 Internal changes for consistency and faster development. ChatKeeper started as a personal experiment and has grown organically. As often happens in software development, some early design choices that focused on releasing something quickly are starting to become obstacles as the software grows. With 1.2 I will be introducing some internal changes that will:
  • 🗹 centralize the markdown generation to make the code simpler and the output more consistent
  • 🗹 centralize the presentation of status and messages to the user in preparation for the GUI described above
• 🗹 Make use of new data in ChatGPT export files. For example, export files now include images generated by DALL-E, so those can be included with and displayed in ChatKeeper's generated markdown rather than linked to the image at chatgpt.com and not displayed.
• 🗹 Experimentation for a future GUI. I would like to add a simple graphical interface so that you don't have to use the command line if you don't want to. This requires thoughtful design (it needs to be good, not just "slapped together") and some internal changes to support both a GUI and the existing CLI. I do not currently expect the GUI itself to be released in 1.2, but I plan to have most of the pieces in place for it to follow in a later release.
• 🗹 Support unzipped exports. Some browsers (I'm looking at you, Safari), will "helpfully" unzip the ChatGPT export file automatically after downloading it. This can be really confusing for people who are already stepping out of their comfort zone to use a command line application. ChatKeeper will now handle these unzipped exports just like a .zip file. Users can point to the unzipped parent directory or the conversations.json file directly.
• 🗹 Ensure support for Tasks. These are subtly different from "normal" conversations. For example, ChatGPT can take multiple conversations "turns" in a row. ChatKeeper needs some minor tweaks to display this properly.
• 🗹 Improved rendering of search results and citations. ChatGPT provides both in several different ways in its responses. If they come in a form that ChatKeeper is not expecting, then ChatKeeper can't render them as links to the sources. These changes support a couple of newly encountered citation types and have better behavior when unexpected ones are encountered.
• 🗹 Improved handling of corrupted or truncated download files. These have become much more likely now that export files have grown so large.
• 🗹 Improved error reports when ChatKeeper runs into a real issue. In order to avoid excessive back and forth during support, the generated reports will include more information, such as os/architecture, some very limited parts of the environment (charset, locale, etc.), and the command line options provided at launch. The full error report is plain text, more informative than before, and can be viewed or redacted before sending my way.
• 🗹 Improved handling of ChatGPT's internal tool-specific messages. Messages relating to tools such as "myfiles_browser" need to be dealt with more gracefully and don't merit an error report.
• 🗹 Better handling of yaml "front matter". ChatKeeper will no longer "step on" any front matter you add after an export. Earlier versions removed new front matter when updating an existing document.
• 🗹 Add "Turn Count" to yaml front matter. ChatKeeper will note the the number of conversation "turns" as metadata that you can use as you wish.
• 🗹 Improved handling of new internal messages. ChatGPT continues to add more and more data to their exports. Some of this is internal to the chat and not of interest for reading it. ChatKeeper continues to learn which messages to ignore so there's less noise for you.
• more to come as experimentation with the new ChatGPT features continues...

Meanwhile, the latest release and its list of features are listed here.