Bobby 51

by Hylke on Wednesday, September 23, 2026

With the imminent release of GNOME 51, I realised I hadn’t released an update to Bobby in a few months.

The long tail of crash reports after a release just doesn’t seem to happen anymore when working with Rust. It’s just done and I moved on to other things.


Screenshot of a SQLite table being searched in Bobby

Bobby follows the GNOME version number scheme for convenience, but I did not want to let a major version bump go by without at least one new useful feature. So I’ve added search.

It uses case-insensitive fuzzy matching to filter out rows and highlight cells using the system accent colour as you type.

Simple yet effective!

Future

There are now two big features left that I want to implement:

  • Encrypted file support
  • Updating values in place

I’m not sure which one to work on in the next cycle, so let me know in this poll on the Fediverse which is most useful to you.

Happy equinox and don’t forget to sanitise your database inputs!