Valentina 1.1: The Update We've Been Building Toward for Months

Valentina 1.1: The Update We've Been Building Toward for Months

This one is different. Most updates bring a handful of new tools and bug fixes. This release brings changes that reshape how you work with patterns at a fundamental level — things we have wanted to build since the very beginning, but only recently found the right way to do.

We know many of you have been waiting. This post is our way of walking you through what’s coming before it lands, so you are ready when it does.

Work With Part of a Curve, Not Just the Whole Thing

If you have ever tried to use only a portion of a curve in a group operation — a rotation, a move, a flip — you already know the frustration. Until now, Valentina has only let you pick the entire curve. You could not say “rotate just this segment of the armhole curve” or “use only the front neckline segment for this piece boundary.” You had to work around it, and the workarounds were messy.

That changes in 1.1.

Valentina now understands that a single curve is made up of segments — the portions between the points that lie on it. Each of those segments is now a real, selectable object. When you activate a tool that can work with a segment — any of the group operations, or when defining a piece boundary — small labels appear on every curve, one per segment, so you can click exactly the portion you need. When you are not using such a tool, the labels disappear and stay out of your way.

The labels are designed to be easy to identify: they use a distinct monospace style and hover effects so you always know which segment you are about to select. Hovering over a label highlights the corresponding arc or curve on the canvas, so there is no guesswork.

You have full control over their visibility. If you prefer to see all segment labels all the time — for example, when planning a complex construction — turn on Show Curve Details in the menu. If you find them distracting and prefer to never see them, there is a setting to hide them permanently.

On large and complex patterns, the sudden appearance of many new labels can feel overwhelming. The new Auto-Arrange Labels feature (Ctrl+Shift+A) solves this: it analyses the positions of all labels on your canvas and automatically repositions them to avoid overlaps and anchor points. When it finishes, it pushes a single undo step — so if you do not like the result, one Ctrl+Z brings everything back.

This is a feature that unlocks things that were simply not possible before.

Edit Your Group Operations — Finally

When you apply a rotation, move, or flip to a group of objects, what happens if you later realize you included the wrong point or missed one? Until now, the answer was painful: undo everything and start again, step by step.

In version 1.1, you can open any group operation after the fact and add or remove objects from it. Click on the operation, open its dialog, and adjust the selection. Valentina rebuilds the result with your changes applied. For people working on existing, complex pattern files — especially files created years ago — this is not just convenient. It is essential. We would never ask you to rebuild your patterns because we finally got this right.

There is also a new bulk rename feature for group operations. When you create a rotation or flip, Valentina generates a set of new object names for the result. Previously, those names were fixed, and you had control only over the suffixes. Now you can open the operation and rename all of its output objects at once — useful when you want your mirrored front bodice pieces to have clean, consistent names rather than auto-generated ones.

Renaming Points No Longer Breaks Your Formulas

Here is something every Valentina user learns early, usually the hard way: do not rename points in the middle of a construction. If you renamed a point that other formulas depended on, those formulas broke. They showed errors. And fixing them meant tracking down every single affected formula by hand, one by one, across the entire pattern.

That is now history.

Valentina 1.1 builds a full map of every dependency in your pattern, including dependencies hidden inside formulas. Before this version, Valentina tracked direct object references — if point B was built on point A, it knew about that link. But formulas were a blind spot. If a formula referenced the length of a spline by name, Valentina did not know. Now it does. When you rename something, the application finds every formula that used the old name and updates it automatically. What used to be a source of anxiety is now just a menu action.

Along with this came a necessary redesign of how curves get their names. Previously, curves inherited parts of their names from the points they were built on. A spline from point A to point B would generate variable names containing “A” and “B”. This worked as long as the curve was based directly on real construction points. But the Parallel Curve tool — which creates a new curve offset from an existing one — broke this convention silently. The names it generated were misleading because they still referenced the original points, not the parallel result.

Now every tool provides its own clear, independent name for every curve it creates. The curve name is no longer derived from its endpoints; it is a deliberate name tied to the tool itself. This makes variable names in your formula list far more predictable and readable, and it eliminates the whole class of naming confusion that the old system created.

One thing to know: if you open older pattern files in 1.1, the application will convert the old variable names automatically. This works in the vast majority of cases. In rare situations involving unusual naming conventions — particularly heavy use of underscores in labels — you may need to review a formula or two by hand.

A New Way to See Your Pattern’s History

The old History dialog had a good idea at its core — show the sequence of steps that built your pattern — but the execution was limited. It lived in a separate, floating window. The information it showed was sparse and hard to read. And it included a feature for inserting objects mid-sequence that was half-finished and risky to use: one wrong move and the pattern could end up in a broken state.

We removed it and replaced it with something much better: the Dependency Tree.

The Dependency Tree is a panel that lives comfortably inside the Valentina window — docked to the side, or detached as a floating panel if you prefer. It shows every object in your pattern as a collapsible tree. Each root item is a construction step. Expand it, and you see exactly what it depends on and what it produces. Expand further, and the full chain of dependencies unfolds.

Finding things is fast. The panel has a built-in filter: type a few letters and the list narrows instantly to matching objects. No more scrolling through hundreds of construction steps to find the one you need.

Navigating is instant. Click any item in the tree, and Valentina selects and highlights it on the canvas, zooming in if needed so you can see it clearly. Click something on the canvas and the tree scrolls to highlight the corresponding entry. The two stay in sync. There is even an Auto Go-to-Object toggle: when it is on, every selection you make on the tree automatically centres the view on that object.

Deleting is safe. The tree’s context menu lets you delete an object — but only if nothing else depends on it. If something does depend on it, the delete option is disabled. No more accidentally removing a point that turns out to be the foundation of twenty subsequent steps.

But the most powerful part is safe history reordering.

Because Valentina now understands the full web of dependencies between every object in your pattern, it can allow you to do something that was previously impossible: move a construction step earlier in the sequence. Say you built a pattern and later realized you forgot to add an auxiliary point — one that should have been created early in the construction, before a dozen other steps that followed. In the past, that meant a lot of painful rework. Now you add the point, move it up in the tree to the correct position, and Valentina reloads the pattern with your changes correctly applied. It verifies the dependencies first, so nothing breaks.

This is, without exaggeration, a game-changer for working with complex patterns.

More Features Worth Knowing About

Rubber band selection for group operations. Instead of clicking objects one by one when building a group operation, you can now draw a selection box around an area to grab everything inside it at once. On patterns with many closely spaced objects, this is a significant time saver.

Filterable lists. Dropdowns throughout the application — the ones that list every point, curve, or arc in your pattern — now have a search box at the top. On a complex pattern with hundreds of named objects, finding the right one used to mean scrolling through a very long list. Now you type a few letters and jump straight to what you need.

A Note on File Conversion

Because of the curve naming redesign, opening a pattern file created in an earlier version of Valentina will trigger a one-time automatic conversion. In most cases, this happens silently and correctly. If the conversion encounters a name it cannot confidently translate — which is rare, and more likely in patterns with heavily customised naming or heavy use of underscores in labels — it may produce an incorrect result. You may need to review your patterns after conversion.

We recommend keeping a backup of your original files before opening them in 1.1, as you would with any major version upgrade.

What’s Next

This release has been a long journey. The dependency graph alone required touching nearly every tool in the application — each one had to be updated to correctly declare what it depends on and what it produces. The segment visualisation required rethinking how curves are represented on screen. The rename feature required building an entirely new way of analysing formulas. We took the time to do it right rather than fast.

The result is a Valentina that is meaningfully smarter about your patterns — one that understands the relationships between your objects, keeps your formulas consistent, lets you navigate and edit your construction history freely, and gets out of your way when you are focused on designing.

We are putting the finishing touches on it now.