Version 2.6.5

UI improvements, and fix plugin reloading

Published 2026-05-09

2.6.5 brings minor improvents in a couple of areas:

Scroll bars are now easy to drag, and should behave a bit more like users expect.
Dataref descriptions are now present in the Dataref detail window. (Only for built in datarefs, as this information comes from DataRefs.txt).
Values of replaced datarefs are not loaded by default. Doing so would put a warning in Log.txt, so you'll need to click a button to load these, which is exactly how deprecated datarefs are treated.

Most of these are just quality of life improvements.

There's also a fix to plugin reloading on macOS, which fixes a regression that I created last month in 2.6.4.

I really appreciate the help from users on the X-Plane.org forums.

Some of the Rust libraries that are used to build DataRefTool are now open source.

xplane-web-api is Rust bindings to the X-Plane REST API; DataRefTool uses this to obtain some information about datarefs and commands.
xplm-sys-lb is Rust bindings to the X-Plane plugin SDK. DataRefTool has used this to call the SDK since version 2.0. There are a few similar libraries out there, but I think this one is the most up to date and functional. There's more information at the link comparing against similar libraries.

DataRefTool does depend on a number of other libraries; I plan to release a few more of these as time permits.

Improvement: Replaced datarefs are now not loaded by default, removing some noise in the log file. They can be loaded on demand, similar to deprecated datarefs.
Improvement: Dataref descriptions are now loaded from the Resources/plugins/DataRefs.txt and Resources/plugins/Commands.txt files. This now means that dataref descriptions are available in the Dataref detail window; for commands, the availablility of descriptions no longer fully depends on the web API being enabled.
Improvement: When a scroll bar grab handle is dragged, the mouse can now be anywhere on screen during the drag. This matches how most OSes treat the scroll bar. (Thanks troupie)
Fix: "Reload on plugin changes" should now work more reliably on macOS. This fixes a regression in 2.6.4. (Thanks karilou)
Change: "Reload on plugin changes" is off by default on new installs