Changelog

Full TableEditor Rewrite

This release contains a full rewrite of the TableEditor. The old implementation of the TableEditor had many bugs and inconveniences that made working with Markdown tables barely less cumbersome than having to deal with raw Markdown tables. Users criticized volatile data handling and experienced frequent data loss. This is why we redesigned the TableEditor from the ground up. With this release, we are finally able to give the new experience to you.

The most important improvement is that now data loss should be a thing of the past. The new TableEditor makes full use of the available features of the editor to keep the data as safe as possible. But we didn't want to stop there. Because the TableEditor hadn't received a face lift in years, we asked ourselves what else the TableEditor was missing.

From a user perspective, we have kept the design of the TableEditor as close to the former UX as possible, while also fixing a few oddities. Specifically, the buttons of the TableEditor have been fully redesigned to be more minimalist. Also gone is the infamous "Save" button that was not able to help prevent data loss. The new TableEditor now features proper syntax highlighting so that you can more easily verify that you are authoring proper Markdown. In addition, the new TableEditor is now faster, more memory efficient, and it should be simpler to fill entire tables with data.

Lastly, one big improvement of the new TableEditor is that you don't have to use it to be more efficient in authoring tables. Specifically, we decided to implement all functionality fully keyboard-oriented. This means that for any modification you may want to make there is now a shortcut. Adding and removing rows and columns; clearing data from rows, columns, or the entire table; aligning column text left, right, or center; swapping rows or columns; etc. Anything is now possible either with the new built-in context menu, or a quick keyboard shortcut.

There is only one thing we stopped to support: grid tables. Given that their structure can be much more difficult to parse we wanted to err on the side of caution. However, some keyboard shortcuts such as navigating between cells will still work with grid tables. Since users will most of the time only edit simple tables, we believe this to be an acceptable compromise — while not completely ruling out supporting grid tables, especially since Pandoc has started heavily investing in an improvement of their grid table support.

In any case, we hope that the new TableEditor will finally fix the issues you experienced over the past years — and we would like to apologize that it took us so long to fix all of these issues at once!

Changes to the snippet `$FILENAME` variable

In this update, we have implemented a change in which the $FILENAME variable no longer includes the filename extension. This means that, while $FILENAME has in the past resolved to my-file.md, it will now only include my-file.

If you rely on the $FILENAME-variable in any of your snippets, please make sure to update it by adding the variable $EXTENSION behind it. In other words, everywhere you need only the filename without its extension, you can keep $FILENAME, but wherever you need both the file name and its file extension, please use $FILENAME$EXTENSION. (The latter variable includes the leading period of the extension, so do not write $FILENAME.$EXTENSION.)

Image Viewer and PDF Viewer

This update brings with it a great new feature for Zettlr: A built-in image viewer and PDF viewer. Once you have selected in the settings that you wish to open images or PDF files in Zettlr instead of the default behavior to open it externally, Zettlr will open them in editor panes just like the editors. You can rearrange them just like you can other files, and you have some options available to inspect the files.

For images, the viewer offers various options to zoom and fit the images so that you can view every detail of them while having other files open side-by-side. In addition, the image viewer offers four background modes to accommodate transparency and difficult-to-view colors in the images better: transparent (the default), a black background, white background, and a translucent checkerboard background.

The PDF viewer likewise allows you to preview PDF files using Chromium's built- in PDF viewer that you may already know if you have opened PDF files in Google Chrome or Edge. Due to restrictions in how this works, however, you will have to manually "enable" such a viewer before being able to scroll it by clicking into it. Whether an iframe is interactive is indicated by a small border around the iframe.

Note that both image and PDF viewers are just that: viewers. As Zettlr is a text app, we do not plan on implementing any ways of editing images or PDF files. To annotate your PDF files, please continue using your existing workflow.

New Citation Parser

This release of Zettlr ships with a fully rewritten citation parser. We have decided to do so because the existing citation parser was very coarse. It would only detect and indicate entire citation nodes, but it could not distinguish between the various parts of citations (such as prefix, citekey, and suffix). In addition, there were quite many inefficiencies in how Zettlr would parse citations.

The new citation parser aims at fixing these issues. It now mounts individual nodes into the document for all individual parts of a citation node. Specifically, it now detects formatting characters, the @-sign, the suppress- author-flag (a hyphen preceding the @-sign), prefix, suffix, and the locator individually. This not just makes styling individual citation parts possible, but also makes all processing within Zettlr more efficient and faster. Especially in documents with a lot of citations, you should be able to observe a performance improvement.

Lastly, we took this opportunity to align the parser more with how Pandoc Citeproc processes citations. Most notably, this includes relaxing some requirements such as having to place commas after the citekey, and support for curly brackets, which allows you more flexibility in defining citekeys (e.g., @{AuthorYear}) and locators (e.g., {pp. 23-24, 66-69}),

If you prefer to style Zettlr using Custom CSS, you can now style the individual parts of your citations, using the following CSS classes:

cm-citation: The entire citation node
cm-citation-mark: Formatting characters ({}[];) except the @-sign and the suppress-author-flag
cm-citation-prefix: The citation prefix
cm-citation-suppress-author-flag: The suppress-author-flag
cm-citation-at-sign: The @-sign in front of your citekey
cm-citation-citekey: The actual cite key (sans surrounding curly brackets)
cm-citation-locator: The locator after your citekey
cm-citation-suffix: The citation suffix

Modified Zettelkasten Link Workflow

With this update, we have updated the Zettelkasten link insertion workflow. This is due to the new capabilities of Zettlr to understand link labels. To do so, we have removed the previous settings "Link with filename only" and "When linking files, add the document name …". Instead, we have added two new settings, "Always use the file title as label for internal links" and "Use the file ID as link target if possible."

The new workflow applies when you autocomplete a filename, and works as follows:

If "Use the file ID" is enabled, Zettlr will use a file's ID, if the file has one, and fall back to the filename only where no ID is available. If it is disabled, Zettlr will always use the filename to generate internal Wikilinks.
If "Always use the file title" is enabled, Zettlr will add the file's title (YAML frontmatter title; first heading level 1; filename) as the link label. If it is disabled, Zettlr will never add a link label automatically.

Footnote Workflow Improvements

This update improves the footnote handling workflow a lot. Until now, Zettlr was only able to properly insert new footnotes. However, the footnote deletion process still required you to manually delete both the footnote label and its accompanying reference.

We have now implemented a few new functions that help you manage footnotes. First, when you delete text by pressing Backspace, and you reach a footnote label, Zettlr will now select the entire footnote label instead of deleting the closing bracket of the label. When you press Backspace a second time, it will remove the entire label at once. This gives you both a visual indication that you are about to delete a footnote, and make it easier (since it requires you to press Backspace only twice, instead of at least four times).

Note that some functionality does not apply to footnote labels that contain text other than numbers.

GUI and Functionality

Feature: Full TableEditor Rewrite. The new TableEditor keeps most functionality of the previous version, with the exception of more safeguards against data loss, and more ergonomic usage.
Feature: Image and PDF previews. Zettlr has now two dedicated viewers that allow users to open common image types and PDF files right from within the app for preview purposes (#5501).
Feature: Fully rewritten citation parser (#5902).
Feature: Full-text (aka. global) search runs can now be cancelled via a dedicated button. You can now also trigger a new search while another search is already running.
Feature: Individual global search results can now be copied to the clipboard (#2070).
Feature: The file manager can now show and display other file types as opposed to having those only in the sidebar. Images and PDF files can be opened directly in Zettlr, while other files will be opened using the system default application. You can use the appropriate section in the advanced settings to customize this. By default, none of the new file types will be displayed in the file manager (#5501).
Feature: Zettlr now provides a Liquid Glass icon for macOS 26.
Feature: A new option has been added to allow a simple switching between a raw Markdown syntax mode and a preview mode ("WYSIWYG"), both in the settings and in the statusbar. Clicking it will toggle Markdown files between a pure syntax view, and a mode in which those items which you have selected will be pre-rendered/previewed (#4514).
Feature: Zettlr now ships with a brand-new onboarding wizard that helps new users tweak some central settings immediately without having to scour the preferences.
Feature: macOS users with an Apple Silicon chip can now access Writing Tools from context menus.
Feature: Allow turning off the behavior of Zettlr to automatically open files upon successful export (#5609).
Feature: Added a simple setting that forcefully enables Pandoc's mark- extension when exporting from Markdown if that is not already enabled. This ensures that ==highlighted== spans are properly considered in any output format.
Feature: Improved the calendar view in the statistics window to better convey the numbers. It now features a gradient heatmap, only considers the numbers from the visible year, and logs the numbers to spread out the distribution across the new, ten activity levels.
Feature: Improved the statistics chart to better help you contextualize your writing flow. It now shows you your current word count for this week, and compares it to this and last years's averages.
Feature: The LanguageTool integration is now more performant and allows ignoring of certain rules (#5910). Whenever you ignore a rule, it shows up in the spellchecking preferences section alongside some additional info. From this section you can re-enable it by removing it from the list of ignored rules.
Feature: "Hide heading characters" now properly hides the characters instead of replacing them with another element, bringing Zettlr's renderer closer to a true WYSIWYG experience. The heading level is now indicated to the left side in its own gutter element.
Feature: You can now show line numbers in Markdown files via a new setting (#5917).
Feature: Zettlr has now improved support for reference-style links. This support extends to the link context-menu (which now supports handling links from both link and link reference), the tooltips (which accurately show link previews), rendering (which accounts for link labels), to any action (such as copying or removing a link) (#5142).
Feature: Zettlr now supports loading BibLaTeX libraries as well (#460).
Feature: Zettlr now correctly displays crossref-style citations (#248).
Feature: You can now collapse and un-collapse the files and workspace sections in the file manager. This can be helpful if you are working with both a lot of individual files and workspaces. Your choice is remembered (#5916).
Feature: Extended the scope and application of vibrancy on macOS.
Feature: Working with footnotes is now more convenient than ever. Zettlr now has an update listener that constantly scans the document for any rogue footnotes and references (which are missing their corresponding reference or footnote), and ensures that the numbering is always correct. This means that you can delete a footnote, and be certain that Zettlr will have removed the now-dangling reference, too. The same applies if you remove a reference that you no longer need. Lastly, deleting footnotes becomes more convenient. Now, if you delete characters and reach a footnote, Zettlr will first select the entire footnote to visually indicate that you are about to delete a footnote, then a second deletion will remove the entire footnote at once.
Change: Zettlr now monitors your documents and will automatically remove footnotes and references without the corresponding reference or footnote. If you have any documents in which you have un-referenced footnotes, or references that are currently unused, please make sure to change this before updating.
Change: Snippets: The $FILENAME variable now does not contain the file extension anymore. Users who also want the extension should update their snippets to $FILENAME$EXTENSION (#4191).
Change: The word and character counters in the statusbar now always show both counts.
Change: Modified the Zettelkasten link insertion workflow. The previous settings "Link with filename only" and "When linking files, add the document name …" have been removed. Instead, there are two new settings, "Always use the file title as label for internal links" and "Use the file ID as link target if possible." The first new setting will always insert the detected file title (YAML frontmatter title; first heading level 1; filename) as the link label. If disabled, Zettlr will always create links without labels. The second setting controls whether Zettlr will always use filenames to link to files, or use IDs where available.
A11y: Zettlr now respects if you choose to reduce transparency in system settings and no longer add window vibrancy on macOS.
Snippets can now be nested (#5939).
You can now show an item in Finder/Explorer/file browser when right-clicking a document tab (#5914).
Fixed inline math not rendering when transforming Markdown to HTML (e.g., in footnotes).
The diagnostics info field in the statusbar now toggles the lint panel, instead of only opening the panel (#5847).
Fixed WebP images not rendering from relative paths (#5181).
Fixed the behavior when clicking widgets (citations, etc.) to accurately select only the widget's source text (#5682).
Update it-IT translations (#5831).
Update da-DA translations (#5868).
Update de-DE translations.
Added support for nix syntax highlighting (#5954).
Fixed incorrect cursor position after inserting IDs (#5846).
The toolbar word counter no longer wraps (#5774; #5881).
Fix context menu entry "Insert table" not working (#5835).
The keyboard shortcuts for snippets no longer require the field, thus preventing errors in EditorViews that map the corresponding shortcuts but don't have snippets installed.
The three-way-toggle for the file manager and global search does not wrap on Windows anymore (#5876).
The toolbar can now scroll left and right if the main window is too narrow (#5873; #5022).
Popovers (especially in the toolbar) will now properly close when clicking the associated toolbar button a second time (#5870).
Style improvements: linter panel dark mode (#5882); drop cursor (#5883); export, pomodoro, and tags popover (#5895); spacing in file manager tree view (#5891); global search (#5894).
Switched the icons for code and comments in the formatting toolbar (#5901).
The word counter now uses a proper segmenter that will make the word count more accurate for languages that do not use spaces to separate words (#5898).
Fixed the tutorial pages not correctly opening on first start.
Improved the macOS tray icon display.
Single clicks on the tray icon now activate the app (#4267).
Fixed footnote placing edge cases.
Due to updates in Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, the main process now no longer removes accelerators/keyboard shortcuts from the menus.
The recent documents provider now uses the OS API to return a list of recent documents. The provider is only retained for Linux at this point.
Improved performance for documents with many and/or large tables (#5903).
Fixes print functionality by completely abandoning the iframe approach and switching to the built-in Markdown-to-HTML parser.
Fixed the user dictionary not persisting to disk under certain conditions (#5922).
The toolbar update button now includes a clearly visible label indicating that an update is available, making it less likely to miss it.
Improved the styling and labelling of the additional attachment extensions setting in the advanced settings
The citation context menu now shows rendered citations instead of the raw citation keys, and utilizes macOS's sublabel feature to describe the context menu items.
Changed default config settings for new installations:
- Dark mode is now preset to true if the OS reports that it uses dark colors.
- Vibrancy on macOS is now set to true only if the user does not prefer reduced transparency.
Improved drag-and-drop behavior in the table of contents (#5871).
Improved the layout of the assets window (#5942).
Improved performance impact of references tab by only updating the bibliography on save, not on every keystroke (#5518).
Fixed images with brackets in the filename from not showing up (#3825).
Switched the window controls on Windows computers to the native controls. This will enable a set of additional OS-level functionality (such as hovering over the maximize-button to show a split-screen menu).
Fixed a bug that would not assign the correct footnote body class to footnote bodies. Now, footnotes will be rendered in a smaller font size and can be styled as a block.
Made the dark editor background less black, and increase contrast of the dark selection background for the Karl-Marx-Stadt theme.
Indentation preferences from the main settings now also apply to code editors where applicable.
The emphasis renderer now also hides formatting characters for footnote reference labels.
Images and links will now be detected more robustly (#5964).
Improved parsing footnotes (especially with multi-paragraph contents) (#5968).
Improved Markdown-to-HTML conversion (#5968).
Fixed image parsing for images with no ALT-text (#5963).

Under the Hood

Update Electron to version 38.3.0.
Update Pandoc to version 3.8.2.1.
Added new curly rule to ESLint, enforcing curly brackets for block-statement declarations (if, for, while, etc.).
The enabled property of context menu items is now optional, and defaults to true.
EditorPanes will no longer load all documents at the same time, and instead reuse the existing MarkdownEditor component for a single document. This greatly reduces memory consumption, especially for very full tab bars, since only a single document will be actively rendered at any one time.
Moved the previously shared common types for the context menu in the renderer into the correct module to colocate the code. The shared types have been a remnant from a time before TypeScript supported the type keyword, and will subsequently be removed.
Moved the DirectedGraph class from the link provider to the stats window.
Switched back from electron-devtools-assembler to electron-devtools-installer; now the Vue.js devtools extension works again.
Style groups in form builder fields now support a label that will be rendered atop of these groups.
Zettlr now records and remembers the binary's build date. This information is shown in the debug info to help pinpoint from when a version is. In addition, this information is now used to disambiguate nightly versions so that both the FSAL cache will be cleared more regularly, and you get a visual indicator that you did update your nightly release.
The AST parser now properly detects task lists, and the Markdown-to-HTML converter appropriately handles them.
Improved list form controls. They now allow customizing the delete label and provide a custom "No records" message.
The rangeInSelection utility function now accepts an optional parameter that allows inclusion of adjacent selection ranges in calculating the result. This allows, e.g., renderers to detect whether a selection touches a node-to-be- rendered.
Added a loading spinner component that can be used to indicate that something is loading.
Context menu items now can have an action property, which is a simple function that will be called when the item is clicked. Those items do not have to have an ID (which is now an optional property). Items with IDs and without actions will still call the provided callback function.
The Markdown AST parser now also emits labelFrom and labelTo-properties for footnote references for easy access to the reference label.
If loading a window fails due to whatever reason, the corresponding error will now be shown to the user using an error dialog.
Aligned the math parser to the internal CodeMirror APIs (#5971).
Zettlr now declares nightly releases via the build flags instead of prerelease (e.g., 4.0.0-beta+nightly instead of 4.0.0-beta-nightly), since the previous way of declaring betas would make the internal semver check would declare 4.0.0-beta-nightly to be the same as 4.0.0-beta.1-nightly.
Zettlr now properly offers updating to a newer prerelease versions if users are on a nightly version (e.g., beta -> beta.1).

Text Transformations

Zettlr now features a set of several text transformation commands in the editor. Using these commands, you can transform various pieces of text in the editor using several strategies aimed at working with both regular text (which you can, e.g., transform between sentence or title case) and corrupted text (from which you can remove control characters, unnecessary line breaks, and clean up quotation marks). In total, Zettlr now ships with 13 such transform commands, but many more are possible.

To utilize these transformations, simply select the text you wish to transform, open the context menu on it, and select the corresponding transformation from the context menu.

The available transforms as of now are:

Zap gremlins: Removes unwanted control characters (such as form feeds, vertical tabs, and others), which sometimes end up in recognized PDF text.
Strip duplicate spaces: Removes any superfluous spaces.
Italics to quotes: Turns italic markers (e.g., *text*) into quotes ("text").
Quotes to italics: Turns quotation marks (e.g., "text") into italic markers (*text*).
Remove line breaks: Removes superfluous linebreaks while retaining any paragraphs (separated by two consecutive linebreaks).
Straighten quotes: Turns smart, or "magic quotes" into regular quotes.
Ensure double quotes: Turns any type of quotation (which includes backticks, since those sometimes appear in text copied from PDF files!) into regular double quotes.
Double quotes to single: Turns any straight double quotes to single quotes.
Single quotes to double: Turns single quotes into double quotes.
Emdash — Add spaces around: Ensures that all em-dashes (—) in the text are surrounded by spaces.
Emdash — Remove spaces around: Ensures that no em-dashes (—) in the text are surrounded by spaces.
To sentence case: Turns the selected text to sentence case.
To title case: Turns The Selected Text To Title Case.

GUI and Functionality

Feature: Zettlr now has text transformations. With these, you can change selected pieces of text using a quick access command menu (#5701). Special thanks to @richdouglasevans for implementing this.
Change: Zettlr will no longer parse Markdown-like files that exceed ca. 10 MB in size. After some testing, we have determined that 10 MB seems to be a balanced trade-off between parsing as many files as possible and preventing the app to crash (especially on slower computers). Note that this only affects the caching of certain pieces of metadata, such as title, heading level 1, and ID. You will still be able to open and edit the file. For more context, see issue #5801.
Fixed a bug that would prevent the creation of new directories via the shortcut (#5769).
Fixed a bug that prevented retention of user-determined dark-mode setting on platforms other than macOS during application restarts (#570).
Fixed the list of related files disappearing when switching sidebar tabs (#5795).
Windows will now receive black as their background color on Windows and Linux if dark mode is active, preventing white flicker during window opening before the UI is ready (#5809).

Under the Hood

Bump Pandoc to version 3.7.0.2.
Bump Electron to version 37.2.0.
The primary app service container can now be retrieved using the factory method getAppServiceContainer. This makes it possible to reduce a few recursive dependencies on passing the service container down and will help disentangle the main process services in the future.

GUI and Functionality

New Feature: Zettlr can now display a set of file types not only in the sidebar's "Other files" tab, but also in the file manager, which in turn makes it simpler to find and open relevant plots or PDF files for reference.
New Feature: Zettlr can now open images and PDF files right next to your regular files, enabling you to preview pictures of, e.g., plots, or studies to reference in your text; and double-check PDF files which you need to reference.
Feature: The code editors (in the assets manager and elsewhere) now share the same keymap as the main editor.
Feature: The image renderer now acknowledges and respects the presence of a Pandoc link attributes string behind an image to scale images using custom sizes (#1328).
Change: Removed some optional properties from the default profiles. If you want to switch to the new defaults, delete those files from the assets manager or rename your existing ones. Specifically, removed top-level-division, whose meaning has changed which started to produce empty first pages during Word exports (#5645).
Fixed a long-standing bug that would not clear the modification marker on both file tabs (#5747) and the macOS window indicator (#4724) when a modified file was closed without saving changes. Acknowledges PR #5747 which is superseded by this change.
Added a keyboard shortcut for highlighting text: Ctrl-Shift-H (#4668).
The Mermaid diagram renderer is now more flexible. It now renders any Mermaid diagram in any type of valid fenced code block with both allowed variations of providing the info string: the plain mermaid and the Pandoc-attribute style {.mermaid} class (#5734).
Fixed a keymap conflict that would cause Enter to not accept autocomplete suggestions in some contexts such as Markdown syntax elements (#5646).
Improved the math, mermaid, image, and heading renderers so that they perform additional checks before actually updating their respective rendered elements. This should reduce the amount of flickering and unintentional scrolling especially in longer documents with many of such elements.
Enable the CodeMirror folding keymap which lets you fold and unfold code, such as headings, with keyboard shortcuts instead of using the arrows to the left of the editor (#857). The shortcuts are: Ctrl-Shift-[ (Windows/Linux) or Cmd-Alt-[ (macOS) for folding code, Ctrl-Shift-] or Cmd-Alt-] for unfolding, Ctrl-Alt-[ for folding all, and Ctrl-Alt-] for unfolding all.
Update fr-FR translation (#5738).
Update cs-CZ translation (#5775).

Under the Hood

Cache ESLint results to improve subsequent linter run speed (#5706).
Spawn shell when starting test GUI on Windows (#5685).
Markdown commands now check whether the provided target EditorView is parsed using a Markdown parser before running.
Move all keymaps into a single defaultKeymap.
Assume ** as default bold and * as default italic formatting for Markdown commands if the config field is not present.
Added a pandocLinkParser for properly parsing pandoc link attribute strings.

An Important Note for Windows Users

If you use Zettlr on Windows, we urgently recommend you to install this update. We will release a second update approximately one week after this update, which you may not be able to install on Windows right away due to Zettlr switching code signing certificates. Therefore, please absolutely make sure you install this update on your Windows computers.

For more context, please read our blog post that outlines our roadmap for the code signing certificate change, as well as our Community Forum post. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask them on the Community Forum, on Discord, or as a comment on our BlueSky or Mastodon accounts.

GUI and Functionality

Breaking Change: To better support the now recommended Wikilink syntax with titles ([[filename|Some title]]), links that use the old and not recommended syntax of adding titles from the time when Zettlr did not support titles ([Do not use this syntax]([[filename]])) can no longer be automatically replaced when renaming files (#5606).
Zettelkasten links with titles will now get properly replaced when renaming files (#5606).
Fixed an issue that prevented the FSAL cache clearing from proceeding appropriately.
Fix an issue that could lead to accidental overwriting of existing files in some cases (#4940; also previously #5460 in Zettlr 3.3.0).
Fixed malformed rendering of plain links into HTML links (#5587).
Fixed a bad interaction between the default keymap and inserting an Å character on macOS keyboards.
Fixed a bad interaction between the default keymap and inserting backticks on macOS keyboard layouts without deadkeys (#5517).
Fixed file exports not working after renaming file (#5574).
Links won't be pre-rendered if their title is empty, as this would hide the entire link syntax.
UI text has been improved throughout the app.

Under the Hood

Bump Pandoc to v3.6.3.
Bump chokidar to v4.0.3.
Bump Electron to v34.2.0.
Fixed the boot order of providers to ensure certain actions are taken before providers access each others (primary case: the FSAL needs to be booted asap).
Promisify the cache clearing procedure.
Switched Apple Code Signing Certificate from expiring to new one.
Improve the linting experience by also including a TypeScript lint on top of vue-tsc; in addition to stylistic and code-issues that are handled by ESLint this will capture serious TypeScript issues as what happened during the patch from 3.3.1 to 3.4.0 (see for context #5526); the new linting experience will run by default, the old linter has been renamed from lint to lint:code, and the new linter can be called individually using lint:types.
Rename value to target in Markdown AST ZettelkastenLink nodes to make it more explicit that this field contains the value and never the title.
Add new property targetRange to Markdown AST ZettelkastenLink nodes to allow for easy manipulation of link targets.

Please Backup Your Writing Statistics

This update includes a change in the writing statistics. While we extensively tested it, we would like you to backup your personal writing statistics. You can do so by going into Zettlr's data directory and simply make a copy of the file stats.json before launching the update. Your data directory is located at C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Roaming\Zettlr (Windows), /Users/<your username>/Library/Application support/Zettlr (macOS), or /home/<your username>/.config/Zettlr (Linux). Then, check if your writing statistics still look proper. If not, please report this. Thanks!

GUI and Functionality

New Feature: Images in the "other files" tab do now contain a small preview to help find the correct images
New Feature: Project settings can now override folder sorting, which means that any project folder will from now on be sorted like so: (1) the files within the folder in the order of the project settings; (2) all other files according to the folder's regular sort settings. Note that this requires all project files to reside in the top folder; included project files in subfolders will not be affected
New Feature: The formatting toolbar can now be toggled on or off in the preferences (#5207)
New Feature: Allow three-digit ordinal day of the year in IDs and filenames (%o; #5424)
Vim mode improvements:
- Mapped Vim's write and quit commands to saving and closing actions (#4720, #5463):
  - w: Executes a save command for the current file
  - q: Executes a close-file command for the current file
  - wq: Attempts to save the current file and then close it
  - Note that the ! argument for supressing the "Omit unsaved changes" dialog will not work, as the editor does not have the authority to tell main to simply omit work (this is a security feature)
- Movement keys (j/k) now account for line wrapping for a smoother navigation experience
- Default Shortcuts Restored: Unmapped C-f, C-t, and C-c in specific modes to re-enable default editor behaviors like search and task item shortcuts
Columns in the preferences window are now properly aligned (#5410)
Fix color scheme in readability mode (#5478)
Prevent initial startup update-check if the setting is unchecked (context: https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/commit/812899#r148519528)
Fix errors in, and update, German translation (de-DE)
Update Turkish translation (tr-TR) (#5461)
Fix "dancing list items" (#4602)
Zettlr finally counts and remembers character counts
The link preview and force-open workflows now expect internal/wiki-links that link to headings within the file ([[filename#heading-id]]) and can handle such links appropriately; the editors will not yet jump to the corresponding headings, but this will improve compatibility with other editors who already support this feature (#3727)
Fixed an edge case in rendering highlight marks
Fixed non-unique clipboard data paste filenames (#5449)
Fixed non-proportional images (especially very tall ones) overlaying other text below them (#5465)
The background color of the active line in typewriter mode no longer blocks the selection background (#5430)
Dropping or copy-pasting images from the file browser now inserts relative links to them again instead of offering to save a copy (#5475)
Code files can now also be indented and unindented as expected using Tab
Changing capitalization of filenames on Windows, macOS, or other case- insensitive file systems (e.g., testfile -> Testfile) no longer fails (#5460)
Fixed drag & drop behavior of open-able files onto the editor from the file browser; dropping any supported file onto the app will now attempt to open it (#5344)
Fixed export menu not remembering last selected custom commands (#5163)
Provide default reset-to-sizes for various split views

Under the Hood

Update Codemirror dependencies
Update Electron to v33.2.0
Update Electron forge to v7.5.0
Update various other dependencies
The PersistentDataContainer now uses proper data types, making usage more type-safe
Completely refactor the Statistics provider as well as the statistics display
Replace the deprecated registerFileProtocol call with the new recommended handle call for handling safe-file:// calls
Re-introduce linter rules; all of these are part of the common style we already use, but they got lost in one of the past ESLint upgrades:
- enforce single quotes across the codebase
- enforce proper object property spacing
- enforce type imports
Moved all keymaps to a centralized space, enabling us to customize them further in the future and streamlining the available keybindings
The document provider is now more strict when loading persisted window arrangements from disk on startup
Made many additional strings in the GUI translatable

Resolved Data Loss Issues

When Zettlr v3.0.0 was released, we started receiving reports by users mentioning that some files wouldn't properly save, potentially leading to data loss. After searching for the underlying root cause, we have now identified it as improper newline handling in files. Specifically, we have accidentally introduced a bug that would render Zettlr incapable of properly detecting Windows-style CRLF newlines. This means that Zettlr was only sometimes able to properly read and modify such files.

This update fixes this bug. Now, Zettlr is able to properly read and modify any file, regardless of whether it has been created on Windows, macOS, Linux, or even some older systems. We would like to apologize for this bug and thank you for sticking with Zettlr despite it.

Changes to the file filtering logic

The filter field in the file manager has always applied OR-logic when searching for files and workspaces. In this latest update, Zettlr changes to AND file filtering logic, meaning that only items matching all queries will be displayed when entering phrases separated by spaces.

As an example: Until now, searching for "Niklas Luhmann" would've surfaced files that contained either "Niklas" or "Luhmann," or both. From now on, searching for "Niklas Luhmann" will only show files that contain both "Niklas" and "Luhmann" and exclude files that miss one of these phrases.

GUI and Functionality

Feature: The attachment/assets/other file sidebar tab now also shows files found in the default image folder where applicable
Feature: The right-click context menu for external markdown links now contains an option to remove a link. When removing <link> style links, the link text remains as plain text. When removing [title](link) style links, the title text remains as plain text.
Change: When searching for files in the filter field, only files and workspaces that match all queries entered will be displayed
Fixed the French translation of unsaved-changes dialog actions. (#5177)
Fixed bugs with properly saving files (and retaining linefeeds) on Windows systems; now Zettlr should be capable of handling any type of linefeed (#5109)
Fixed an issue where checkboxes in various list controls would not be properly updated to reflect the actual, underlying value
Fix assets file icons in the sidebar
Design fixes in the sidebar
Fix: The file preview tooltip now respects the filename display settings
Fix: Focus input field when search in folder (global search) is triggered

Under the Hood

Upgrade Electron to v30.1.0 (cf. issue #5135 and Electron issue #41839)
Downgrade Linux builds to use Ubuntu 20.04 instead of 22.04 (#5137)
Fully abstract away newline handling from the internal logic. Now, newlines are always \n across the entire app. The actual newlines from the files will be stored in their respective file descriptor, and will be exclusively used on file reads (to replace them with \n) and file writes (to replace \n with)

Changes to the link detection

For a long time now, Zettlr would (sometimes aggressively so) detect plain links and display them in a rendered state. In some cases, this was nice as it would relieve you from having to surround such links with pointy or angled brackets.

However, especially in the latest evolution of this parser plugin, the link detection was a bit too aggressive and interfered, e.g., with emphasis highlighting. In this version, we have entirely removed our custom link detection and rely upon the more straight-forward way of detecting links.

Regarding your exporting experience, this should not have any impact, since the auto-link-detection feature wasn't enabled by default by Pandoc anyhow, but depending on how you have been writing, you may notice less detected links in your documents.

To add "plain" links (without using the full []()-syntax) from now on, simply surround them with angled brackets: <https://www.google.com> or <mail@example.com>. Note that the protocol (https://) is required, so <www.google.com> will not work.

This changes brings Zettlr's link functionality much more into alignment with other editors as well, since this is the way that many other applications handle links as well.

Introducing Wikilink Titles

This update brings a long-awaited change to Zettlr's handling of internal links (sometimes called Wikilinks). Specifically, with this version, Zettlr finally supports optional titles in such links. Your old links in the format [[link]] still work fine, but now you can add a title that is different from the link, separated by a pipe, or vertical bar character (|).

If such a title is given, Zettlr will use it in various ways to make your files more readable. For example, if you have the link renderer activated in the settings, it will take care of hiding the link target of Wikilinks as well as those of regular Markdown links.

Since there is no way of knowing which of the two parts is the link, and which is the title, Zettlr follows Pandoc's solution in allowing you to specify how internal links are structured for you. The default and recommended setting is to put links first, and titles second ([[link|title]]). This ensures compatibility with VimWiki, MediaWiki, Obsidian, and others. However, should you need to target GitHub wiki pages or another application that expects a title to come first, you can select the alternative option ([[title|link]]).

In order to make Pandoc aware of your choice, you can add one of the following reader extensions to your export profiles: wikilinks_title_after_pipe or wikilinks_title_before_pipe.

Lastly, due to this improvement, we have changed the default setting for "link with filename" from "always" to "never", since it will be more ergonomic to use a custom link title directly instead of having the filename pop up after the link. This default setting applies only to new installations automatically; so if you already installed Zettlr, you can manually switch it.

Re-enabling old Link-Title-Syntax

After the release of Zettlr v3.0.0, some users have complained that their internal links have stopped working. It turns out that quite a lot were using Logseq's syntax for adding titles to internal links ([Title]([[Link]])), which we broke during a refactor of the Markdown parser. This update partially restores this link functionality, allowing you to Cmd/Ctrl-Click them to follow these links again.

Note that we have not implemented other parts yet, and we recommend the more common [[wikilinks]] or [regular markdown links](./file.md).

Preferences Window Overhaul

This release marks the debut of our UX/UI artist Artem Barinov who spent the better half of 2023 redesigning the entire preferences window from scratch. While this change narrowly didn't make it into 3.0.0, we are more than excited to introduce this new and sleek overhaul in this version.

The new window now follows a much more consistent design philosophy. While we have kept the broad tabbed outline, the settings have now been moved into smaller blocks that contain sets of related settings. Furthermore, instead of having to remember where a setting is located, you can now directly search for it using the new search bar.

We also took the opportunity to change, rename, relabel, and remove settings so that a bit of older remnants are now gone. Overall, the experience of changing the settings should now be much smoother, and we hope you like the change. In the coming updates, you can improve many more improvements on the UX side of things!

Project Overhaul: Full Control Over Your Files

Projects are at the heart of Zettlr. As a writing toolbox primarily targeted at academics, journalists, and writers, it must cater not just to simple note- taking workflows, but also to serious writing. Because of this, Zettlr ships with a project feature since the very beginning (since version 0.18.0, released on Jul 20, 2018, to be precise).

However, for a long time the feature attempted to piggyback on the way your files were displayed. This meant that (a) the order in which your files were weaved together into the project file depended on the sorting of the directory, and (b) there was no clear way to exclude files that naturally amass during the lifetime of a project, such as notes, backup files, and miscellaneous.

Zettlr 3.1.0 fixes this issue by introducing a rather small, but powerful change to the way projects work. We have removed the difficult to understand glob- patterns that were introduced in a less-than-ideal attempt to fix some of the complexity-issues that were introduced later (such as displaying file titles instead of filenames, and others). Instead, you can now explicitly select which files will be included in your bound export files – and in which order.

The new file list, which you can find in the project properties dialog, aims to be dead-simple to understand, yet give you back the certainty which files will end up where in your export – without a doubt.

This also means a change to your projects: After this update, the glob patterns will be removed from your .ztr-directory files and replaced with an (initially empty) array of files to be included in your project. That means that you will have to select the files you want to include in a project once after the update.

Managing this list in the project properties is simple: The "Files" tab includes a list of all files available within the project's folder structure. To select a file for export, click the "+"-button to move it up and include it in the export. Next, you can use the "Up"- and "Down"-buttons to change the order of the files within your export. The "-"-button removes a file again and moves it back down to the list of ignored files. Changes are immediately applied and persisted to your disk.

When you now export the project, Zettlr will use only the files you have selected, and put them in the appropriate order.

Should you have deleted a file that you originally included in the list of files, Zettlr will show you a warning message as soon as you export it so that you can have a second look to not send off a file that's missing a crucial part of your work. Such missing files are shown atop of the available files and feature a "-"-button which allows you to remove them from the list. We opted for this approach of you manually having to remove missing links, since it makes it transparent which files are missing so you can take the appropriate action (especially if it was an accidental deletion).

LanguageTool Improvements

The first update to Zettlr's LanguageTool integration concerns the language detection. This update ships with two improvements:

Zettlr implements LanguageTool's "Preferred Variants" setting
LanguageTool respects the lang frontmatter property

Those who prefer writing in British English (instead of, e.g., US English) had to resort to manually switching the automatically detected language from en-US to en-GB every time they opened a file. This has to do with fact that LanguageTool's auto-detector cannot reliably distinguish between variants of some languages (English, German, Portuguese, and Catalan). That is why LT implements a "Preferred Variants" setting that allows you to specify which variant you prefer when writing in any of these languages. Zettlr now implements this setting so that when LT auto-detects the language, it will choose that variant if it detects that, e.g., English is the language. You can adapt this in the settings.

Second, LanguageTool now respects the lang property in YAML frontmatters. This will come in especially handy for people writing bilingual and where LanguageTool has troubles auto-detecting the primary language. By setting the property lang to the language of the document (e.g., en-CA), LanguageTool will default to that one instead of choosing the auto-detection. As an added benefit, Pandoc also supports this property to localize some things here and there (read more at https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#language-variables).

Note that both improvements only apply to the initial loading of a document. You can always override the language on a per-document basis using the status bar.

GUI and Functionality

Feature: Zettlr now supports titles in internal (wiki) links; the default setting instructs the parser to expect first the link, and then the title ([[link|title]]), which ensures compatibility to, e.g., VimWiki, MediaWiki, or Obsidian, whereas the alternative setting ([[title|link]]) is compatible to GitHub wiki syntax. Remember that you need to enable the corresponding option on the Pandoc Markdown reader (wikilinks_title_after_pipe or wikilinks_title_before_pipe, respectively) if you wish to export files with this option
Feature: Project Overhaul. Now you can properly manage which files will be exported in projects, and in which order
Feature: Zettlr can now suggest you emojis during autocompletion. Emojis use the same trigger character as the snippets autocomplete, a colon (:); and Emojis will always be sorted below your snippets -- you can turn this off in the editor settings
Feature: We've completely redesigned the preferences dialog; now it is more aligned with the system preferences on macOS and Windows, allows searching and follows a more stringent structure (special thanks to our UX/UI artist Artem for spending almost an entire year redesigning it from the ground up!)
Feature: The assets manager now provides buttons to open the defaults and snippets directories directly from within the app
Feature: The table insertion popover now displays how many rows and columns will be inserted
Feature: A new setting allows to highlight whitespace across the app (#1123)
Feature: Implemented the LanguageTool Preferred Variants setting; now you can select variants of certain languages (English, German, Portuguese, and Catalan) for cases in which the automatic detection may pick the wrong one
Feature: LanguageTool now respects the lang YAML frontmatter property (if present and conforming to simple BCP-47 tags, e.g., de or de-DE), instead of defaulting to "auto"; this allows you to specify the languages of your documents instead of relying on LanguageTool to figure it out; may not work with more exotic tag variants (such as de-DE-x-simple-language)
Change: The attachment sidebar no longer considers the "open folder" for fetching its "other files" -- instead it will use the last focused file's folder
Change: The shortcut for deleting a directory has been removed from the menu as it provided an opaque way of deleting a seemingly random folder; now deleting a folder requires right-clicking the corresponding directory which makes the process more transparent
Change: Removed the option for choosing to sort by either file creation or last modification time, since that can also be inferred from whichever time you choose to display
Change: Removed the option for activating or disabling automatic file creation upon following internal links; now this will happen automatically as long as the "custom folder" option points to an existing folder; to disable this functionality simply remove the folder path
Fixed a bug where recent documents would not turn up in the menu
Fixed the sidebar shortcut: It is now Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+0 (to align with the file manager shortcut, which is Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+1)
Custom protocols should now be opened without problems by Zettlr (#3853)
Added Tamil (India) translation (#4848)
Removed the custom plain link parser out of two reasons: (1) It was a tad too aggressive, detecting links even where none were wanted; (2) Pandoc doesn't support auto-links in such a way as we have implemented it, leading to inconsistencies in exports
The YAML frontmatter is now ignored for the purposes of previewing files, showing a more meaningful preview of its contents (#4598)
Improve pasting behavior: Now text from Microsoft Word or Excel will be pasted as text, instead of offering to insert an image of the selection
Fix pasting behavior: Now Zettlr should properly paste most formatted text without too much noise (in the form of comments, styles, and other additions)
Fix restart-dialog showing multiple times for the same options (#4768)
Fix the active typewriter line background color in dark mode
Fixed an issue where gutter markers were not equally offset when typewriter mode was active (#4918)
Fixed non-working file deletion menu item (#3894)
Fixed a bug that would not ask users to save their changes when closing the last main window on Windows or Linux (#4898)
Fixed a bug that would not properly restore the open directory on application boot (#3797)
Fixed an issue that would break drag & drop behavior of editor panes when the path name contained a colon on non-Windows systems (#4822)
Fixed an issue where the re-ordering of list item numbers would not ensure that lists start at 1
Fixed an issue that has removed the custom background color from the Bielefeld and Bordeaux themes (#4913)
Fixed broken context menu options for images (#4893)
Implemented superscript and subscript HTML rendering in the internal Markdown- to-HTML converter (#4943)
Improved the TableEditor to more reliably parse tables; also, when a table could not be rendered out of any reason, the editor will simply remain dormant and not render the table instead of messing up the entire document
Improvements to how the Markdown AST handles table parsing, which will improve Markdown-to-HTML conversion both within the TableEditor as well as when copying as HTML
Fixed an issue that would make a context menu on macOS appear offset from the actual mouse position if the window's GUI was scaled absolutely (as per the preferences); now the context menu should always appear exactly where it should be
Updated the CodeMirror dependencies to resolve an issue where users of keyboards with Alt-G being assigned to some character were unable to type that (specifically, Swiss-Mac keyboard users could not type an @)
Fixed a bug that would not properly highlight PHP syntax in code blocks
The link renderer will now also hide internal link/Wikilink links and only show the titles, if enabled
Internal link tooltips will now show regardless of where inside the link your mouse cursor is
Added a visible error message to two places in which saving documents may go wrong so that users have visible feedback if their changes are actually persisted to disk (#4229)
Re-enable following internal Links in the format [Title]([[Link]]) by clicking them with Cmd/Ctrl pressed
Fixed a bug that would not properly check for autocorrect values during a spell check
The cursor on the editor scrollbars should now be a regular pointer instead of a text cursor (#4441)
The global search now differentiates between the total amount of matches and the number of matched files
The search button in the global search will now be disabled during a search
Due to the new ability to add link titles, the default setting for "Link with filename" is now set to "never" for new installations; you may consider changing this as well
The updater now contains a message indicating when Zettlr last checked for updates (#4963)
Fixed a bug that would sometimes make the "New file" command hang (#4785)
Fixed a bug on Windows and Linux that would not make the context menu on the status bar's MagicQuotes handler appear
Fixed a bug in the print window (#4902)
Fixed a bug in the image pasting modal handler (#5007)
Fixed a bug caused by a workaround from a few years ago, making dialogs modal again (see #4952)
Fixed an issue that would prevent the status bar in Code editors to switch between light and dark
Fixed an issue that would not show the color picker's color in the tag manager on Windows
Fixed list item indentation in Markdown and Code files
Fixed a bug that would make Zettlr always save files with regular newlines (LF), even if the file originally uses carriage returns (CR) or a mixture (CRLF or LFCR), leading, among other things, to save issues (#4959)
Fixed a bug that would make opening and closing folders in the file manager very hard
The importer will ask for a target directory first now, and no longer use the openDirectory configuration value as a metric (due to a limitation in the dialog engine, this is a bit opaque and will be improved; for more info see issue #5084)
Fixed an issue with the AST parser that has made it impossible to successfully parse Markdown tables with empty cells (#5025)
Fixed an issue with inserting Markdown tables via the popover (#5028)
Add a somewhat more informative message to the directory selection in the file importing workflow
Improved how focusing the various open editors works (#4889)
Fixed an issue where some borders in between split views wouldn't be drawn in more complex layouts
Fixed an issue that would not add a newly created file outside the loaded workspaces to the list of standalone files, leading to various minor annoyances around other parts of the app
It should now be more difficult to add faulty autocorrect entries (#4961)

Under the Hood

Version updates:
- Pandoc: 3.1.13
- Electron: 30.0.2
Switched from the vue-recommended to the vue3-recommended ESLint ruleset
Removed the config option sortingTime since that can be inferred from the option fileMetaTime
Removed the config option zkn.autoCreateLinkedFiles, since that can be inferred from the option zkn.customDir
Simplified tab bar tab retention logic across reloads
Add the ability to programmatically open the assets window with specified tab
Failure to fetch a link preview will now simply log a verbose message instead of an error
Reimplement configuration guard options as Maps to allow for volatile state
Fully remove the renderers's dependency on Node.js's path module to prepare for fully sandboxing the window code; instead polyfill the required functions, testing them against the module's behavior
Completely sandbox renderers
Switched the popover logic away from deprecated plugin syntax to child components with Teleport (#4663)
No more JavaScript: With this update, the entire code base (sans build scripts) is written in TypeScript.
Migrated from Electron's deprecated clipboard API to the native Browser API
Migrated the entire main window store state from Vuex to Pinia
Fixed an issue with the FSALCache provider where we accidentally stored the descriptors as strings, increasing the complexity of loading the cache values (see #4269)
The internal Markdown-to-HTML converter now respects (potentially significant) whitespace in the Markdown source to construct the HTML
The TableEditor now parses any table directly from the underlying parser to ensure that the representation is (almost) identical to the parse state and reduce complexity when parsing the table; several edge cases remain
Removed a check for whether certain commands exist; instead we now attempt to run them, and if they do not succeed, we catch that error instead; removed commandExists as it appears to have a few minor issues on Windows installs
The config provider now allows specifying options that will cause an event to be emitted instructing every open MainEditor to reload itself; this can be used to change options that affect non-reloadable components such as the parser without having to manually close and re-open affected editors, or forcing a reload of the entire main window
MainEditors can now be programmatically instructed by the main process to reload themselves with the broadcast event reload-editors
Added the commands shortcut:install and shortcut:uninstall to add develop shortcuts on Linux systems, allowing the simple launching of a binary compiled from source (rather than the provided binaries)
Fixed an issue with showing the appropriate platformVersion in the about debug info tab
Move preventNavigation utility function into the lifecycle handlers to reduce boilerplate code and make the app more secure
Switched to the new YAML parser (@codemirror/lang-yaml)
Improved linting to include plain JavaScript files, but exclude type checking
Add build number (= git commit hash) to the debug info of the about dialog
Simplify exporter types
Retire the test-gui command; instead now the start command does the same; similarly, start won't touch any existing Zettlr configuration anymore
Simplify CodeMirror theming, retire the themeManager and replace it with a simpler, more general darkTheme extension
Disallow fuzzy matching during updates of translation files; previously this has led to inaccurate results (see, e.g., #5042)
All renderer processes (= all windows) now have access to Pinia
Markdown AST parser is now its own module
Removed openDirectory functionality completely from the documents manager; instead it is now again managed entirely by using the config provider, removing tons of superfluous code
Properly unmount CodeMirror instances when the MainEditor is unmounted
Reinstated ability to style tags individually again; by targeting classes with the format .cm-zkn-tag-<tagName> (#4589)
Fixed a bug that would prevent rendering of citations in certain edge cases (#5069)
The citation parser is now more strict when it comes to @Author [p. 123] citations: Now only spaces are allowed between the citation key and the suffix
Improved the i18n runs over the software, improving translatability (#5122)

A Note on Custom CSS

This update includes a full refactor of the theming: The editor themes (Berlin, Frankfurt, Bielefeld, Karl-Marx-Stadt, and Bordeaux) have now moved to their own theme files and do not come with standard CSS anymore. This heavily un-clutters the codebase, but it may impact your Custom CSS, should you use this feature. We have ensured that no class names change and that the styling is mostly the same, but the possibility of having to adapt the Custom CSS may arise for some of you.

GUI and Functionality

Fixed a visual issue that would handle overly long window titles improperly
Fixed Tab not indenting/unindenting code in the CodeEditors (snippets, profiles, etc.)
Fixed a precedence issue that would make it impossible to use autocomplete while filling in a snippet; now, accepting a potential autocomplete has a higher precedence than moving to the next tabstop of a snippet, making working with snippets more ergonomic
Images now render more appropriately in inline-contexts
Updated the German translation
Fixed the keyboard shortcut for inserting footnotes on Windows and Linux
Removed the accent color setting: now the accent color will always be the system accent color on macOS and Windows, and Zettlr's brand green on Linux; themes do not provide an accent color anymore
Restored syntax highlighting for inline math code
Fixes an issue that would frequently may make the cursor appear to jump or a dialog appearing warning of external changes (#4729; #4732)
Added some translations
Generating link previews no longer downloads the entire link target if the content is not preview-able
Improved layout of link previews
Overly long summaries of link previews are now shortened
Project properties now adequately resolve the readers and writers of the existing profiles, enabling the usage of profiles with extended readers/writers (#4699)
GraphView's labels are now rendered filled instead of stroked, to make it easier to read the labels.
The GraphView does now support multi-window, so clicking a link will open it in the last focused window. If the file is already open in a leaf, that file will be in that leaf, otherwise it will open the file in the last focused leaf.
Alt+Click in GraphView will force the document to be opened in a new tab.
Zettelkasten links and tags will now be output by our custom Markdown-to-HTML parser (i.e., in various places in the app as well as on Copy with Style)

Under the Hood

Moved all themes from the *.less-files into proper theme plugins for CodeMirror v6; this means that they will not provide any global styles anymore; any applicable styling has been moved to more appropriate places (CodeMirror plugins as well as the WindowChrome and the various remaining *.less files). We tested the changes out and in our settings, no changes were necessary; sometimes you may need to adapt class definitions
Remove unused color variable definitions
Move gray color palette to the Window Chrome component
Fixed an issue where the font definitions were borked and required usage of !important to make them work (#4719)
Upgraded all available CodeMirror components to the most recent version
Replaced fs.unlink with fs.rm in safeDelete to support recursive removal of directories
fsal-directory::removeChild now calls pathExists instead of isFile to make sure directories also are removed in removeChild
pathExists wraps fs.promises.access.
(CodeMirror) Move plugin-specific base styles from the main override as well as from the themes to the respective plugin files
Bump Pandoc to version 3.1.9
Fixed a weird layouting issue with the code block backgrounds
DocumentManager's openFile does now handle the case when windowId and leafId is undefined, by keeping track on the last used editor.

READ THIS FIRST!

This update brings a host of changes and new features. If you're upgrading from an older version of Zettlr, you will have to re-do a few things because due to the extensive changes, we had to adapt how your data is persisted. Here's the quick list:

Your open documents will have to be re-opened once. Regardless of which files were open previously, they will all be closed after the update.
There are no more unsaved in-memory files.
Two default settings have changed in order to maximize benefits from the new features: Avoid new tabs is now set to false (since split-panes also allows you to spread out your open documents across several panes and windows), and Always reload remote changes is now set to true by default.
The defaults system has changed. You will see new export options that weren't there before, and you will see some weird export.format.yaml and import.format.yaml export options. These are the "old" profiles we have kept in case you made modifications. We suggest you copy over all changes to the new profiles and then delete them, or rename those old ones to more memorable names. Read more below.
The TableEditor has received a better save strategy to prevent data loss. As it is impossible to fully control the data flow from the visual table element into the underlying Markdown document, this data flow is now explicit: Tables now feature a save button (with a disk icon) at the top of the table. Its background will be green as long as the table has not been modified. Once it it modified, the background will turn red. Click the button to apply all changes to the document.
Quicklook windows are completely gone now.
Footnote editing has changed: Instead of editing the footnote in-place by Cmd/Ctrl-clicking it, there is now an "Edit" button inside the footnote preview which, upon clicking, will bring you to the footnote context. This has the benefit that you will have full syntax highlighting support as well as any shortcuts and commands you may need.
We have deprecated the Zettelkasten link start and end configuration settings. Both are now fixed to [[ and ]] respectively. We have figured that nobody needs to configure this, and it makes many parts of our code easier.

Correcting Ordered List Numbers on Move

Moving lines that are part of an ordered list using 'Alt-UpArrow'/'Alt-DownArrow' will now also correct the list numbers of any affected lists after the move.

New Icons on Windows and Linux

For 3.0, we decided that it's time to give our app icons a facelift. For the past six years, Zettlr sported working, but relatively bland icons to convey its existence on the taskbar to its users. The new icons still convey the same message, but you will notice that they now integrate much better into the new Windows 11 Fluent UI.

We decided to exchange the icons on Linux as well. They may not seamlessly integrate into your specific UI, but we feel they will definitely look more modern than the previous iteration of icons.

With this move, the Windows and Linux experience of Zettlr finally moves on par to the macOS experience, which has received an updated icon with the release of Zettlr 2.0.

Split-Panes and Multiple Windows

A long awaited feature has made it into this version: Now you can open multiple windows and you can split the editor area in every window into multiple parts, so-called editor panes (sometimes we may call them "leafs" since internally they are represented as a tree structure. Feel free to remind us in that case that we're talking to humans, not our code). This means you can now open as many files as you wish at the same time, and you can spread them out across multiple windows. This will especially benefit workflows that rely on having open multiple files side by side to copy information or to read them. However, if you are happy with the old ways, you can of course opt not to use them. Here's how it works:

You can open a new window by choosing the corresponding menu item in the Windows submenu, or by pressing Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+N.
You can now drag document tabs not just within the tab bar, but also onto the editor area. If you move a document tab to the borders of the editor, a shimmer will appear that indicates that you can split the editor to that side. If you drop the file on one of the four borders of the editor, this will split the corresponding editor in two along the specified direction (left, right, top, bottom) and also move the file into that new pane.
You can also move document tabs between multiple panes by simply dropping them in the center of an editor pane. As long as there's no shimmer, the file will be moved instead. You can also drop a file onto a tabbar of one of the editors, which will have the same effect (but it will be indicated with the same blue shimmer as when you are splitting an editor).
After you have closed the last file inside such a pane, it will automatically close itself. If the pane was part of a split, the other pane will then occupy the place of the now closed editor pane. To create the pane again, simply drag another file to the correct border of an existing editor pane.
You can resize the panes at will. Unlike the sidebar and file manager, we have not implemented any size limits, so with a little bit of care, you can create your unique mosaic of files.
Since we are now not limited to one active file and one set of open files per window, these notions have changed their meaning. Now, every editor pane has one set of open files and one active file. Each window also remembers which pane was last active so that global features (such as the sidebar) can show you information based on the most recently focused editor pane's active file.
Most contextual information (table of contents, list of references, etc.) will now update based on the most recently focused editor. In order to make those places show information relating to one of the open editors, simply click with your mouse inside to focus them.

New Defaults/Profile File System

This update introduces a new way to work with defaults files. At a glance, here's what has changed:

Zettlr now understands the reader and writer properties of defaults files
It uses those properties to determine if a file can be used for importing or exporting, and displays the appropriate files in the relevant places for you to choose
You can now create new defaults files, rename existing ones, or remove them
When changing the writer or reader for such a file, this change will be recognized by Zettlr and be treated accordingly
This also means that Zettlr will from now on only ship with a minimum set of profiles; but any additional import/export formats can be created by you with just one click
Additionally, because of this, you are now able to export LaTeX files directly without running them through a Markdown interpreter first, allowing you to, e.g., create beamer slides or write plain TeX files within Zettlr
Furthermore, we have dropped our internal reveal.js exporter, since Pandoc supports everything we did out of the box (and better) than our exporter

Tag Manager Update

The tag manager has received a necessary face lift. Now, the tag manager shows all your tags and allows you to assign/un-assign colors and descriptions. This makes it easier to assign colors to certain tags without having to remember the tag first. Additionally, it gives you a better overview over your tags. The info is now being propagated better across the app, with more places showing the assigned colors for tags.

Additionally, you now have a better way to consolidate your tags: Within the tag manager, you can now rename tags in order to clean up your tagging system.

Splash Screen

As more and more users have increasingly large workspaces, we receive an increasing amount of feedback that the app start seems sluggish. To indicate that nothing is wrong and Zettlr simply needs time to recreate the cache, we have implemented a splash screen that shows if the file loading isn't finished after one second and displays the boot process to show what is happening behind the hood.

Migration Guide

There are two instances where you will want to migrate something.

Old defaults files

Since Zettlr will never remove any data without asking, it will keep the previous files in your defaults directory. Now that their filename is also meaningful, you can see them by their naming structure: import.format.yaml and export.format.yaml. You are free to remove them or rename and keep them.

Zettlr ships with a set of new files that are now additionally appropriately named. Those files are "protected". Protected files have a small lock icon next to their name. Protected means that if you delete or rename them, they will automatically be recreated. You can use this to your advantage: By deleting such a file, you are effectively resetting it to factory default (good if you forgot what you changed). By renaming such a file, you can effectively make a copy to have several versions of the same settings depending on your needs.

Reveal.js Presentations

Since we have now dropped our internal reveal.js exporter, there are a few changes you have to make to your existing reveal.js presentations. First, the theme must now be defined in a YAML frontmatter instead of via the dropdown. A minimal working YAML frontmatter will look like this:

---
theme: league
---

... the rest of the file

Supported theme values are:

beige
black (the default, in this case you can omit the theme variable)
blood
league
moon
night
serif
simple
sky
solarized
white

Then, in order to get a working reveal.js presentation, you have to make sure that the property standalone: true is inside the profile (this is the default). In order to additionally copy everything into the HTML file to create a truly self-contained presentation, set the property self-contained: true.

All other things should work as before, but may require a small tweak here or there.

GUI and Functionality

New Feature: You can now open multiple main windows, each with their own files loaded
New Feature: You can now arbitrarily split the editor area into multiple editor panes to keep open as many files at the same time as you wish
New Feature: After a long time, you can now again drag and drop entries in the table of contents in the sidebar to rearrange sections of your file
New Feature: Overhauled, improved, and streamlined the defaults file system used by the importer and exporter
New Feature: You can now pin tabs, which prevents them from being closed
New Feature: The editor will now check your Markdown for potential style issues (can be disabled in the preferences)
New Feature: In the combined filemanager mode, you can now see writing targets as a ring progress bar in the position of the file icon
New Feature: Zettlr can now automatically update internal links (Wiki/ Zettelkasten style) if you rename a file
New Feature: When you hover over a link, you can now get a link preview
New Feature: Zettlr now features a LanguageTool integration. You can turn it on in the Spellchecker settings and even provide your LanguageTool username and an API key to unlock premium features
New Feature: You can now activate a statusbar that shows some context- specific information for each editor pane you have open; this statusbar also shows you information for code editor panels, e.g., in the assets manager
New Feature: Changing a certain set of configuration options will make Zettlr ask you whether you wish to restart the app for the changes to take effect
New Feature: While modifying import and export profiles, Zettlr will now check them for validity, and inform you of any potential errors
New Feature: You can now specify the Pandoc working directory in a file's frontmatter with the property pandoc_working_dir within the zettlr object
New Feature: Right-clicking on a file or directory now also gives you the option to copy the absolute file or folder path to the clipboard
New Feature: There is now a new menu item that allows you to conveniently clear the FSAL cache in case of some errors
New Feature: A new gutter to the left side of the editor will now display arrow buttons next to footnote reference bodies that will select the corresponding footnote reference up in the text upon click
New Feature: Add splash screen to indicate FSAL loading progress
Note preview tooltips now display a sanitized HTML version of the note's Markdown contents
New Feature: Both entire YAML documents (including both profiles and regular files) as well as YAML frontmatter sections in Markdown documents are now linted, providing a visual indication that a piece of YAML code contains syntax errors that prevents, e.g., Zettlr from detecting the file's title or Pandoc from properly reading the metadata of the document
Removed the "Get LaTeX" menu item since (hopefully) now the advice in the docs and in the tutorial are sufficient
Replaced the old Markdown-to-HTML and HTML-to-Markdown converter with more up- to-date modules. This should not change how pasting from HTML or copying as HTML work, but it could.
The TableEditor now has a clear data saving strategy: Whenever you change a table, you need to manually click the disk icon at the top of the table to apply all your changes to the document so that it can then be saved
Quicklook windows are gone completely now, since they can be more than replaced by the new split views and multiple windows
The windows now finally correctly remember their positions, fixing an old bug
Improved the link tooltip inside the editor; it will show faster now and is easier to access
Zettlr now recognizes Quarto Markdown files (*.qmd)
Code files (e.g. *.tex or *.json) now have line numbers enabled and the margins of the main editor removed by default
The sidebar tabs are now static at the top, meaning you don't have to scroll up within a long list just to see the tabbar
Lists (especially in the assets manager) now also allow you to remove entries with a right click
Fixed the Simple PDF, Textbundle, and Textpack exporters
Added new variables for snippets:
- CURRENT_ID: Holds the currently assigned Zettelkasten ID to the file
- FILENAME: Holds the filename of the current file
- DIRECTORY: Holds the directory path for the current file
- EXTENSION: Holds the file extension for the current file
Fixed inability to move the text cursor while renaming files in the file tree
Fixed ability to case-sensitively rename files
Fixed an incredibly dangerous bug that would lead to data loss if the app was being shut down before the statistics provider has been booted up; in which case the provider would overwrite sometimes several years worth of statistics with empty data
Added the ability to use mouse buttons 4 and 5 for forward/backward navigation
Fixed a visual glitch on Linux where in dark mode the active tab would have no colored bottom border
Added a third exporter option: You can now have Zettlr ask you everytime where it should store an exported file
In case of an error, the error dialog will now also present the Pandoc error code
Fixed a minor bug in toolbar toggle controls that necessitated clicking them twice to bring them into the "active" state (holds especially true for the sidebar toggle)
Fixed faulty updates on Windows: Now the downloaded file should be opened without any errors
Middle-mouse clicks on the collapse/uncollapse indicators in the file tree should no longer trigger scrolling behavior on Windows
File tree items now show their absolute path on mouse hover
Clicking a directory will now also uncollapse it without having to click on the arrow
The graph view now uses as labels YAML frontmatter titles, first headings level 1, or a filename without extension based on the preferences
Fixed a usability issue on macOS where if you wanted to select a BibTeX file for your citations you had to click through intransparent buttons before being able to; now you can immediately select both CSL JSON and BibTeX files
Parsed links will now show the correctly resolved link as titles
The file tree now properly cuts too long file and directory names, indicating these with an ellipsis, rather than simply cutting off the text mid-letter
Pressing Cmd/Ctrl+S while a TableEditor is focused, this will now trigger an update that applies the changes to the underlying document. In other words, when editing a table, you can press Cmd/Ctrl+S twice to first apply any changes from the table to the document and second save the document itself.
The editor now recognizes Pandoc attribute syntax (e.g., {.unnumbered})
Added lua syntax highlighting support
Improved the tutorial to make use of the new split views
Citation keys in the autocomplete dropdown are now sorted by number of occurrences in the text
Fixed the readability mode color gradient (red -> purple -> blue -> green)
The "Save changes" dialog is now simpler and easier to understand
The main editor is finally properly styled and looks more natural to work with
Pre-rendered citations within Zettlr now respect the composite flag, meaning that Some sentence by @Author2015 renders as Some sentence by Author (2015) instead of Some sentence by (Author 2015)
Tags now include a measure of informativeness or uniqueness, called Inverse Document Frequency (IDF); the higher this value the more informative a tag is. This number is shown in the tag manager, and tags are ordered by this in some places
The file autocomplete now also includes links to not-yet-existing files. This enables you to define links to files that you may want to create at another point in time and ensure that all files that link to this file include the correct link
The editor now uses the built-in search panel from CodeMirror
Added support for COBOL syntax highlighting
Zettlr can now recognize changes to the Zettlr directory files (where things such as sorting and project settings are stored), which means that, if you have Zettlr open on two computers and synchronize your files, changes you make in one app should be picked up by the other
Zettlr can now detect changes to the status of a directory as a git repository during runtime
The "Characters without spaces" info is no longer present in the toolbar counter widget; the "characters" count now represents always the count without spaces across the app
Mermaid charts now dynamically switch themes between default and dark depending on the app's display
In various parts of the app, URLs will now be displayed in a shortened format if they are long and the space is limited
If you make use of glob-patterns to filter which files will be exported during project exports, you will now get a visible error message if your glob- patterns have removed all files so that none remain to be exported
Clicking on the "Project Properties" button in a directory properties popup with activated project functionality now closes the popup
Redid the emphasis renderer to work on the SyntaxTree directly, which makes the emphasis render more properly and now works much faster than before
Users on macOS can now disable window vibrancy
Non-existing citekeys in the document no longer cause the list of references to be empty
Dark mode is now set to system by default for all operating systems, not just macOS/Windows
A new "match whole word" setting allows to control whether AutoCorrect can also correct partial words
The tutorial is now available in Dutch as well.
The combined file tree is now more verbose when it comes to icons: Folders now always have icons to indicate that they're folders (can be overridden with a project icon or a custom icon), and Markdown files have a more distinct icon
Made the code block autocomplete more resilient in interaction with European keyboard layouts' dead key mechanism
Contrain tooltips to a reasonable size, mainly to prevent overly long lines that are uncomfortable to read when the tooltip spans an entire fullscreen window

Under the Hood

Refactored the main editor component further
Refactored the Sidebar panels into their own respective components
Upgrade Electron to 25.x.x
Upgrade Pandoc to 3.1.6.2
Pandoc is now also available natively for Apple Silicon (darwin arm64)
Upgrade Chart.js to 4.x.x
Upgrade CodeMirror to version 6
Upgrade to Yarn v2
Exchange electron-devtools-installer with electron-devtools-assembler, as the former appears to be unmaintained
Moved from Electron Builder to Electron Forge for building Debian and RPM- packages, since Electron Builder seems to produce a few errors which Forge doesn't
Switch from deprecated @clr/icons to @cds/core
Pandoc logs are now logged in every case
Improve the display and functionality of log messages
Switched the configuration file management for the different service providers from the previously very bodged methods to the unified and new PersistentDataContainer
Changed the default ports for the logging server to 9001 to avoid collisions with PHP fpm installations on development systems
The yaml frontmatter title property is now its own property on file descriptors to centralize the extraction logic and save some code on the renderer's side
Extracted the ID extraction functionality to its own utility function
Fixed a bug that would incorrectly detect Python comments or C++ pragmas as tags
Removed all Meta descriptors; now all descriptors are unified across main and renderer processes
Documents are now no longer managed by the editor leafs. Instead, they are managed by the document provider
Completely removed all instances of hash; the FSAL cache now is being called with absolute file paths. Hashed paths are only used to determine the shard.
Exchanged nspell with nodehun so that we can load any Hunspell-compatible dictionary file in Zettlr, including the previously too-complex ones such as the Italian or Portuguese dictionaries
Fixed the build pipeline so that native Node modules are now code-signed and work on macOS and Windows, meaning that chokidar should not need to fall back to CPU intensive polling anymore
Sandbox print preview window iframe elements
The update check will no longer block the boot cycle, making start up times fast even in degraded Wifi contexts where there is a connection, but extremely slow
Zettlr now attempts to extract the version strings for supported external programs (such as Pandoc, Git, and Quarto) and displays them in the About panel
Exchanged Zettlr Translate system with gettext
Removed the translation provider, since its remaining functionality to list available dictionary files and translations has now been moved to the main command hub
Removed the Zettlr class; the last remnant of the old, class-based system
Remove deprecated modules svg-inline-loader, raw-loader, and file-loader
Removed unused Markdown Syntax Tree tags
Separate frontmatter detection and inner (YAML) parse responsibilities
Remove the info property from YAML frontmatter blocks in Markdown AST

This update changes the scroll effect on the document tab bar to be smooth instead of snappy. To revert to the old behavior, you can use the following Custom CSS:

body div#tab-container {
  scroll-behavior: auto;
}

GUI and Functionality

New Feature: You can now switch between zooming the whole GUI or just the editor font size when using the zoom menu items/shortcuts
Restores the display of links in the related files section of the sidebar
Differentiate between inbound, outbound, and bidirectional links in the related files section
Fix related files display and link reporting
Added a smooth scrolling effect for the tab bar
Added classes in order to conditionally style the related files section based on the type of relation, the classes are tags if the relation is based on keywords, inbound for incoming links, outbound for outgoing links, and bidirectional for links from and to the said file
Clicking on math now places the cursor correctly, reducing friction
Select the image markup when clearing a rendered image by clicking on it
Image captions do not disappear anymore while you are editing it, even if you move the mouse out of the image area
Improve icon alignment in the related files section
Relaxed conditions for emphasis rendering by just excluding word-characters
Tab characters are no longer detected as spelling errors
You can now choose to indent using tab characters instead of spaces
Do not close the file left to a new usaved file upon saving the file
Fixed a weird race condition in which the file manager would remain ignorant of an in-memory file after it has been saved to disk
Changes to your files should now be detected immediately also on macOS
Fixed a bug that would disable both types of magic quotes (single + double) if you disabled only one type
Improve styling of progress bars on all platforms

Under the Hood

Resolve links on-demand in the link provider
Factor out the clickAndClear functionality to its own helper
Improve editor image CSS
Factor out the checks to see if we can render some element to unify behavior across rendering plugins
Update most pure Node scripts from CommonJS to ESM in order to support the new versions of csso, chalk, and got
FINALLY managed to get fsevents to run! After about three years or so.
Add support for JabRef fileDirectory-style comments

This update includes a long-awaited feature: Graph views. This brings Zettlr on par with other apps such as logseq or Obsidian. You will find the graph view in the stats window, which you can open as usual by clicking the statistics button on the toolbar. The graph will re-render as soon as something in the link structure of your notes changes. Rendering may take some time, however -- not because constructing or displaying the actual graph takes so much time, but rather, because resolving internal links (which can be either IDs or filenames) takes a long time.

Within the graph view, you can interact with it in a few ways:

You can tick the checkbox to exclude isolates from rendering, that is: files which are not linked to any other note
With the + and --buttons, you can zoom in and out of the graph
Using the dropdown menu, you can restrict rendering to a single component. These clusters of files are ordered by size, so the first components in the list are the biggest in your network of files. Note that isolates are excluded from this list
By utilizing the trackpad or scrollwheel of your mouse, you can scroll both vertically and horizontally; dragging does not work yet
Clicking the target button resets the view on the graph to its origin if you have scrolled someplace else
Clicking on a note will open it in the main window just as if you had clicked on the note in the file manager

Note that the graph view is still in its early stages. It works as advertised, but since networks can be very tricky, there is a lot of room for improvement. You will notice that we publish this new feature using a patch release (2.2.2 instead of 2.3.0). The reason is that we cannot finalize this feature in any way without the feedback from the community. So for this feature, we would like to invite you to provide feedback -- not just about potential bugs, but about things we should improve in the visual feedback the graph view gives you.

See this as an opportunity: Whereas the graph views of Roam, logseq or Obsidian are pretty much in a final stage, Zettlr's graph view is still a blank canvas upon which you can project your ideas that help us all make sense of the chaos that is the network of our files!

GUI and Functionality

New Feature: Zettlr now finally offers a graph view of all notes in the statistics window; clicking on a vertex opens the file in the main editor, and you can choose to hide isolates
The full-text search doesn't skip files whose title and/or tags match the search terms anymore
Hovering the mouse over a document tab now shows the full path of the file
Ensure that in-memory files which are saved outside the workspaces are still added as root files
Use a more appropriate cursor for resizing the split views

Under the Hood

Add d3 as a fixed dependency in package.json; lock to the version from mermaid
Fix a dependency race condition in the service container
Make error messages more meaningful
Enable renderers to search for files using an internal link

Attention: This update switches one preference in the exporters' defaults: file-scope is now removed. Remove this line from your defaults files, or reset them to the (new) default, if you'd like to use this in your exports as well. See for more info this issue.

GUI and Functionality

Tags and keywords within a YAML frontmatter are now clickable
AutoCorrect values are no longer detected as spelling mistakes
Fix an issue with false detection of footnote reference texts
Fix link resolving: Now files dropped onto the editor will be easier to detect as files (rather than weblinks)
Fixed reloading issues with very large citation databases
Fixed a visual glitch when choosing to "Open in a new tab" in a note preview
Fix a regression that inserting pasted image paths into the editor didn't work
Fix wrong display of citations if there was an error rendering the citation
The tutorial is now also available after the first start; you can reopen it any time from the Help menu
The autocompletion popup doesn't disappear anymore if you completely remove anything already written to begin anew
Fix a bug that would with some installations result in a blank main window.
Fixed a bug that would sometimes not update the tag autocompletion
Ensure documents are saved when renaming a directory
Do not show "Open Image Externally" if loading a data URL
Improve styling for the "No results" message on file tree filtering
Newly created files now always open in a new tab
Fixed a bug where you would receive two "paste image" dialogs if you had text selected when pasting an image onto the editor
Fixed conflicting text decorations between strikethrough and spellchecking
Fixed a bug where a YAML frontmatter beginning and end would also be recognized even if it was not valid. A valid YAML frontmatter must be delimited by exactly three dashes/dots on their own line, and not more

Under the Hood

Update Pandoc to 2.17.1.1
Activate watchdog polling for the citeproc provider. This should reduce issues with very large citation databases.
If the error message upon a failed database reload indicates that the file was simply incomplete, the citeproc provider now attempts a second reload after a delay of 5 seconds
Moved the workspace and root file opening logic into their own command
Make the ZettlrCommand base class abstract and require constraints on derived
Remove all calls to global in the renderer processes; instead properly type the API provided via the window object
Refactor the main process:
- Move the FSAL, the WindowManager, and the DocumentManager into the service provider realm
- Factor out all commands into a new CommandProvider
- Use singleton dependency injection to provide services to each other, utilizing an AppServiceContainer
- Remove (almost) every dependency on the global object
- Move the littered code from the Zettlr main class into their corresponding service providers
- Fixed the dependency hell within the FSAL
The app doesn't attempt to download the Vue3 devtools in production anymore
The date formatter now takes everything as parameters and has unit tests

GUI and Functionality

Display inline math using monospaced font
Right-clicking citations doesn't select parts of it anymore
Inline-equations are now properly syntax highlighted
Fixed a bug that caused unintentional pastes when closing a tab using the middle mouse button on Linux
Heavily improved the full text search: Previously, certain files that should have been returned for specific search terms were not considered a match, and multiple results per line were mostly not reported; additionally, search results are now ordered by relevancy and the search results are marked more visibly
Heavily improved the table editor user interface: Now the table editor will on certain actions write all changes back to the document so that the possibility of data loss involves a single table cell at most in case the user forgets to un-focus the table. Furthermore, the table editor will now not be removed from the document when it loses focus, and instead the table will be updated silently
The log viewer now only displays errors and warnings initially
Fix a small visual glitch on macOS for toolbar searches
Added "Open in new Tab" button to link preview tooltip, when user has preference "Avoid Opening Files in New Tabs" set to true
Fix Use the CodeMirror default actions for Home and End preference not working on MacOS
Fix task item strikethrough appearing laggy
Fix task item strikethrough covering the preceding whitespace
On macOS, file tree icons are now displayed using the theme/system color. On all platforms, you can customize the appearance using the selector body .tree-item clr-icon.special (including platform/mode selectors)
Improve the readability mode: Now it will not render a YAML frontmatter and it will additionally treat sentences smarter than before
Fixed an issue that would sometimes break images when you edited the caption in the rendered image caption.
Enable resetting of the custom Zettelkasten directory
The default value for "Use system accent color" is now off for all platforms except macOS
The app now remembers if you had the sidebar open, and which tab you selected
The app now remembers your recent global searches
The file tree now expands when you are filtering for files/directories
Translate the auto dark mode start/end setting strings
The ToC now displays the currently active section
Fix file manager always showing word count, even if user selected character count in preferences
When clicking on a heading in the ToC, the cursor is now set to that heading and the editor is focused immediately
Fix recent documents items not being clickable in Linux
Fix drag & drop of files onto the editor
Fix some bugs in the link opener

Under the Hood

Update Pandoc to 2.17
Removed the unused PDF settings from the config
Removed the unused pandoc and xelatex config options
Convert all MarkdownEditor hooks and plugins to TypeScript
Tests now simply transpile without type checking
Move service provider types to the new types directory
Provide @dts as an alias to retrieve typings
Move FSAL types to the new types directory
Convert the remaining utility functions to TypeScript
Polyfill the path module in renderer processes
Convert the MainSidebar component to TypeScript
Move out the statistics calculation from the FSAL
The yarn package and yarn test-gui commands now skip typechecking, reducing build time by a large margin

GUI and Functionality

New Feature: Implemented "forward" and "back" actions, which are especially useful for people managing a Zettelkasten and frequently follow links: Now you can go back and forth between opened files (shortcuts: Cmd/Ctrl+[ and Cmd/Ctrl+]) so you can more quickly navigate your files
Fixed an error in the link filtering process that would throw an error when you attempted to remove internal links completely upon export
Fixed Cmd/Ctrl-Click-behavior on footnotes
Dragging and dropping files (both from the desktop and the sidebar) now always inserts relative paths
More reactive updating of the related files section
Improvements during insertion of snippets
The footnote editor now has a consistent background color in dark mode
You can now open linked files from within the preview tooltips
Removed the shortcut to rename directories since that was rarely used and could confuse users since it was not obvious where the directory is in the file manager
Moved the file renaming process via shortcut to the document tabs since it's much more visible there
Fix a very rare bug in which selections inside headings would look off
Fixed an error that would fail the print preview if you had images with relative paths in your document
Internal links to files that contain a period should work now (except what follows exactly matches an allowed Markdown file extension)
Scrollbars on Windows and Linux should now switch colors according to the app's dark mode setting
Zettlr doesn't detect links to other headings in the form of [link](#target) as tags anymore
Reinstated the ability to use pure number tags or hexadecimal numbers as tags
Using the shortcut Ctrl-Shift-V to paste something as plain text will no longer paste it twice on Windows and Linux
Zettlr can now be started minimized (in the tray/notification area) by passing the CLI flag --launch-minimized, which means the main window will not be shown after launching the app
On single-file export, unsaved changes are now also exported
MagicQuotes can now surround selections
File duplication will now make sure to always create new files instead of overwriting existing ones
Attempt to scroll back to the correct position after applying remote changes
Adapt styles on Windows
You can now specify a TeX template and an HTML template for projects
Fix double titlebars on Windows and Linux when displaying modals
Following internal links now also works for systems in which the ID is part of the file name
Updated the display name in the Add/Remove Programs entry for Windows
Task list items in the editor are now correctly spaced again
Fixed a bug that would render it impossible to open images and files with non- ASCII characters within their path
You can now copy the underlying equation code for LaTeX equations

Under the Hood

Added a further check to the filter copying. Since the filters that ship with Zettlr are bound to the inner workings of the app, we should always overwrite them if applicable (to ensure they are updated with the app), unlike the defaults which people should be able to modify without us messing with them
Sanitized and standardized all Vue component names and app entry points
Fix a whole bunch of linter warnings
Remove the custom event system ($on, $off, and $once) in preparation for Vue 3
Switched to Vue 3 (incl. Vuex 4, vue-loader 16, vue-virtual-scroller 2)
The state is now being instantiated using a function which adds reactivity
The modified documents are now updated in such a way that attached watchers are notified
The snippet insertion process is now much more precise and allows snippets to be inserted at any point within non-empty lines without any quirks
Update Pandoc to 2.16.2
The VS Code debugger now uses the test-gui configuration and not the regular (potentially critical) main configuration; NOTE that this means you must run the test-gui command first to generate that data-dir in the first place before starting the debugger
Cleaned up the handler for rendering task-list items
Switched the windows update, tag-manager, stats, quicklook, project-properties, print, paste-image, log-viewer, error, assets, preferences, and about to TypeScript
extractYamlFrontmatter does not require the linefeed anymore
Remove the openFile method from the main Zettlr object. Use getDocumentManager().openFile instead to open a file
Add an automatic updater for CITATION.cff
Zettlr now extracts outlinks from a file and adds them to descriptors
Added @common as a shorthand alias for importing files within the common- directory
The file autocompletion database now uses the full paths to index files

Since the last release, 1.8.9, there have been 1,921 commits and 823 files inside the codebase have changed (plus one or two commits after editing this changelog and bumping the version string). Thus, the changelog this time does not contain a meticulous list of every change. Rather, we focus on notable changes here. If you would like to see the full list of every change, please follow this link.

32bit Builds Are Discontinued

We do not ship any more 32bit builds. From 2.0.0 onwards, only 64bit builds (both Intel and ARM) are supported. For Windows ARM builds, Pandoc is not available, so to export and import files on Windows ARM you must install Pandoc manually, if possible.

New Configuration Options

Several existing configuration options have changed their format. This means that changes to these won't be recognised and they will reset to their default. In this case, you may have to re-adapt your preferences in several places. Please have a look at your settings after updating and see if they still are set the way you like.

Writing Targets Must Be Re-Applied

Due to a change in the underlying data structure, this version of Zettlr will not recognise any writing target set by a Zettlr version 1.x. This means: Please note down the important writing targets you have set before updating and then once re-apply them. We would like to apologise for this inconvenience, but believe its benefits by far outweigh the single additional migration effort on your side.

No More Transitive Files / New Browser-Like Behavior

The idea of "transitive files" we implemented in previous iterations of Zettlr proved to be counter-intuitive to many people. We now removed that feature in favor of a much better tab-management. By default, Zettlr will now try to avoid opening new tabs and instead attempt to replace existing tabs whenever you open any new file. You can force Zettlr to open a file in a new tab instead by either middle-clicking, or right-clicking the file and choosing "Open in a new tab." If you generally do not want tabs to be closed in favor of other files, you can uncheck the option "Avoid opening new tabs." Files with unsaved changes will never be replaced. This behavior is very closely aligned with how modern browsers handle links.

Autosave Is Now A Setting

A few years ago we implemented auto-saving after a delay of five seconds with no change to the current file. However, some people mentioned that they'd like to choose what to do. Now you can switch between three modes of autosaving. "Off" disables autosave and you have to manually save using Cmd/Ctrl+S. "Immediately" saves files after a very short delay of 250ms, that is basically whenever you stop typing. "After a delay" (default) will save files after the 5s delay you know from previous versions of Zettlr.

PDF-Preferences Are Discontinued

The PDF-Preferences window has been removed in favor of the new "assets manager." While it did prove to be a nice reminiscence of how LibreOffice or Word handled layout, it was not a scalable solution. Instead, we have now switched to defaults files, which are a little more complex than this dialog, but provide much more functionality and flexibility.

New Dialog: Assets Manager

Instead of the old PDF-Preferences window, Zettlr now contains a so-called "assets manager." This is a new preferences window that allows you to customize settings which are stored in individual files. The first two tabs feature exporting and importing settings using so-called defaults files. Defaults files are written using YAML and provide Pandoc with sensible defaults for every export. We will shortly after the release of 2.0 include extensive documentation for how these work. The defaults we provide should work well for most users.

The third tab contains the custom CSS, and the fourth tab contains the new snippets feature.

Custom CSS Has Moved

The Custom CSS can now be edited directly in the assets manager instead of in its own dialog.

Zoom Functionality Has Changed

Previously, you could increase and decrease the editor's font size using the zoom shortcuts. Now, the zoom shortcuts will zoom the complete user interface. This is an accessibility feature, since several people with visual impairments as well as people with large external displays have mentioned they would like the user interface itself to be scalable.

The editor's font size can now directly be edited with a new setting in the editor settings tab.

Scroll-to-zoom has been removed, because too many people have accidentally held down Cmd/Ctrl while using the scrollwheel, causing many accidental zoom operations.

The Pandoc Command Has Been Removed

In the past, you had the ability to modify the command that Zettlr would run to export your files. However, several times we had to adapt the command, which lead to frustration among users because we had to manually inform everyone of these changes and they had to manually "reset" the command. Now that we have switched to defaults files, the command that will be run in every case is pandoc --defaults "/path/to/defaults.yaml". Instead of modifying the CLI arguments, you can now adapt the defaults Pandoc will be run with, which is possible because every CLI argument has a corresponding setting in defaults files, which can be edited in the assets manager.

Native User Interface

Another notable change is that now we have switched to a native user interface. This means that Zettlr does not have a completely custom design anymore, but rather orients itself at the various interface guidelines published by Apple, Microsoft, and the GNOME team. Thus, on macOS and Windows Zettlr now follows the Big Sur style and the Metro style respectively. On Linux, we have attempted to model the GNOME interface but had to make a few changes due to the fact that there are numerous different window managers with different aesthetics.

Two PDF Export Options

You will notice that there are now two different PDF exporting options, one is called "PDF Document", the other "PDF (LaTeX)". The first option enables you to export a document to PDF without the help of a LaTeX distribution. This way you can have PDF exports without installing such a distribution. The second option allows you to export to PDF as you know it from previous versions of Zettlr.

Project Settings Have Moved

With the introduction of defaults files, there is less necessity to ship a full dialog just to edit a project's settings. Instead, the project settings have been moved to the novel "Properties" dialog of directories, which you can access via the context menu.

GUI and Functionality

Feature: Switched to using defaults files in the exporter. Additionally, the exporter is now modular, allowing for more extensions in the future.
Feature: You can now define snippets, reusable pieces of text that allow you to save some time when writing
Feature: The "global search" has been renamed "full text search" and has moved to its own sidebar panel -- you can switch between the file manager and the full text search using the three-way toggle in the toolbar
Feature: A new sidebar tab shows you related files
Feature: Added a calendar view to the stats dialog, showing you what you've written over the year
Feature: The macOS version of Zettlr now boasts a new application icon, adapted to fit the style of the Big Sur operating system. It was provided by Marc Oliver Orth (@marc2o) – thank you!
Feature: Zettlr now supports bibliography files on a per-file basis. Just set the wanted bibliography in your YAML frontmatter, within the bibliography-property.
Feature: The tag cloud now offers you "suggested tags" for the current file. Tag suggestions are words equalling tags found inside your file which are not yet prepended with a hash-character. You can modify the list of suggestions and insert them at once. Zettlr will insert them into the frontmatter so that the actual text will remain untouched. If there are any tag suggestions, the tag cloud icon will feature a small red dot.
Feature: Now Zettlr can export to PDF even without any LaTeX-distribution installed on the system.
Feature: The footnote editing logic has been improved. Now, multiline footnotes are handled appropriately, and you can safely use multi-line footnotes alongside the in-place editing feature.
Feature: You can now customize the data directory using the --data-dir="/path/to/directory" switch. This allows portable installations.
Feature: In addition to the "Glass" sound you can now also have the Pomodoro timer play a "Chime" or a "Digital Alarm" after each step
Feature: The filter now not only filters the file list but also the file tree
Feature: New "Properties" popouts give you access to information about your files and folders via the context menu
Feature: Projects can now be exported into multiple formats at once, allowing you to choose from every available format
Feature: You can now further filter which files will be exported using glob patterns
Feature: A new update dialog improves the updating experience
32bit AppImages and Windows builds are no longer supported.
Double-dollar equations are now rendered in display mode.
Removed the Pandoc installation item from the help menu.
Moved the Pandoc and XeLaTeX settings to the export tab in preferences.
Updated the tutorial instructions to install Pandoc
Fixed a bug that would delete file if it got renamed as itself.
All languages will now be downloaded by the CI workflow. Updates will still be pulled via the application on boot.
Removed the ability for the translation provider to arbitrarily request languages that have not been installed in order to remove that fragile feature. All languages will now be provided from the application immediately.
All windows will now remember their last position.
Some components of the renderer elements will now respect a given accent color set by your operating system (only available for macOS and Windows). You can choose between a theme's accent color and the operating system's in the display settings.
You can now close files by middle-clicking their tabs
MDX supported as a type of markdown file
New File and Edit File can now fast rename without selecting the extension
Add a tray to the system notification area, off by default. To activate, see Preferences → Advanced → "Leave app running in the notification area" (or "Show app in the notification area" when using MacOS).
Fixed a bug that would mark some quotation marks as misspelled
Fix the visibility problems under night mode mentioned in issue #1845
Enabled syntax higlighting for fenced code blocks that use attribute lists as per issue #2259
Added the SIL Open Font License to the About dialog

Under the Hood

Removed support for 32 bit AppImages on the CI.
Migrated the exporter to TypeScript.
Completely rewritten the exporter in order to be able to use defaults files and enable much more flexibility.
Removed the Pandoc command.
Add typings for external modules, remove the internal custom ones for bcp-47 and nspell.
Reenabled the Pandoc and XeLaTeX options in preferences.
Removed the generic IPC call from the config provider and replaced it with consistent checks as to which options have actually changed. This increases the performance after configuration saves.
Migrated the config provider to TypeScript.
Migrated the Citeproc Provider to TypeScript, and cleaned the provider up:
- The provider has now the capability to load multiple databases at once and switch between them.
- Furthermore, the provider now needs much less variables, the logic is much simpler, and many unnecessary ipc calls have been removed.
Migrated many utility functions and other scripts to TypeScript.
The translations are now loaded by the trans helper to make sure it will always work.
Migrated the complete GUI to Vue.js, using a reusable component system.
The window chrome is no longer controlled by the window registration handler.
Now tests can be run as JavaScript or as TypeScript files (use .js or .spec.ts files respectively).
Generalised the window state management so that all windows are now able to remember their positions easily.
Zettlr is now completely jQuery-free.
Migrated the FSAL cache from unstable Objects to Maps and Sets.
Migrated the TagProvider to a Map as well.
Added an assets provider responsible for maintaining the various files Zettlr now uses
Completely sandboxed the renderer processes. Now, even if an attacker gains access to a browser window, the chances of them causing any damage is greatly reduced
Moved all static assets to their own directory
Fixed font, image, and resource loading in general via webpack
Fixed the debug capabilities; now everyone should be able to debug both the main process as well as the renderer processes using VS Code
Added "recommended extensions" to the VS Code setup, allowing for easier interoperability across code contributors
Switched to the native "recent documents" functionality on macOS and Windows
Switched to a new, completely GDPR compliant API for updates. No piece of data will be transferred anymore (except the update information from our server to the apps)

GUI and Functionality

Your typing speed is now as fast as previously again, even for long paragraphs and files (thanks to @mattj23 for implementing the fixes in the multiplexer).
You can now also switch to sub-directories using the file list navigation; it is not limited to files only anymore.
Fixed a bug that would show a wrong path as the current one on pasting image data onto the editor.
Fixed a bug that would make dragging items from the file list impossible.
Fixed odd behaviour that would make dragging and dropping items in the file tree (especially in combined mode of the file manager) hard.
Fixed a logical bug that would open a dialog notifying of remote changes for every detected change, rather than just once per file.
Added RMarkdown files (.Rmd) to the list of supported file extensions for which Zettlr can be registered as a default handler.
Fix a regression error that has rendered citation exporting impossible.

Under the Hood

Fixed a performance sink in the multiplexer module which introduced noticeable lag while writing long paragraphs and documents (implemented by @mattj23).
Implemented a global event listener that prevents any arbitrary navigation away from the loaded URL that occurs within webContents. So this way we do not need to sanitize any anchors or take care about setting window.location, because all of these events will be captured and navigation will be prevented. For opening local files and directories, make sure to prepend the path with safe-file://, which is recognized by this listener.
Implemented a global event listener that makes sure any call to console.log is also received in the main process so that we can intercept those and add them to our global logging interface as well. This way, debugging errors in the renderer process can be debugged together with users as well. Messages from the renderers are indicated by a [R] including the window identifier (e.g. "[Main Window]").
Migrated the Tags Provider to TypeScript. Cleaned up the IPC calls.
Moved electron-builder configuration to electron-builder.yml.
Removed no longer necessary scripts.
Moved most type annotations to corresponding types files. The structure is currently: All node_modules without type support reside within ./source, whereas the service provider types are stored in ./source/app/service-providers/assets.
Removed generic IPC calls for the CSS Provider and migrated that to the provider class.
Zettlr now detects a potential downloaded Pandoc in the resources directory during development.
Fixed a logical error in calculating the application uptime.
The application now exits forcefully if an error is produced during boot.

Apple Silicon Support

This version provides native Apple Silicon/M1 support, a.k.a. the darwin/arm64 architecture. Make sure to download the correct update file (either x64 for Intel-based Macs or arm64 for the new Apple Silicon chips).

A Note to Apple Silicon users

If you possess one of the new Apple devices sporting Apple's M1 chip, please see whether or not the application is able to run the built-in pandoc (which is still compiled for 64 bit). If your bundled exporter fails, please report an issue.

A Note to Windows ARM users

As of the current development build, Microsoft has finished support for running 64 bit applications on ARM computers. However, this is not yet officially released, so the bundled Pandoc might not work and you have to return back to the system-wide installation. However, if the bundled 64 bit Pandoc does work on your ARM computer, please notify us so we know that we can officially support Windows ARM again!

Drag Behaviour Fixes

Due to efforts within the file manager structure, we could re-enable the functionality to drag files out of the app without having to press any modification key before actually dragging something.

GUI and Functionality

Feature: 64bit applications will now run the built-in Pandoc. To see whether your application runs using the bundled Pandoc, open the developer logs and look for "pandoc." If Zettlr has used the built-in Pandoc for an export, the pandoc command will not begin with "pandoc" but with the full, absolute path to the bundled Pandoc binary. If your application does use the bundled Pandoc, you can uninstall any system-wide Pandoc installationn; Zettlr should still be able to export. If not, please report a bug!
Feature: macOS-users can now use horizontal scrolling instead of using the arrow button to toggle between the file tree and the file list (only available in thin file manager mode; this behaves exactly like back and forth navigating in browsers such as Safari and Chrome).
Enhancement: Added a new option to allow spaces during autocompletion (of tags, citations, or internal links).
Enhancement: Added a configuration option to programmatically set the editor's base font size. Additionally, the zooming now works reliably. (This setting is independent of the base font size above.)
Enhancement: Values from the AutoCorrect replacement table will now also be indicated as correct, so you don't have to add them to your user dictionary anymore.
Enhancement: Added an option to prevent auto-searches when following Zettelkasten-links.
Enhancement: Zettlr now recognizes the tags frontmatter property. Please note that Pandoc does not recognize the tags-property, so if you need tags to be processed by Pandoc, consider using the keywords-property.
Enhancement: The File System Abstraction Layer (FSAL) now spits out a few descriptive statistics collected across all loaded files and folders.
Made the dialogs' tab lists more accessible for screen readers.
Fixed the other files's extension icons in the sidebar -- they now also display in dark mode.
Fixes to the stylesheets.
Fix too dark colours for some variables in CodeMirror.
Added a new CSS variable that allows you to set the font-size of the whole application, --base-font-size. You can set it in your custom CSS to increase or decrease the overall font-size of everything persistently. Remember to apply it to the :root-pseudo element.
Fixed a race condition in the dictionary provider that would render spellchecking unfunctional in certain edge cases.
Revamped the about dialog's other project tab.
Removed the deprecation warning for deprecated installations.
Improved the preferences explanations with regard to AutoCorrect modes and the Magic Quotes section (some require adaptions by the users in the corresponding translations!)
Re-built the QuickLooks. Now they share even more code with the rest of the app, should react more snappy, and are more responsive then ever.
Fixed a few logical bugs where the meaning of the "Overwrite file?"-dialog's buttons were swapped, overwriting a file if you chose "Cancel" and not overwriting a file if you chose "Ok."
Fixed a bug that would mistakenly show a file twice in the file manager if a file rename or the creation of a new file would overwrite a file that was already present.
Added a switch in the export options to choose whether to use the internal Pandoc or the system wide application.
Messages can now be filtered in the log viewer.
Windows can now be regularly closed using the Cmd/Ctrl+W-shortcut without interfering with the open tabs in the main window anymore.
On macOS, Zettlr will not force-show the main window anymore when you click on its Dock icon, but rather restore the default behaviour on macOS.
You can now zoom both Quicklook editors and the main editor independently using the zoom shortcuts.
Unlocked the ability to select "Follow Operating System" in the auto dark mode settings. Please note that this setting might have no effect on certain linuxoid Operating Systems.
Improved tag/keyword detection in frontmatters. Comma-separated lists should now also work.
Fixed a bug making it impossible to open Markdown files from the menu.

Under the Hood

Removed jQuery UI from the dialog classes completely.
Removed jQuery from the editor controller.
Removed jQuery from the updater.
Removed jQuery from the tag cloud dialog.
Removed jQuery from the stats dialog.
Removed jQuery from PDF preferences.
Removed jQuery from the CSS dialog.
Removed jQuery from the file manager.
Removed jQuery from the Pomodoro counter.
Fix a bug in the error handler during update checks.
Removed the timeout on the dictionary provider, as the dictionaries are likely to be loaded prior either way.
Force electron-packager to 15.2.0 to enable darwin/arm64 (Apple Silicon) builds.
Zettlr now detects Byte Order Marks (BOM) if present in a file.
The LogViewer got a new paint job: It's now based on Vue, much less resource-heavy and it includes filters to only show certain log levels.
Moved the log window creation to the Window Manager.
The window registration procedure now supports handling the toolbar which now also doubles as a title bar (if you don't want a toolbar).
Migrated the Quicklook windows to Vue.js.
Overhauled the print window.
Changed function name askOverwriteFile to shouldOverwriteFile to make it semantically more correct.
Aligned the exact behaviour of the file-rename and file-new commands to be the same when it comes to overwriting files.
Began implementing another new menu functionality: A shortcut property will send a shortcut-message to the currently focused window.
Migrated the Appearance Provider to TypeScript.
Renamed darkTheme to darkMode.
Migrated the Target Provider to TypeScript.
Transform the zoom-commands to shortcuts.
Move the loadIcons function to a more central place in the window registration module.
Moved the tree view functionality to its dedicated Vue component.
Fixed a regression error from updating LESS.
Moved the file list functionality to its dedicated Vue component.
Unified ES6 syntax within the file manager components.
Migrated the Vuex store to TypeScript.

Deprecating 32 bit builds

This version ships with a debug notification that will inform users of deprecated operating systems about that fact. This debug notification cannot be turned off, but will be removed in Zettlr 1.8.5, which will use the bundled Pandoc version first of all. Beginning with Zettlr 1.9.0, we will no longer support 32 bit applications, so you have to make sure your operating system supports 64 bit. If your Windows is still 32 bit, there is a very high chance that your processor actually supports 64 bit. Please check this, if you want to continue using Zettlr.

GUI and Functionality

Enhancement: Navigating the file list has just become easier. Now when you navigate the list files will not be opened immediately! Rather, they are being marked as "active," making the navigation much less cumbersome. To open an activated file, simply hit Enter.
Visual improvements to the quick filter. The "back"-arrow now appears below the input.
The quick filter now searches for all search terms (delimited by space) separately.
The editor will now be focused whenever the containing document is changed.
The cursor will now be of the correct height no matter whether you are on a heading class or within a normal-height text line.
Pandoc will now be pre-bundled with 64 bit installers.
Fixed a bug that the TableEditor would oftentimes "swallow" table cell content, making it almost unusable.
Fixed a logical error that would display .tex-files as if they were directories in the file manager's tree view.
Added two more variables, %y and %X for Zettelkasten-IDs, which allow you to use a two-digit year or the unix epoch (seconds since Jan 1st, 1970) in your IDs (thanks to @cdaven for implementing).
RMarkdown files (.rmd) are now supported in general.

Under the Hood

The statistics controller is now the Stats Provider.
Migrated the Stats Provider to TypeScript.
ASAR support reinstated
Switched GitHub Actions CI to use Node 14.x.
Prepared everything so that Pandoc can be bundled with Zettlr at every time. However, the corresponding code is not yet active to provide for a transition phase where we still ship 32 bit builds.
Fixed the TableEditor. The two major changes are that it does not depend on jQuery anymore, and that now all changes are always applied to the AST, not the DOM element. The DOM element is always rebuilt after the AST has changed so that the single source of truth is always the AST.
Made sure that environmentally necessary directories are now created recursively.
Added a prompt-passthrough to the main Zettlr class.
Fix function signatures in the FSAL.
Fix function signatures in the WindowManager.
Migrate the command infrastructure to TypeScript.
The regular expressions are now unified within the ./source/common/regular-expressions.js-file (thanks to @Kangie for implementing).
The recent docs provider is now written in TypeScript.
Removed conditional RMarkdown checks.
Remove empty strings, if applicable.

Support for Pandoc 2.11

The default Pandoc command now targets Pandoc 2.11 and above. In order to use the new command, make sure to "reset" it once, or (if it contains customisations) replace $citeproc$ with --citeproc --bibliography "$bibliography$" $cslstyle$. However, you can retain compatibility with older versions by replacing the new part --citeproc with --filter pandoc-citeproc. The new $bibliography$ variable will be replaced with /path/to/your/library.json. Furthermore, the $cslstyle$ -variable will be replaced with --csl /path/to/your/style.json, if applicable.

GUI and Functionality

The file search popup now retains your last search again.
The global search now lets you select all text again.
Removed deprecated Pandoc command variable $citeproc$ and added the two variables $bibliography$ and $cslstyle$ .
Began implementing better screen reader support for Zettlr. Now, a certain amount of elements has received correct labels according to the ARIA guidelines so that screenreader are now better in handling the app:
- The toolbar is now being recognised as such, the toolbar buttons themselves have correct labels
- The editor tabs are recognised as a tabbar and you can easily switch tabs now.
- The sidebar buttons are now being correctly identified as tabs.
- Added region landmark roles to a few of the components in order to facilitate quicker voice over navigation.
- The icons in the file manager now have role="presentation" set to not have the screen reader name all of those "unlabelled images" one by one.
Fixed some relative links to files on your system not being resolved correctly.
Fix weird indentation rendering in the syntax code highlighting blocks.
Fixed an issue that sometimes did not fully shut down the application before exit. This lead to numerous issues, the most visible of which was that sometimes configuration changes were not persisted.
Fixed an issue in which user dictionary-entries were not actually removed when removed from the preferences.
The citation engine now also supports loading CSL YAML files as bibliographies.
Fixed some issues with the citeproc provider.
Fixed multi-cursor placement.
Fix duplicate IDs when linking files whose filename contains the ID with the setting "Always link with filename."
Fix a few visual link rendering oddities.
Fix the ToC navigation sometimes not working.

Under the Hood

Migrated the UpdateProvider to TypeScript.
Migrated the DictionaryProvider to TypeScript.
TextMarkers are now bound to the Document instances, not the editor overall. This increases the speed of document switching.
Updated dependencies:
- @clr/icons 4.0.8
- adm-zip 0.5.1
- archiver 5.1.0
- bcp-47 1.0.8
- citeproc 2.4.52
- codemirror 5.58.3
- got 11.8.1
- mermaid 8.8.4
- semver 7.3.4
- uuid 8.3.2
- vuex 3.6.0
- fsevents 2.2.1
- @electron-forge/cli 6.0.0-beta.54
- @electron-forge/plugin-webpack 6.0.0-beta.54
- @teamsupercell/typings-for-css-modules-loader 2.4.0
- @typescript-eslint/eslint-plugin 4.9.1
- @typescript-eslint/parser 4.9.1
- cross-env 7.0.3
- css-loader 5.0.1
- csso 4.2.0
- electron 11.1.0
- electron-bundler 22.9.1
- eslint 7.15.0
- eslint-config-standard 16.0.2
- eslint-plugin-standard 5.0.0
- eslint-plugin-vue 7.2.0
- file-loader 6.2.0
- fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin 6.0.6
- less 3.13.0
- less-loader 7.1.0
- mocha 8.2.1
- style-loader 2.0.0
- ts-loader 8.0.12
- typescript 4.1.3
- vue-loader 15.9.5
Removed dependency v8-compile-cache

Breaking Changes

Renamed the sidebar to file manager. We finally decided on better terminology for distinguishing the right from the left sidebar. This means: The left sidebar, formerly known only as "sidebar," is now the "file manager." The right sidebar, formerly known as "attachment sidebar," is now "the" sidebar. This change was introduced to reduce user confusion and provide a better user experience.
The shortcut for opening the developer tools on Windows and Linux is now Ctrl+Alt+I (was: Ctrl+Shift+I) to resolve a conflict with the shortcut Ctrl+Shift+I (insert images).
Renamed Root Directories to Workspaces. The term "root" is rather technical, and for most people, it makes most sense to think of those roots as workspaces, albeit other than being opened at the root level of the application, they have no difference to regular directories.
The shortcut Cmd/Ctrl+O, which previously would let you open workspaces, now opens files. To open a workspace, use Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+O. This is now in line with many other programs.

GUI and Functionality

New Feature: Typewriter mode. By pressing Cmd/Ctrl+Alt+T, you can activate the typewriter mode, which will keep the current line in the editor always centered so that you have to move your eyes less while editing a text. This also works in combination with the distraction free mode so that you can fully focus on what you're editing right at the moment.
New Feature: The sidebar (formerly attachment sidebar) is now tabbified. That means you have three distinct tabs to choose from with regard to displaying important information: the non-markdown files in your currently selected directory, the references in the current file, and the table of contents of the current file.
New Feature: When hovering over links, they now appear in a separate tooltip to click them without holding down Ctrl/Cmd.
New Feature: The QuickLook windows now share the main editor including its appearance. The same options apply for Quicklook windows as they are set in the global preferences (e.g. if you turned off image previewing, images would also not be displayed in the Quicklooks, etc).
New Feature: Now you have an additional option in the "Advanced" preferences to choose between a "native" appearance of all Zettlr Windows (that is, a frameless window with inset traffic lights on macOS, and standard window decorations on Windows and Linux) or a custom built-in appearance (that is, for all platforms a frameless window with custom drawn menu and window control buttons, which mimick the Windows 10 design).
New Feature: The heading tag elements (those h1 to h6-tags replacing the Markdown heading characters) finally serve a purpose: Clicking on them reveals a small menu which lets you quickly choose a different heading level.
New Feature: Improvement in the citation rendering capabilities: Both when copying Markdown as HTML, and when viewing footnote tooltips, any citation will be correctly rendered by the citeproc provider.
New Feature: The TableEditor now pre-renders table cells so that it looks more like it will when you export it!
New Feature: A selection of notifications will now be displayed using your operating system's notification service (if available), for instance export messages, errors, and updates. All notifications will still be displayed in the main window, so if you do not like this behaviour, you can turn notifications off for Zettlr within your operating system settings.
New Feature: Whenever you begin a code block (\```), Zettlr now offers you to autocomplete the syntax highlighting language.
Added syntax highlighting modes (with keywords):
- diff: diff
- Dockerfile: docker/dockerfile
- TOML: toml/ini
Fixed the fold-gutter being too close to the text.
The editor link autocompletion now respects the setting to use headings level 1 instead of YAML frontmatter titles where possible.
The paste image dialog now also provides the original image size as a default value, so that you simply can use the arrow buttons on the field to adjust the image size.
Fixed a rare bug where changes would be discarded if you renamed the modified file quickly enough.
HTML export should now centre both figures and figure captions.
Sorting files by name now takes into account possible settings such as using headings of level 1 or YAML frontmatter titles so that sorted files now correspond to their display again.
You can now select rendered references from the right sidebar.
The file tabs now have their own, dedicated menu, containing a new "Close all tabs" command to close all open file tabs (thanks to @anoopengineer for implementing).
The file info now displays the selection information, if there is any. The popup that opens when you click the counter then lists all selections within your document.
When you initiate a keyword search from the tag cloud by clicking on a tag, it'll be automatically enclosed in quotes, enabling searches for keywords with spaces in them.
The image paste dialog now shows you the resolved path of the directory into which the image you are about to paste will be saved to.
Fixed a missing translatable string from the paste image dialog.
Fixed the width of the word counter in order to make the toolbar more "stiff."
Enabled Dart syntax highlighting (thanks to @Kangie for implementing).
Reduced the added margins for overflowing dialog windows from 15 % to 2 %, making the visible gap on smaller screens smaller.
Remove the intermediary .ztr-project-migration code, which means you should update to Zettlr 1.7.x before updating to 1.8.x, if you still use an older version of Zettlr.
Fixed (= monkeypatched) a weird bug that would cause selections on specially indented lines (e.g. wrapped blockquotes, list items, etc.) to be padded by precisely four pixels, making the selection not look like a box.
Double clicks on file tabs now make files intransient (if they were transient before).
The editor is now in a non-editable mode if no file is open. If the editor is read-only, the Zettlr logo will display in the background to indicate that fact. Empty files, on the other hand, will not yield the feather logo anymore. This should now meet up with users' expectations about file editing better.
The last opened file will now reliably open whenever you start the application again.
File loading (especially on boot) is now much faster, because the opened tabs won't be switched through during load anymore. Only the relevant, last file will be opened and displayed.
Fixed a bug that would prevent you from exporting standalone files.
Non-breaking spaces (NBSP) are now considered word delimiters in the spellchecker.
Fixed a bug that would not close all tabs when the corresponding entry was selected from the tab context menu.
Fixed a bug where checkboxes of tasks would be strangely hidden on undo/redo operations that checked/unchecked those checkboxes.
Fixed a bug that would throw errors and not actually remove the file if said file was a root.
Fixed broken shortcuts Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+E (focus the editor) and Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+T (focus the file list).
Markdown links to local files that are absolute are now attempted to be opened internally, without recurring to external programs.
The various rendering methods now only update anything that is within the viewport, thereby increasing the performance vastly. This is especially noticable for large documents.
Fixed a bug that led to the exporter ignoring custom templates and always reverting to the default.
Fixed the date formatter, as the moment.js locales are not found when compiling using electron-forge.
Fixed a bug that would mess up the tag-tooltip on files under certain circumstances.
Fixed a bug that would throw errors instead of exporting, if the export-directory is set to the current working directory and a non-root file is being exported.
Fixed a bug which would not let you create duplicates of root files. Now, you can and the duplicate is being placed in the currently selected directory.
Fixed a rendering edge condition where if you wanted to retain multiple single-line breaks with backslashes, the backslashes positioned on the line would have had alternating colours.
Collocated the time-display and time-sorting settings for files to reduce confusion if users display the modification time but sort using the creation time, or vice versa.
Improved the layouting of the display settings tab.
The context menu is now a custom one, making the experience more seamless.
If you change the display settings for the editor, the editor will now also remove rendered elements that you do not wish to be rendered anymore.
Footnote tooltips are now interactive, which means you can select text from them, and also click on any link to visit it without having to scroll to the bottom and do the same action there.
You can now forcefully open a file non-transient by either middle-clicking it, or holding down Ctrl/Cmd.
If you use YAML frontmatters demarcated by only dashes (---), for instance for compatibility with Jeckyll, these will not render as tables anymore.
Switched to reveal.js 4 and fixed an occasional error on export.
The tutorial is now also available in German.
The application menu now displays many more shortcuts which were already available albeit not visible.
Checkboxes are now disabled in Quicklooks.
Fixed a bug that caused files dropped onto the editor from the file manager not to be linked when the file manager is in combined mode.
Custom protocols for links (e.g. zettlr://, thunderlink://) can now be up to 100 characters long to be recognized by Zettlr.
Fixed an issue that Zettlr would sometimes attempt to open a link to a local file in the browser instead of the correct app.
Finally fixed the document tabs using the wrong font in the Frankfurt and Bielefeld theme.
Fixed a display glitch in the combined file manager in dark mode.
Now both Quicklook windows and the main window remember their last position. As long as the configuration of displays did not change, they will appear at the same positions as the last time they were open.
Menu items in the application menu that can have a "checked" state (indicated by, e.g., a checkmark) now remember their correct state if other settings change consistently.
Non-image files being dropped onto the editor are now being linked.
Files that are dropped from the outside onto the editor are now linked using a relative path.
Fixed a behaviour that would lead to the autocomplete to stop working completely until a full refresh of the window.
Fix a bug that prevent non-existing documents to be created upon following a link despite the option being activated.
Added F11 as an accelerator for fullscreen on Windows.
Fixed a display bug (= the window would reload itself) when there were no tags in the tag manager.
Fixed the padding of dialog buttons and input fields also in dark mode.
Fix pasting on Windows 10 (thanks to @graphixillusion for fixing).
Fixed a sometimes weird behaviour when linking files.
Following Zettelkasten-links should now be way faster.
Fixed an issue with number-only frontmatter keywords.
Clean up the application menus on Linux and Windows: Now all preferences live under a shared menu item.
Prevent multiple cursors while following internal links.
Fix display glitches on the sorters.

Under the Hood

Moved (almost) all window functionality to a dedicated WindowManager module. The added benefits of this are:
- Centralised window functionality
- A correct place for window-controls-commands
- Sleeker design
- Enable a much better window handling: (1) Now all windows are closed automatically before the main window is being closed; (2) When someone requests a Quicklook/Print/Main window, an existing window is being searched first and made visible, instead of (re)creating it.
- New window types can be added much faster.
Switched to Electron forge (thanks to @tobiasdiez for implementing).
Bumped dependencies:
- @clr/icons 4.0.4
- @electron-forge/cli 6.0.0-beta.53
- @electron-forge/plugin-webpack 6.0.0-beta.53
- @teamsupercell/typings-for-css-modules-loader 2.3.0
- @typescript-eslint/eslint-plugin 4.5.0
- @typescript-eslint/parser 4.5.0
- archiver 5.0.2
- astrocite 0.16.4
- chokidar 3.4.3
- citeproc 2.4.48
- codemirror 5.58.2
- chart.js 2.9.4
- copy-webpack-plugin 6.1.0
- electron 10.1.5
- eslint 7.8.1
- eslint-config-standard-with-typescript 19.0.1
- eslint-plugin-import 2.22.1
- eslint-plugin-standard 4.0.2
- eslint-plugin-vue 7.0.0-beta.3
- file-loader 6.1.1
- fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin 5.1.0
- fsevents 2.1.3
- got 11.8.0
- joplin-turndown 4.0.30
- md5 2.3.0
- mermaid 8.8.2
- mocha 8.2.0
- moment 2.29.1
- node-loader 1.0.2
- nspell 2.1.4
- raw-loader 4.0.2
- reveal.js 4.1.0
- tippy.js 6.2.7
- ts-loader 8.0.7
- typescript 4.0.3
- uuid 8.3.1
- vue 2.6.12
- vue-template-compiler 2.6.12
Removed dependencies:
- uglify-js
- on-change
Added a new Handlebars templating helper function, i18n_value that allows you to translate something passing a value to the translation helper (e.g. {{i18n_value 'trans.identifier' someValue}}).
Refactored the main build Workflow file. Now it doesn't run on a matrix, but due to the many dissimilar steps involved, there are three distinct jobs. Other than that, we switched to yarn everywhere and cleaned up the code.
Removed the now unused script afterSign.js.
Finally removed the verbose IPC calls from the logs.
Migrated the toolbar logic from jQuery to vanilla JS.
Migrated the main renderer from jQuery to vanilla JS.
Migrated the popup class from jQuery to vanilla JS.
(Mostly) migrated the dialog classes from jQuery to vanilla JS (tabs are still done using jQueryUI).
Added a popup provider for easy creation of popups across the main renderer process.
Added an update provider for easy access to specific updating functionality (such as downloading an update, and automatically running it).
Migrated any popups that were defined inline into their respective handlebars template files.
The TableEditor is now finally a module.
Outsourced the CSS computations from the main module of the TableEditor.
Migrated the CodeMirror editor instantiation into its own module (MarkdownEditor).
Transformed all event listeners on the CodeMirror instance to "hooks" to reflect the fact that they are plugins, except they are not run like parameterless commands but hook into certain events of the application.
Moved the CodeMirror assets from the old folder into the MarkdownEditor module.
Moved some general utility functions to the common/util-folder.
The rendering plugins have been optimized. They now take less time to run and also don't keep an additional array of all the textmarkers in memory, decreasing the computational load especially for big documents.
The app now saves the last opened file again.
Moved the Turndown and Showdown converters to two utility functions, md2html and html2md.
Moved the regular expression for detecting image files by extension into the global RegExp module.
Moved the moveSection helper function to the common/util-folder.
Documentation fix for safeAssign.
Fixes in the tests.
Completely refurbished the test command. Now, a full-fledged testing directory will be set up to test features within the GUI without endangering your regular configuration in case you use Zettlr regularly.
Better handling of the custom paths for both the Pandoc and the XeLaTeX executables in the advanced preferences.
Migrated the FSAL to TypeScript so that the different descriptors can be better handled. Also, this showed countless logical errors, which are now mostly fixed.
- Furthermore, the responsibilities have been readjusted: The FSAL is now responsible for emitting events whenever the internal state changes. This is not being done by the commands anymore.
- The actions are now proper methods on the FSAL class in order to enable better tracking of the function arguments and to help ESLint fix possible signature errors.
- Moved every piece of state logic from the commands to the FSAL.
- Now, the general way anything regarding the files works is as follows: User --> one of the commands --> an action on the FSAL --> emits which part of the state has changed --> the application main class receives these notifications --> triggers potential updates in the renderer.
- Additionally, now the distinction between the meta objects which can be serialized and sent to the renderer and the tree objects within the FSAL is made more clear: Metadata files can have content attached to them (in order to save new content to a file), whereas the full objects, which are never getting sent to the renderer, do not contain a content property anymore.
- Also, we managed to fix errors regarding remote change detection.
The log provider now also outputs on the console, if the app runs unpacked (app.isPackaged === false).
Updated all service providers. They are now loaded immediately after application boot (right after the ready-event fires on the app-object) and not when the Zettlr main class loads.
Created a new directory app which provides functionality that pertains only to the lifecycle of the application itself, such as boot and shutdown functionalities. Service providers have been migrated to there.
Fixed the issue that only the en-US-language of the CSL styles was loaded for the citation provider.
CSL locales and CSL styles are now bundled with the app as native_modules.
Began providing first global interfaces which the service providers make use of in order to enable ESLint to detect errors.
Provide a test library, which you can load to debug citeproc-related issues and test the provider.
Converted the CSS Provider to TypeScript.
Converted the Log Provider to TypeScript.
Migrated the Quicklook and Print window classes to Typescript.
Added a utility function to quickly broadcast arbitrary IPC messages to all open Zettlr windows.
Migrated many functionalities that are important for all windows on the renderer side to a dedicated TypeScript module (register-window).
Divided the menu template into templates for macOS and Windows (+ all other platforms).
Simplified the menu building process.
Added classes and event listeners to show custom built menus within frameless BrowserWindow instances.
Deprecate the remote-module.
The md2html-function can now make anchors renderer-safe, so that they don't open within the main window anymore.
The menu handler is now a service provider.
Added a notification provider for better notification management, and to further reduce the main IPC classes.
The tag list on file list items is now only shown when there are actually coloured tags available, and hidden otherwise. This enables a better UX for the users as the tag-list-tooltip will then consistently pop up, not being hidden behind an invisible div.
Removed the Watchdog service provider, as it is no longer being used.
The Window Manager now saves the positions of each window (main and Quicklooks), persists them on disk and ensures the windows are displayed properly. The corresponding settings have been removed from the configuration service provider.
The menu provider now keeps track of the state of those checkbox menu items which are not controlled externally by a configuration setting, but rather always begin unchecked when the application starts.
Moved the typo-logic to their respective places in the renderer.
The dictionary provider now listens on the correct channel and is additionally based on fs.promises thoroughly.
The app bundle now contains all language files; the i18n-modules have been moved.
"Fixed" the high CPU usage of Zettlr when having many files and directories open in the app.
Fixed the force-open command. It now only searches for an exact filename-match, if the given argument (the contents of the link) do not look like an ID. This way we save at least one full file-tree search, which improves the speed notably especially with large setups.
Re-ordered the filetypes array so that expensive functions will attempt to match those extensions first which are more likely to occur.
Moved the ID regular expression generation into the corresponding file.

GUI and Functionality

Fixed a bug where opening RMarkdown files with Zettlr not open would throw an error.
Fixed a bug where the app would not process inline images during export, leading to missing images.
HTML Export now centres figure captions underneath figures (thanks to @Kangie for implementing).
Zettlr finally allows alternative/title texts in images to be specified, making it possible to preview images with a title, and have them properly export even with relative filenames.
Fix wrong design of the sorters in combined sidebar file trees.
Fixed a bug where adding more and more list-characters in front of a list item would make the left gutter "swallow" these due to an extreme amount of negative indent. Now the line indentation for soft-wrapped lists (or anything indented) should work as expected.
Fixed a behaviour that would sometimes lead to the editor inserting tab-characters instead of spaces.
Added UX improvements to the fold gutter and the global search bar (thanks to @doup for implementing).
Fixed non-centered button icons and made some UI elements a little bit bigger.
You can now abort searching in Quicklook windows by pressing escape while the search field is highlighted.
Fixed a rare error where codeblocks would not be indented correctly in HTML outputs.
Zettlr now renders linked images.
Restored the security question when you are about to overwrite an already existing file.
Made URLs in references into clickable links that open in the system's browser (thanks to @maxedmands for implementing).
The context menu on directories within the file list now correctly shows you project options, if the directory is one.
The file tree has been cleaned up. Now, the children toggle (if a directory has any) as well as any additional icon will be displayed aligned with each other.
Fixed a bug that would not display the filename but a heading level 1 that has been removed from the file.
Single inline image inserts are now handled without adding newline characters.

Under the Hood

Added an additional check for directory exports to check that they indeed have an attached project.
Removed all legacy WebHostingHub-Glyph references and switch fully to Clarity.
Removed unused legacy code from the Quicklook windows.
Replaced getTokenAt with getTokenTypeAt, hopefully achieving performance gains on documents littered with renderable elements.

GUI and Functionality

The NSIS installer (Windows) now contains customized, branded images for the sidebar and header of the various pages visible during the setup process.
Added syntax highlighting modes (with keywords):
- Clojure: clojure
- LaTeX: latex/tex
Fixed a bug where the trailing --- of a YAML frontmatter would mistakenly be identified by the renderer as ATX-headings in readability mode, resulting in weird display of the last YAML frontmatter line.
Added feedback if there was no directory selected, but one is needed to do a certain task.
Multiline math equations now feature syntax highlighting.
Fixed a bug that would sometimes render parts of multiline equations as headings.
Added an option to tell Zettlr to use the first heading level 1 of a file to display instead of the filename (however, a frontmatter title will override this).
YAML frontmatter ending characters should not trigger AutoCorrect anymore.
The exporter now respects values from a YAML frontmatter, if (and where) applicable.
You should now be able to fold Markdown sections from anywhere within their section text.
Fixed a rare bug where Zettlr would attempt to render an internal link as a citation.
Creating files using a case-sensitive extension name should now work.
Set desktop Linux desktop icon in BrowserWindow config.
reveal.js-presentations now do not have standalone-flags during export.
The "Import"-option now also lets you select Markdown and text files. However, instead of running them through Pandoc, they are directly copied into the target directory.
Fixed a bug that would cause the global search to stop working in certain situations, e.g. after renaming a file.
The middle mouse button now closes tabs (thanks to @Kaan0200 for implementing).

Under the Hood

Added the logo source files to source control. Please make sure to read the accompanying README file in the icons-directory before using!!
The AutoCorrect replacement now checks for the actual mode at both range endings before actually performing a replacement.
The importer is now a module.
Fixed a logical error in the FSAL change detection, which would lead to the FSAL not being able to process additions of assets.
The application now uses app.getVersion() instead of requiring the package.json-file (thanks to @Aigeruth for implementing).
CodeMirror is now required directly within the plugins and is independent of the location of node_modules.
Zettlr is now also available for ARM64 Windows (thanks to @smitec for implementing).

Breaking Changes

This release contains several breaking changes to 1.6 due to heavy internal refactoring.

Your virtual directories will be gone after installing.
Projects will be incorporated into the .ztr-directory-files, which means that you need to extract these files (or backup them) if you plan to roll back to 1.6 or earlier, lest you will lose the project settings.
Cmd/Ctrl+W will now attempt to close open tabs first before closing the window. To close the main window directly, use Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+W.
Now you will need to either Cmd+Click (macOS) or Ctrl+Click (other platforms) on internal and external links as well as on tags in order to follow the link/start a search.
Cmd/Ctrl+[1-9] now do no longer toggle recent documents -- rather they select the corresponding tab!

GUI and Functionality

New Feature: Zettlr now supports (theoretically) unlimited open documents and orders them in tabs at the top of the editor instance.
- The tabs display the frontmatter title, if applicable, or the filename.
- On hover, you can get additional info about the documents.
- Drag and drop the tabs to re-sort their order.
- Get going where you left of the day before: Open files are persisted during restarts of the application.
- Transiency: Tabs are opened transient, which means if you do not modify their contents, they will be replaced with another file that you open. This way you can quickly stroll through search results without having to close hundreds of tabs afterwards!
New Feature: RTL support! Now whether you are writing in Hebrew, Persian, Urdu or any other right-to-left writing system, you can do so now. We've added support for the respective options of CodeMirror in the "Preferences -> Editor" tab.
New Feature: You can now direct Zettlr to automatically create new files if you click on an internal link that does not match a file. Thanks to @halcyonquest for their contribution!
New Feature: Vim and Emacs insertion modes are now supported! You can switch persistently between these two and the "normal" insertion mode using the preferences. Thanks to @JorySchossau for implementing this feature!
New Feature: Directory icons. From now on you can select an arbitrary icon to further visually distinguish certain directories from the others. This has no other than a purely visual effect and may help identify specific directories within a longer list reliably.
New Feature: Many apps feature it already, Zettlr joins them now. An interactive tutorial will be opened on the first start of the app.
If available, a title from a YAML frontmatter will be appended to the displayed file entry when linking files.
Copying images from the Explorer/Finder/file browser now offers to insert them into the document, copying them over to the assets directory.
The popups are now more resilient against accidental closing, just like the dialogs.
When focus-selecting the global search bar (pressing the mouse button in the input and using it to select some text immediately) works as in other inputs now.
Added the week-number as a variable for filenames and the Zettelkasten IDs (use %W).
Changes to the Pomodoro timer: Now the sound will play each time you release the mouse button on the volume slider to check how loud it is. Furthermore, the mute button has been removed in favor of a volume indication, with 0% equalling the former mute setting.
When the tag cloud is filtered, "Copy Tags" will only copy the filtered tags, and no longer all tags. To copy all tags, reset the filter. Furthermore tags will now be copied to clipboard including the leading hashtag.
Re-enabled double-dollar equations for rendering and syntax highlighting.
HTML-style comments () are now also exempt from the word counting.
Fixed an error in the Table Editor that would assume empty rows to be header rows, leading to false behavior when trying to display a completely empty table.
The Table Editor can now also parse and display simple and grid tables, and a wider range of pipe tables, as described in the Pandoc manual.
Fixed a small mistake where literal blocks would be wrongly offset as the editor treated them as list items.
Fixed artefacts with spellchecking errors. Thanks to @ryota-abe for proposing the correct selector!
The Table Editor now remembers what the source table looked like and tries to recreate that when it applies the changes to the DOM.
Added verbose error reporting and improved the error handling during citeproc boot. Now, Zettlr will (a) remove error-throwing CiteKeys so that the rest of the library loads just fine and (b) display the exact errors as reported by citeproc-js so that users can immediately identify the bad keys and know where to look.
The global search bar's autocomplete will now also work for non-western scripts such as Japanese, Korean, Chinese, or any other.
Virtual directories have been discontinued. Parts of their functionality will be re-implemented in different ways.
On Linux, we've restored the default window decorations -- that is, the burger menu button is gone, and the menu will be displayed wherever the window manager decides.
Fixed a small bug that could lead to errors during autocomplete selection if no frontmatter is present in the file.
Added syntax highlighting modes (with keywords):
- Elm: elm
- F#: f#/fsharp
- Haskell: hs/haskell
- VB.net: vb.net/vb/visualbasic
- HTML: html
- XML: xml
- Markdown: markdown/md
- Julia: julia/jl
- Turtle: turtle/ttl
- SPARQL: sparql
- Verilog: verilog/v
- SystemVerilog: systemverilog/sv
- VHDL: vhdl/vhd
- Tcl: tcl
- CommonLisp: clisp/commonlisp
- Scheme: scheme
- PowerShell: powershell
Fix the colours of the heatmap search list.
Fixed a logical error in the detection of remote changes of attachment files.
Fenced code blocks, delimited by three backticks have a customizable box background. The colour (and different styles) can be customized by targeting the code-block-line-CSS class.
The font size of mathematics was decreased a bit to align it better with the size of normal text. Thanks to @tobiasdiez.
Support fenced code blocks surrounded by tildes (~) instead of backticks.
The About dialog of the application now also holds a tab with debug information about both the binary, the system, and the current environment.
Tags with diacritics are now also removed on export (with the respective setting turned on), so that the removed tags match the tags which are highlighted in the editor.
Fixed searches behaving irrationally if you search again while the previous search has not yet ended.
Switched to using the Clarity Design icon set where possible.
Sort buttons now show how the directory is currently sorted. One shows and toggles what is being sorted by (name or time). The other shows and toggles what direction is being sorted ine (ascending or descending).
Modified display settings are now applied on configuration changes (not just after clicking somewhere in the document).
Modals now also apply a dark theming if in dark mode.
Fixed image exports.
Fixed correct exporting of images when exporting to Textbundle and Textpack.
Fixed revealJS presentations which now display Math.
Fixed the autocomplete behaviour, especially with cursor movement.
If there is a selection in the document, its contents are used to fill in the search field now. Furthermore, the occurrences of the search term are now already highlighted without you having to search first.
If there is a selection in the document, its contents fill up the global search field on focus, if the global search field does not have any contents.
Fixed wrong display of project property table of content evaluation level.
When linking files, Zettlr will now present you those files that match with at least one tag with the currently active file, making cross-linking of notes as easy as typing the link-start and hitting the arrow down-key. Bonus: It'll present you these options even if the files reside in a completely different root directory.
Fixed behaviour of nested checkboxes.
Fixed escaping of special TeX characters in input value fields (e.g. project properties).
Finally fixed the parenthesis-link-problem. This means: For each Markdown link, the algorithm will parse the full detected URL and see if all opening parentheses have closing ones. If there are more opening parentheses than closing ones, the algorithm will push the link further in an attempt to fully resolve all parentheses. If this is not possible (because the link itself contains more opening than closing parentheses to begin with), you need to encode one opening parenthesis using %28 for the algorithm to successfully render the link.
Dragging search results like normal files is now possible.
When switching directories while a search result list is displayed, this search is now performed at the other directory immediately after switching.
Reversing a MagicQuote can now be performed by pressing backspace after a replacement has taken place, in order to restore the default double (") or single (') quote.
Math doesn't render in comments anymore.
Opening files with Zettlr when the app is not running will now correctly open them.
Zooming on Windows and Linux can now be facilitated by scrolling while holding down the control-key.
Use Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+L to copy the active file's ID to the clipboard.
You can now also use F2 to trigger a file rename for the current file.
Improve the detection and rendering of Setext-headings.
Dropping files from the file list onto the editor now inserts a valid Zettelkasten-link to that file into the editor.
Images will now also render in-line.
The "Window" submenu is now not confined to macOS applications anymore, but available to all platforms.
URLs in Markdown links will not be rendered anymore.
Enabled the context menu now also for both directories in the file list and the empty space in the file list (if there is some).
You can now open directories externally (read: in Finder/Explorer/your Linux file browser) in the context menu now.
Zettlr now attempts to set the cursor back to the place where it has been after programmatically updating the document content, e.g. after a remote change.
Added a setting to control the sensitivity of Zettlr checking for remote file notifications on certain systems.
Prevent multiple cursors when performing a special action (following a link, clicking a tag, etc.)
Now both the current cursor position and the word count are displayed side by side. No need to right-click again to toggle!
Citations in comments are now no longer rendered.

Under the Hood

FSAL Refactor: This release includes a huge refactor of the file system core of the application. In general terms, the rewritten core enables Zettlr to handle the file system more efficiently, uses up less RAM and has some other goodies that make the whole File System Abstraction Layer (FSAL) much more scalable for future feature implementations. More precisely:
- From OOP to Functional: While previously files and directories were heavily object-oriented with one full object being instantiated for each and every file including a whole prototype chain, the new core switches to a functional approach, removing the memory-intensive prototype chains. Instead, files and directories are now represented by a descriptor which includes the all meta-information packages, but no function bodies. Instead, the new FSAL calls functions to which it passes one or more descriptors in order to enable the function to modify the descriptor itself. This also makes state management easier, as the whole FSAL only works with object pointers and does not re-instantiate most descriptors every time a function modifies them.
- Improved state management: Now the state is not littered across the main process code base, but instead is centrally managed by the FSAL core class, which emits events every time anything in the state changes. This keeps the functional logic of the application much simpler. As opposed to before, the Zettlr main application class only accesses the FSAL state, and furthermore makes use of three events -- directory replacement, file replacement, and full file tree update -- to propagate any changes to the renderer process.
- File Caching for faster boot: The FSAL additionally includes a sharded file cache which approximately halves the boot time. Furthermore, this enables the app to be much more resource-friendly for your storage, as the number of file accesses is reduced heavily -- at most, one hundred files will be opened during boot, instead of up to 10,000 or more, depending on the amount of open files you had.
- Improved remote change detection: As a result of the descriptor-system and improved central state management, detecting and managing state changes induced remotely much easier. The whole logic of the watchdog has been cut down to its essential parts to make its business logic more manageable.
- Improved debugging: Also as a result of implementing the new FSAL core as a self-contained EventEmitter module, it's much easier to locate logical errors, as due to improved state management missing state updates in the graphical user interface most likely emanate from exactly there, and not the FSAL. This has already helped identify several very small and almost unnoticeable bugs that did not update the renderer's state as wanted.
Improvements to image dragging and dropping from the attachment sidebar.
Switched the string variable replacer from vanilla JavaScript to moment.js, which simplified the function considerably.
The export module is now really a module.
Switched to cTime internally as the representation for modification time, because it'll capture more changes than mTime.
Updated insecure dependencies.
.git-directories are now ignored.
Applying the CSS line classes for Markdown headings should now be less computationally intensive.
Switched to Gulp for LESS compilation (thanks to @tobiasdiez for implementing).
The command autoloader now logs potential errors during command loading.
You can now pass a temporary configuration file to Zettlr, e.g. for testing purposes. Simply start Zettlr from the command line and pass --config /your/config/file.json. It can also only be a stub (e.g. only containing certain selected configuration parameters), as Zettlr will set all missing properties to their respective defaults. If the path is relative, Zettlr will attempt to find the file either at the repository root, if app.isPackaged is false, or at the current executable's directory.
Added a test command for GUI testing. It creates a small directory structure so that you can test the GUI without having to sacrifice your files or your mental health for that issue. Run yarn test-gui to run Zettlr in that test environment, and do to the files whatever you want!
The targets class is now a service provider.
Fixed the flattenDirectoryTree utility function. I have no idea why it worked for eleven months, but when it started throwing errors on the FSAL I realized it did a lot of things but it should've never worked. JavaScript is magic. Update: Found a newer and more optimized utility function, objectToArray, so I'm trashing it for good.
The Pandoc-command is now logged in its resolved state immediately before actually being run.
Windows installers are finally signed.
Switched back to the package.json configuration for electron-builder, because, well, Electron.
Fix a lot of unused and weirdly coded code.
Added a flag to determine if the Zettlr version has changed, indicating an update (or downgrade). Based on this, the FSAL will clear its cache on boot.
Added command-line flag --clear-cache to programmatically clear the FSAL cache on startup.
Moved the forceOpen-functionality to a command.
Refactored the autocompletion logic and moved it out into its own designated class to reduce the size of the ZettlrEditor class.
Refactored the logic for building the bibliography in an attempt to further reduce the size of the ZettlrEditor class.
Include the codemirror.css into the geometry styles so we have one less dependency to include on startup.
Switched to Electron 9.0.0.
Set the standalone flag for Pandoc on all non-special exports.
Image rendering now also supports base64-encoded inline images.
Improvements to the detection of tags, internal links and footnotes. The algorithm is now more efficient and stable in various situations.

The macOS-build of Zettlr is now code-signed and notarized, which means you will be able to open it without having to explicitly add an exception in your security preferences.

Breaking Changes

If you want to enable the newly added MathJax CDN support for equation rendering, make sure to add the --mathjax-flag to your Pandoc command. If you did not modify the Pandoc command, you can "restore" the (new) default value, which will add the MathJax support for you.

GUI and Functionality

New Feature: Mermaid chart support! Now you can add code blocks with the keyword "mermaid" (i.e. "```mermaid")to your document and use the Mermaid chart language to create charts!
New Feature: Zettlr is now able to open file attachments for citations in your files. Simply right-click a citation, go to "Open Attachment" and select the cite-key for which you want to open the file attachment. Got multiple? Here's how Zettlr chooses which one to open: All attachments are listed and then the PDF files are sorted on top of the list. Then, Zettlr will open whatever attachment is the first in the list.
New Feature: You now have an additional setting that allows you to determine if, and when, the filename will be automatically added to your link. "Never" means that the file name will never be added, "Only with ID" means that the file name will only be added, if the link is constructed using the ID, and "always" (the default) means that the file name will always be added, possibly duplicating it.
New Feature: NOT search operator. Now you can use an exclamation mark (!) before the term in your global search to exclude certain search terms. If any NOT-condition is satisfied, the file will no longer be considered a candidate. You can combine the NOT-operator with both exact matches (!"an exact phrase") and single terms (!word).
Added TypeScript syntax highlighting. Keywords: typescript, ts.
Added Windows 32bit build.
Switched from showdown to turndown for converting HTML to Markdown on pasting contents. This makes pasting HTML formatted text much better than prior. Thanks to @Zverik for implementing!
Pressing Alt-Up and Alt-Down will now swap lines in the editor window up or down.
Cleaned up the shortcuts. Until now, Ctrl+B would also make text bold on macOS. Now, only Cmd+B will work, while Ctrl+B will only work on non-Apple systems.
Improved the Math equation detection again. Now it's simpler, faster and will work more reliable. Escaping dollar signs should most of the time not be necessary anymore.
Added syntax highlighting to inline and block Math equations. Now they're displayed in monospace to make it easier for you to write them.
Title and tag matching of search terms during global search is now performed case insensitive.
Added an option to copy the filename of files to the clipboard via the context menu.
Exact search terms in the global search are no longer trimmed (trailing and leading whitespace is not removed) to maintain the meaning of "exact".
The AutoCorrect option can now be activated and deactivated as intended.
Added German secondary guillemets to the MagicQuotes settings.
Better citation detection: Now, standalone-citations at the beginning of line will also be rendered.
Improved the contextmenu behaviour.
When creating a new file, the editor is re-focused again so that you can immediately begin writing.
Task items are now rendered irrespective of the list-type-character they use, i.e. the following examples will all be rendered correctly: - [ ], + [ ], and * [ ].
The "Empty directory"-message is now translatable and available in several languages.
Headings will no longer be considered tags
Fix Ctrl+F-shortcut on macOS.
When linking a file using the Zettelkasten links, the prompt will now include all files from the whole root, not just the files from within the current directory.
Made the dialogs more resilient. Now you can select text somewhere on dialogs, and regardless of whether you accidentally moved too far (out of the dialog), it will not close anymore, when you release the mouse.
The front matter is now disregarded when counting words or chars.
In case of renaming a directory, the containing directory is now re-sorted everytime so that changes are reflected immediately.
The HTML template now includes a switch to include MathJax (CDN) in order to display equations in HTML exports and the print preview (only works with Pandoc installed).
Improved placement of Input Method Editors (IME) for non-western input sources (e.g., Japanese or Korean typeset). Thanks to @ryota-abe for implementing!
The file linking autocomplete will now respect your choice of Zettelkasten link starting characters, if they differ from [[.
The formatting of Zettelkasten-links is now according to other formattings (such as emphasis or bold text), slightly transparent.
On autocompleting Zettelkasten-links, the closing characters for the links are now added in case they are not already present (due to autoclosing, or else).
The automplete-dropdown for Zettelkasten-links does not appear anymore if editing a footnote.
Added overall days statistics to the stats dialog.
Image-Paths correction for Windows systems.
Setext headers are now rendered in the correct size, in line with the ATX headers.
Abstracts in the YAML frontmatter are now considered on PDF exports.
Fixed a rare bug, which would cause the edit flag on the main process to remain even though the renderer reports the editor is clean (that is, no changes to the document).
Fixed an error where a completely empty custom CSS (e.g. when the user simply selects and deletes all content in the dialog or in the file) would cause the dialog generation to crash until a restart of the app.
Fixed a rare error where an error would be thrown during export of extremely small projects.
Fixed an error where the writing target popup would close itself via click on an option on Windows systems.
Fixed "Select All" context menu item for text selection.
Allow spaces in header delimiting rows.
revealJS-presentations now have a basic syntax highlighting (Solarized theme).
HTML exports now have a basic syntax highlighting (Solarized theme).

Under the Hood

Fixed a small bug that would display a non-intuitive message when checking for updates and the update server is not available.
Fixed wrong error logging in the Citeproc provider.
Added the necessary cslenvironment to Zettlr's default TeX template so that Pandoc >2.8 does not throw errors. Thanks to @frederik-elwert for implementing!
Cleaned up the keymap for CodeMirror. It's now centralised within generate-keymap.js and not scattered in all the plugins anymore.
Rewrote the i18n loading logic, resulting in huge performance gains on startup. Thanks to @BAKFR for implementing!
Exchanged deprecated API calls in the AppearanceProvider class.
The default DMG height for macOS installers now again shows the disclaimer at the bottom of the archive window.
Fixed a logical bug with zoom levels bigger than 40x.
Fixed the welcome log message, because whatever it was, it did not read こんにちは (Hello).
Now during startup all files that do not exist anymore in the openPaths-property will be removed (because only directories can be "dead").
Wrote script to automatically update the CSL styles and locales that are shipped with the app. Also, updated the CSL styles and locales.
The YAML mode within frontmatters is now correctly detected by all plugins, so that e.g. AutoCorrect does not apply within YAML-frontmatters and quotes are the "correct" ones (no need to disable MagicQuotes temporarily to write frontmatters).
Added an additional check to make sure to differ between explicit and implicit paste events in the CodeMirror instance.
Finally fixed the weird glitches of the file list. Now it will correctly scroll files into view, not break, and be not empty for a fraction of a second.
Overhauled the QuickLook windows. Now they react to much more finetuned configuration changes, are more responsive, and in general react faster to changes.
Switch to Electron 8.
Fix Pandoc error logging.
Detach Popup event listeners on close.
Add configuration files for Visual Studio Code to simplify coding. Thanks to @tobiasdiez for implementing.

GUI and Functionality

New Feature: AutoCorrect! Zettlr can now automatically replace certain characters with special symbols. For instance, by default it will replace --> with →, != with ≠ or perform certain default replacements, such as transforming hyphens and fullstops with their typographically correct symbols (... -> … and -- -> –). You can edit the replacement table in the preferences and adapt them to your own needs. Please note that this feature will only be active when you are outside of codeblocks. This is meant to prevent unintended replacements, especially with certain languages such as R, where ASCII arrows are part of assignment operations.
New Feature: Magic Quotes! Together with AutoCorrect, we've implemented the ability of Zettlr to use magic quotes. That means, whenever you type " (double quote) or ' (single quote), it will instead insert the typographically correct characters of your choice, for instance „…“ for German, or « … » for French. Even 「…」 for Japanese are supported! Please note that this feature will only be active when you are outside of codeblocks. This is meant to prevent unintended replacements, as most languages require the ASCII quotes. Note also that having this feature active will deactivate the automatic bracket matching for quotes.
YAML Frontmatters now receive the correct syntax highlighting.
YAML Frontmatters do now have influence on the appearance of files: If a title is given, Zettlr will use this instead of the filename in the file list. If an array of keywords is given, Zettlr will add them to the rest found within the file.
Codeblocks are now excluded from both tag extraction and ID search algorithms, so for example #include (used in C++ code) will no longer be recognised as a tag.
Fixed a bug that would ignore the page size set in your PDF preferences when using the default template.
Fixed a bug that prevented you from moving files and folders in combined sidebar mode.
Fixed the broken footnote in-place preview and editing support when using named references.
Improved the design of wrongly spelled words -- now the dotted line is closer to the actual words.
Fixed Alt-clicking files in the combined sidebar mode. Now this will also open QuickLooks.
Added the shortcuts Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+E to focus the editor and Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+T to focus the file list.
On macOS, you can now also Cmd-Click links and tags to open/follow them.
Added the variable %uuid4 to use Universally Unique Identifiers version 4 (random UUID) within certain strings in the app.
Improve "Copy as HTML" to also provide fallback Markdown.
Fixed paste detection (if there's only HTML in the clipboard)
Changed the Support-link to link to Patreon.
Added a new error message informing you of malformed citation keys.
Fixed the print preview.
Removed the quotes from the matchbrackets-configuration.
Fixed link rendering and the opening of links.
Added the shortcut Cmd/Ctrl+T to create a task list. Thanks to @jeffgeorge for implementing!
The blockquote character > is not treated as a list-item anymore, meaning you don't have to Shift-Enter into the next line anymore to prevent the blockquote from expanding unnecessarily.
Implemented a "fat" cursor for the insert mode of Windows, so that when you press the Ins-key to toggle between inserting and replacing, Zettlr will graphically announce that you'll now be replacing characters rather than inserting. Please note that this will only look good for monospaced fonts -- the other themes will have characters that are bigger than the cursor.
Improve the tabs display for long titles (e.g. in the preferences dialog).
The link detection algorithm is now less aggressive.
On HTML exports (both revealJS presentations and regular HTML files), image paths will not be absolute anymore, but relative.

Under the Hood

Switched to Electron 7.
Added v8 code caching for better startup performance.
Added a global logging interface for better error and bug handling.
Relaxed the policy on wrong citation keys: One wrong key won't stop the loading of the rest of the database anymore, only the wrong key won't be included.
Moved out the markdownOpenLink-function from the editor class to the utilities.
Added much better heuristics to resolve paths linked to in markdown documents. Except a few edge cases, the algorithm should be able to open most varieties of links.
The exporter now escapes the templates to account for potential spaces in the template path.
Increased efficiency and cleanliness for loading the fenced code highlighting modes. Thanks to @BAKFR for implementing!
Added support for building AppImage releases using the command yarn release:app-image (or npm run release:app-image). Thanks to @yashha for implementing!

GUI and Functionality

This update will reset your sidebar mode to the initial value of thin.

From this update on, you will need to hold either the Alt-key or the Ctrl-key on your keyboard, if you plan to move a file out of the app.

New Feature: Table management has just become easier. With the new table helper plugin, Zettlr enables you to circumvent manually having to edit Markdown tables. All you need to do now is keep the table helper active in the settings and just edit your tables as you would do in any other application. The table helper offers the following keyboard navigation shortcuts:
- Tab: Move to the next cell, or the first cell on the next row, if the cursor is in the last column. Adds a new table row, if the cursor is in the last row.
- Shift-Tab: Move to the previous cell, or the last cell on the previous row, if the cursor is in the first column.
- Return: Move to the same column on the next row. Adds a new table row, if the cursor is in the last row.
- Arrow Up: Move to the same cell in the previous row.
- Arrow Down: Move to the same cell in the next row.
- Arrow Left: If the cursor is at the beginning of the cell, move to the previous cell. Moves to the last cell on the previous row, if the active cell is in column 1.
- Arrow Right: If the cursor is at the end of the cell, move to the next cell. Moves to the first cell on the next row, if the active cell is in the last column.
- Buttons:
  - Alignment-Buttons (top-left): Aligns the currently active column left, center, or right.
  - Removal-Buttons (top-right): Removes either the current row or the current column. Does not remove the last row or column.
  - Add-Buttons: Adds rows or columns to the top, left, bottom or right hand side of the currently active cell, depending on the button.
New Feature: 1.4 introduces a readability mode that you can turn on. It will try to highlight your sentences based on four possible algorithms, where green means that it's readable and red means that the sentence is difficult to read. You can turn on the mode in the toolbar. Thanks to @wooorm at this point for providing the incentive of implementing the algorithm!
New Feature: The Translatr-API is now integrated into the app. This means: All translations will automatically be kept updated. Additionally, you can comfortably download all available languages (completed at least 50 percent) from the preferences dialog.
The app will boot much faster now.
Root directories that have not been found on app start, or are removed during runtime, are indicated as "dead" in your directory tree. If they reside on a removable medium, you can now simply plug the medium into the computer and rescan the directory. You don't have to manually open it anymore.
Citations in your text are now always updated, you don't have to type anything for this to work.
Inserting tasklists is now possible via context menu and formatting toolbar.
New Theme: Karl-Marx-Stadt.
Now you can choose which time to use for sorting and for displaying in the file meta: It's either the last modification time of the files or the creation time.
Directory sorting is now persisted during reboots.
Clicking on tags now initiates a search for the given tag.
Added three new optional variables to pass to external exporter programs: $infile_basename$ (input filename without directory), $outfile_basename$ (output filename without directory) and $indir$ (the input file's directory)
You can now change the number of spaces to indent by in the preferences.
Images can now be put inside links on the condition that they are (a) the only element inside the link's description and (b) relative links won't work during preview.
You can now activate RMarkdown file support in the advanced preferences.
You can now tell Zettlr to count characters instead of words (e.g. for Chinese).
Custom CSS is now also rendered in the QuickLook windows.
The preview image colour is now adapted to the active theme.
You can now choose the formatting characters that should be used by the formatting commands.
You can now change the pattern used for generating new file names, and omit being asked for filenames in general.
Zettlr now tries to escape the input you provide for options that are directly passed into LaTeX documents.
When you have open two or more root files with the same filename, Zettlr will display the containing directory's name as well.
French-style guillemets are now supported for auto closing.
Image display in HTML exports fixed.
The About dialog contributors' tab now displays the date when the translation was last updated at.
The dates and times all across the app are now correctly localised.
When initiating a replace command with a regular expression search, you can now use variables in your replacement value so that you can re-use capturing groups from the search regular expression:
- $1 in the replacement value will be replaced with the first capturing group
- $2 with the second capturing group
- ... and so forth.
Zettlr now automatically downloads updates to the translations, if available.
The editor now has a light background image in case it is empty.
Fixed a bug with certain types of keyboards on macOS conflicting with internal CodeMirror commands.
Prevent opening of a user's home directory.
The citation rendering plugin won't render the domain parts of Emails anymore.
Markdown links in braces won't include the closing brace anymore.
The search's heatmaps now use the theme's colour as a base to indiciate the relevancy instead of always green.
The image regular expression is now a little bit less restrictive, allowing for some spaces before and after the image.
Fixed a small bug during checking and unchecking of task list items that would prevent the updating of the underlying Markdown text.
When you enter an ID and choose the ID from the popup list, the filename belonging to that ID will also be inserted after the ID.
You can now filter the tags in the tag cloud.
You can now duplicate files within a given directory.
The tag selection dropdown will not appear anymore, if you type a # somewhere within a word or a link. It must either be at the beginning of a line, or preceded by a space for the tag dropdown to appear.
If there are two or more root directories open with the same name, Zettlr will now display the containing directory just like with root files.
Added a line:column indicator mode to the word counter (switch modes with right-click).
You can now move through the file-list with the arrow buttons in steps:
- Arrow down: Select next file
- Arrow up: Select previous file
- Shift key: Move up or down by ten files
- Command or Control: Move to the bottom or the top.
Added a table generator.
Fixed a small bug that would not correctly sort newly created files.

Under the Hood

Massive rewrite of the underlying mechanism of loading the directory trees into the app. It's now asynchronous and the app starts up way faster than before.
Replaced the citation engine with Citr for more accurate results in previewing citations.
The Citeproc engine is now a service provider.
Switched internally to CSS-variables for all colours.
Moved all Zettlr CodeMirror modes to their respective files.
Moved all helper functions to their own files.
Translations located in the lang-directory in the user data folder now take precedence over the shipped translations.
Moved all local find functionality to a new class EditorSearch and did some fixing.
Massive rewrite of the watchdog logic. Now the app is blazingly fast, there's no up-to-five-seconds-delay anymore when you add/remove any files and the app should generally feel smoother to handle.
Fixed duplicate dictionary entries and saving of the dictionary preferences function.
Moved the comment detection in the link rendering command further back to speed up performance significantly.
Added a clipboard inspection dialog to inspect the contents of the clipboard and make sure copy & paste operations work as expected.
Updated the make.sh script to automatically infer the version to use from the source's package.json.
Simplified the process of maintaining the revealJS templates, added a few other goodies. The command reveal:build will now re-build the full revealJS templates with the installed revealJS version.
The Citeproc-provider now logs all errors that prevent a successful boot to the console.
Replaced the sidebar with a Vue.js component.
The configuration setting for the sidebarMode is finally called as such.
Removed ZettlrWindow::setTitle().
ESLint is now added to the devDependencies so that everyone can use the same code style.
Add activation for opening external links on macOS.
Switched to Electron 6.

GUI and Functionality

Attention, this update breaks three shortcuts: To view the file list, the tree view, and the attachment sidebar, you need to use Cmd/Ctrl+! (for toggling the sidebar), and Cmd/Ctrl+? for toggling the attachments. The shortcuts for Cmd/Ctrl+[number] are now reserved for recent documents!

Attention: Due to changes in the configuration, this update resets your setting concerning text snippets. They are now called "file information" and the corresponding setting will be set to "Show", regardless of your current setting.

New Feature: Zettlr can now automatically switch between light and dark mode either based on a fixed schedule or, if you are using macOS or Windows, based on the appearance of the operating system.
New Feature: Add words to the user defined dictionary. You can remove words by removing them in the "Editor" tab in the preferences.
New Feature: You can now provide a default path for images that you paste onto the editor in the preferences. If you provide a relative path, it'll be relative to the file.
New Feature: In the preferences you can now switch between the three themes of the app:
- Berlin: A modern sans-serif theme, the default.
- Frankfurt: A clean serif-based theme with royal blue highlights.
- Bielefeld: For Markdown purists, this theme features creme colours and a monospaced font.
New Feature: Rearrange sections in your documents by dragging the headings in the Table of Contents popup around (Note: Only works with ATX-Style headings!). Please note that the last section will always count until the very last line, therefore including footnotes and references.
New Feature: You can now also load BibTex files into Zettlr.
Popup redesign: Now the popups aren't semi-transparent anymore, have rounded edges and are much more crisp. Therefore it's even easier to read them.
Display contributors tab on the about dialog containing the names of all authors of the translation files.
You can now customize the pandoc command to your liking using several variables.
Added syntax highlighting for
- Go (keyword: "go")
- Kotlin (keyword: "kotlin")
Add shortcuts for easier access to the recent documents.
HTML export now relies on Pandoc, if available, and only falls back to Showdown if Pandoc hasn't been found on the system.
You can now edit Math formulae by clicking on them.
The tag count is now shown next to the tags in the tag cloud.
During global search, the search results will include all files once at most, so files within virtual directories, for example, will be excluded to prevent duplicate files.
The preview images when pasting an image from clipboard load faster.
Formatting marks at the beginning or end of a misspelled word are now excluded from the selection.
Now, if trying to follow a link without a protocol (e.g. www.google.com instead of https://www.google.com), Zettlr will automatically assume https as the protocol to make sure it can be opened by the web browser. Correctly configured servers should automatically redirect you to http, if applicable.
Zettlr now highlights the full link when you right-click it to give visual feedback that the context menu options "Copy Link" or "Open Link" will indeed use the full link, and not just a part of it.
The dictionary selection is now more compact than before.
The editor automatically selects the word under cursor on requesting a context menu, making both the code more clean and enabling you to simply right-click a word to make it, for instance, bold.
Now you can comment out selections of text using the new shortcut Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+C.
You can now also link to files on your local filesystem from within Markdown files. Zettlr will try to open them. The following algorithm is applied internally: First, try to open the link just like that. Second, try to open the current file's folder plus the link. Third, try to open https://<link>. If all three methods don't yield a result, Zettlr will show you a notification.
The GUI is not locked anymore while a popup is shown.
The tag preferences have been updated.
CodeMirror by default sets the cursor to the beginning or end of a whole line (with line wrapping). You can now change that behaviour, so that the Home and End buttons bring you to the beginning and end of the visible lines, not the logical lines.
Zettlr now counts completed pomodoros.
The image path of pictures pasted from clipboard will now always be relative.
You can now drag & drop attachments onto the editor.
The full path to an attachment will now be shown on mouse over.
You can now turn off the dialog asking you to load remote changes into the editor by checking the corresponding checkbox in the preferences or in the dialog.
The file list now shows the full filename after a 1 second delay if you keep your mouse over the name of a file.
You can middle mouse click on editor-tabs to close them.

Fixes

Fixed a bug that would, on certain actions, lead to unwanted behaviour when using the menu items for these actions instead of the shortcut.
The last opened file will now be added to the recent documents on start up.
The window's title will now only contain the currently opened file's name, and never the full path, even for root files.
The dictionary loading mechanism works far more reliably now.
Fixed a bug with checking and unchecking task items in the editor.
Fixed an error in option validation.
Fixed the translations for the pagenumbering sections in the PDF preferences and project settings.
Fixed a small bug concerning case insensitive searching.
Fix for single-letter Math preview.
Fixed the "remove from virtual directory" command.
Design fix for dialog tabs on small screens.
Fix automatic rendering of Markdown links containing brackets (especially a problem for Wikipedia links)
Improved performance during window resizing and moving.
Removed all inline-javascript from the index.htm and moved it to a new main.js in the renderer process.
Links will not be rendered within comments anymore so that you can escape Markdown links as expected using backticks.
Fixed wrong cursor positioning after the headings have been altered.
Finally exchanged all mentions of "snippets" with "File metadata" or information, respectively, to reflect the fact that text fragments (a.k.a. "snippets") have been ditched several months ago.
Fixed an issue that prevented from re-creating writing targets after deleting them without a restart of the app.
Fixed inconsistent behaviour with the document search.
When trying to close the main window immediately after modifying the open document, you will now not be prompted to save the document anymore. All changes will be saved automatically.
Now files with more than one tag will have tag indicators more consistent to files with only one tag.
On rare occasions, Zettlr instances run on Windows can enter a zombie state where the main process is still running albeit the main window has been closed. Trying to run Zettlr anew will fail with an error due to the (now non-existing) window being accessed during the on-second-instance event. This fix makes sure a window will be opened in any case if there is none prior to restoring Zettlr.
Fixed the placement of the popups, so they should now be visible.
Fixed the context menu on files that have visible tags.
Fixed wrong citation suggestions after a change of the library file.
Fixed a bug causing the attachment extensions to be checked case-sensitive, instead of case-insensitive.
Fixed the search not saving the strings you were searching for after re-showing the popup.

Under the Hood

Re-throw errors during command run in Zettlr main class.
Moved the dictionary to its own dedicated provider for more versatility and improved upon its functionality.
Created an appearance provider which takes care of switching the Zettlr theming based upon user choices.
Switched from the build-property electron-build toolchain to the API.
Switched to Electron 5.0.0.
Some CSS cleanup, again.
Changed the way popups are closed from an invisible barrier div to a simple click detection handler.
Added Table and Strikethrough support to the copy & paste operations.
Moved the Table-of-Contents-popup to the ZettlrBody class.
Removed excess debug code.

GUI and Functionality

New Feature: Zettlr can now import and export both textbundle and textpack files. Refer to textbundle.org for more information.
Removed the Speech submenu from Windows and Linux, as it is only used on macOS.
Attention: The recent documents submenu is now to be found in the File menu! It resides no longer in the toolbar.
Added an "Inspect Element" context menu item if the debug mode is enabled.
The context menu doesn't show up on directory items in the file list anymore, which it wasn't supposed to anyway.
Fixes in the math rendering. Now the app will correctly render all equations, be they inline or multiline.
Added a flag to let the app know if you want to receive beta release notifications. If you tick the checkbox, Zettlr will also present you with beta releases, so that you can stay up to date.
When importing files, the "All Files" filter is now at the top and should be selected by default.
Fixed a small bug that would render exporting of standalone files impossible.
Rendered Markdown links now retain the outer formatting (e.g., if you wrapped the whole link inside bold or emphasis).
The Zettlr default tex-template now doesn't break checkbox exports by including the amsmath and amssymb-packages.
New shortcuts: Pressing Ctrl+Enter will insert a new line below the one in which you are currently, placing your cursor there. Pressing Ctrl+Shift+Enter will do the same but above the current line.
Added context menu entries to copy mail addresses and links to clipboard.
For compatibility reasons with some Linux distributions that reserve the Alt-key for dragging windows around it is now also possible to press the control key to follow links and initiate searches.
Removed a bug that would allow multiple dialogs to be shown as some kind of "overlays" on top of each other.
Updates to the design of the editor. Now the margins of the editor don't resize as soon as you change the font size.
Updates to the zooming of the editor's font: Now it'll stop at both 30 percent and 400 percent for lower and upper limits. Exceeding these may yield very weird errors.
The cursor over the Quicklook windows' window controls is now the default, not the dragging.
Added shell syntax highlighting (using keyword: shell or bash [for compatibility with Highlight.js]).
Adapted the styles - now the filenames stay readable even during global searches.
If you drag a file out of the app and cross a directory, it won't retain its highlighted state after you finish your drag&drop-operation.
Tags, internal links and normal links now only have a pointer cursor when one of the meta keys (currently: Alt or Ctrl) is pressed.
Implemented formatting support for HTML paste operations. If there's HTML in the clipboard as you paste, it will be converted to Markdown so that the formatting is retained. If you do not want to keep the formatting, simply hold down Shift before you paste, so that the formatting will not be kept.
Removed the minimum window size constraint so that the application window will be resizable to half a screen even on smaller devices.
Restored the window maximise/minimise-functionality by double-clicking on the toolbar.
Fixed a small bug that would throw errors on Windows and Linux if you would open a file in Zettlr by double-clicking it in the file browser while Zettlr was already running.
Links are now correctly detected by the preview algorithm.
Fixed a bug that would make it impossible to export Markdown files with strikethrough text using the Zettlr default template.

Under the Hood

Fixed a small logical error in the menu buildup process.
The context menu in the ZettlrBody class is now always instantiated anew.
Rewrote the logic of detecting and rendering mathematical equations.
Updated the KaTeX.css stylesheet to the newest version and removed some errors (thanks to @Wieke for doing this).
Rewrote the complete command structure of the app and branched it out into standalone files. Thereby the system becomes extremely modular and new commands can be written with ease. Additionally, it becomes possible to create shortcuts for certain commands.
Fixed a small possibility of running into an error while performing a global search.
Exchanged the variables for usage in TeX-templates with Pandoc-Style $-variables. Additionally, now all occurrences will be replaced with the correct value.
Moved the JavaScript bits out of the Handlebars templates and added them to the Dialog handler classes.
Code cleanup.
Removed the complete KaTeX dist files from the Zettlr source and switched to using the shipped files provided by the KaTeX module, reducing the binary sizes, maintenance effort and code clutter at once.
The Custom CSS is now a service provider.
The configuration is now a service provider.
The tags handler class is now a service provider.
Removed the superfluous getLocale-functions from ZettlrBody and ZettlrRenderer.
Pulled in the URL regular expression from the GFM CodeMirror mode so that the pre-rendered links by the command are the same as those detected by the GFM mode.
Added the ulem-package to enable export of strikethrough and underline text.

GUI and Functionality

Attention! Installing this update will reset the application language to the detected system locale and reset all spellcheck choices (i.e. you will have to re-select the dictionaries using the preferences window). The reason for this is that Zettlr is now compliant with the regulations for language codes as laid out in the Best Current Practices No. 47 (BCP 47). To achieve this, all mechanisms of finding and loading translation files and dictionary files had to be modified.
New Feature: Paste Images. From now on it is possible to copy images directly to the clipboard, then press Cmd/Ctrl+V in the editor and Zettlr will ask how to proceed. By pressing Return the default action will be taken: The image will be saved into the currently selected directory using either the original filename or a simple hash (for instance if you took a screenshot and there's no associated URL available), and it will be inserted at the current cursor position as a standard Markdown image tag, using the filename as title. If you don't press Return directly, you can adapt some options, such as the file size and the filename, and also choose a custom directory alternatively.
New Feature: Set writing targets. You can set writing targets for files by right-clicking them in the preview list. Each file that has a writing target will display its progress in the snippets section. Set an existing target to 0 to remove it.
New Feature: Print support. Just press Cmd/Ctrl+P to open the print preview, which is essentially an exported HTML file. Click the printer icon in the titlebar to print it!
New Feature: Custom CSS. Beneath your tag preferences, you now have a new menu option that lets you override certain styles of the app to customise it even further! From now on, the sky really is the only limit for customising the app.
Huge updates to the statistics dialog. We've added a lot of functionality to the statistics dialog. If you click the More … button in the statistics popup, the resulting dialog now presents you with a overhauled interface. Now you'll be able to filter your data by week, month, and year. Additionally, you can choose to compare the timeframe with the previous one (either week, month, or year). This way you'll be able to track your writing habits much more differentiated.
Tags are now only rendered as such and detected by the internal engine, if they are preceeded by a newline or a space. This will prevent page anchors inside links (e.g. example.com/page#anchor-name) or words with hashes in them from being detected as tags.
Switched from Droid Mono to Liberation Mono for displaying monospaced code and comment blocks because of better support for glyphs in the latter font.
Fixed an issue with the titles of the exporting buttons for HTML, docx, odt and PDF.
Fixed a small bug that made it unable to open standalone files from the directory list.
Small fix to the margins of switches. General fixes to the colours of the input controls in dark mode.
Fixed a bug that led to files reporting the same tags more than once.
Search results are now readable even in dark mode.
Fixed a bug that would not correctly transform the links of images dragged from the attachment sidebar onto the editor, causing errors by pandoc when trying to export the file.
Task list items are now rendered directly after you leave the formatting. You don't have to leave the line anymore.
Special tags that you've assigned a colour to are now displayed distinct from other tags in the tag dropdown list.
Now changing dictionaries during runtime yields the expected effects: The full word buffer will be invalidated so that formerly-wrong and formerly-correct words are checked against the new dictionaries.
Fixed a small bug that would cause users with French localisation to not be able to use the preferences dialog as it was intended.
Fixed a bug that made it impossible to load new dictionaries from the user directory.
Fixed a small issue that would display the full translation strings for dictionaries and languages that were not translated in the currently loaded translation, instead of just the language codes.
Fixed a small bug that would, on some Linux distributions, lead to the operating system opening up loads of file explorer windows when the "Open Directory"-button in the attachments sidebar was clicked.
Now it's not possible anymore to try to create files and directories within virtual directories.
The cursor blinks now smoothly.
Changes to the word-count chart: Now numbers are localised and the date is not in the ugly ISO format anymore.
You can now easily search for a file to link with the newly implemented autocompletion list that will pop up if you begin writing an internal link (i.e. type [[). After accepting an autocomplete suggestion, Zettlr will either put the ID between the brackets, or the filename, if there is no ID.
Fixed a bug that would throw an error if updating the config with no dictionary loaded on app boot.
Fixed a bug that would move a file to a random directory instead of enabling you to actually copy said file outside the app, if you dragged the file out of the app and passed the directory list.
Fixed the highlighting effect on drag operations. Now even if you use the thin sidebar mode, the directories where you can drop files will receive the highlighting shimmer.
Added an option to hide the heading characters and replace them with a small tag indicating the heading level (h1, h2, etc). Off by default.
Refined the rendering of links. Now, inline elements will be also rendered correctly inside rendered links.
The app will now correctly scroll to the selected file again (if any).
Added an option to hide directories from the preview list while performing a global search.
Fixed a small error that would strip false positive tags on export (i.e. that would also strip escaped tags).
Massive updates to the notification service provider. If a message is too long, it will be truncated when it is first shown to you. If you then click on the notification, it will expand itself so that you can read the full message. Click on it again to hide it. Additionally, the notifications are now the same height and move smoothly as soon as new notifications arrive or old ones get removed.
Gave the exporter an update: Now, if Pandoc experiences an error during export, you will be presented with a better error dialog which even lets you select portions of the error message for you to google them.

Under the Hood

Moved the input styling to the geometry section and only left the colouring in place.
Added a data-default-action support for Dialogs. Now there can be a button with the attribute data-default-action="data-default-action" (repetition necessary for ensuring a correct DOM structure) in each dialog that will be focused on instantiation of the dialog, thereby enabling a simple "default action".
Small changes to the translation files to remove some duplicates.
Added md5 for generating simple hashes.
The ZettlrDictionary-class is now an EventEmitter and emits update-events whenever the composition of the loaded dictionaries changes.
Renamed the default theme to its correct name: Berlin.
Small changes to enable on-the-fly theme CSS replacement.
Better escaping of some feedback strings in the preferences template.
The app is now BCP 47 compatible. This means that it should be possible to load every translation file and every dictionary folder using the correct language tag, instead of having to fall back to the crude xx_XX-type Zettlr used until now.
Moved the editor-specific getWordCount function out as a helper function.
Added an updateFile method to the global.ipc to enable files to update themselves silently if something changed.
Moved the calculating functionality of the ZettlrStatsView class to the main process's ZettlrStats class.
Removed the ZettlrStatsView class and moved the triggering functionality to the ZettlrBody class accordingly with the other popups/dialogs.
Branched out the ZettlrDialog class so that all functionality is now provided by specialised dialog classes that inherit from the base class.
Rearranged the options within the "Advanced" tab in the preferences dialog.
Moved out all CodeMirror require() to a new file called autoload.js in the assets directory to save space in the main ZettlrEditor class.
Added a security pass to the droppable directories to make sure they don't accidentally accept the file and direct the main process to move it out of the app instead of moving it to themselves.
Switched back to electron 3 for the time being, as electron 4 still has a nasty bug that renders the toolbar unusable when exiting fullscreen on macOS (see https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/16418 ).
Switched to nspell for spellchecking, as the correction-finding algorithm works smoother and the repository is not as old as Typo.js.
makeExport now returns a Promise instead of the Exporter object. The exporter is now only returned if it's call succeeded (by passing it to resolve).
There is now the yarn command yarn less:extract available which extracts the CSS class names and IDs from the prebuilt styles. Please note that you must run the yarn less command beforehand.

GUI and functionality

Added a written reason for why some preferences options failed validation and need to be corrected.
Moved the attachment options to the "Advanced"-tab in the preferences window.
Fixed a bug that threw errors when you tried to Alt-click a virtual directory.
Fixed the bug that virtual directories got duplicated on the creation of new files.
Added a "Donate" menu entry to the help menu.
The startup overlay is now gone.
Dictionaries can be selected and deselected at runtime.
Fixed a bug that did not remove the file's ID in the preview list, after it has been deleted from the file itself.
Added an option to deactivate the automatic closing of pairs of matching characters in the editor.
The app now supports code folding! Now you can click the new, small arrows left to Markdown headings to collapse everything below it!
Removed the customised word processor templates. Zettlr now uses the default reference docs provided by Pandoc.
Projects can now also be exported to odt, docx, and HTML.
Added tag autocomplete. Now when you start typing a #-character, you are presented with a list of tags you already use inside your files, so you don't use similar (but not same) tags in different files.
Added citeproc-js integration: Now you can point Zettlr to a JSON CSL-file (ideally generated by Zotero) and it will automatically enable you to put @BibTex-IDs or even complex Pandoc citations in your text, which will not only be automatically replaced by a correct citation (only Chicago supported, because it is only a preview), but also renders a preview bibliography! Additionally, if you point Zettlr to a CSL Style file in the settings of a project, it will use this file to generate your citations!
Added an option to change the sansfont property of LaTeX-documents, used mainly for headings.
The Pomodoro timer now remembers your settings on a per-session basis.
Added an additional check to see whether or not a huge number of words has been pasted into the editor. If so, the word counter won't count these towards the overall counter. So if you need to paste in whole documents, this won't raise your word counter absurdly high.
Fixed a bug that rendered unwanted Math previews.
Added file-open buttons. Now, whenever you are required to select a normal file, Zettlr provides you with a button that lets you choose the file comfortably.
Zettlr now features an additional "Display" preferences tab, which lets you control all things that define Zettlr's appearance.
You can now constrain the maximum size of images in the editor, separated by maximum width and maximum height.
Updated the about dialog to now feature a tabbed interface containing main projects with licenses for the four big projects Zettlr use (Electron, Node.js, CodeMirror, and CitationStyleLanguage), all complementary projects, and the license of Zettlr itself.
Now only escaping characters are formatted, not the characters following them.
Fixed a bug that would prevent you from being able to modify an already loaded image without restarting Zettlr, because it would cache the image and not reload the modified version of it.
Updated the styling of form elements: Now ranges and radio buttons are also displayed in the Zettlr design.
Added an option to set a custom TeX template for PDF exports both in the general PDF preferences as well as on a per-project setting.
Restored the functionality to quickly navigate the files in the preview container using the arrow keys Up and Down. Also you can once again jump to the end of the list by pressing an arrow key while holding Cmd/Ctrl.
Zettlr now sorts your files based on a natural sorting order. You can restore the ASCII-sorting (the sorting as it has been until now) in the settings.
Tags can now be escaped with a backslash (\) to make sure they won't show up in the tag dropdown list and also won't render as tags.
Keyboard navigation is much more reliable.
Fixed creation of new files while writing in the editor with no file open.
The search functionality in both editor and Quicklook windows has been enhanced. It is now faster and you have to explicitly request a regular expression search by typing it literally. This means: Searching for /\w/ will select all words inside the editor, while \w will literally search for that string.
Zettlr now supports internal links. If you place a pandoc-compatible identifier inside a markdown link, it will try to jump to the respective line. E.g., the identifier #tangos-photography-and-film will match the heading # Tangos, Photography, and Film. Simply use a standard Markdown link: [Go to Tangos, Photography, and Film](#tangos-photography-and-film).
Zettlr keeps some margin between the cursor where you are writing and the window edges, i.e. it won't touch the window edges anymore, but keep a nice distance.
Quicklook windows can now be "popped out" so that they are no longer bound to the main window but can be dragged onto different displays, etc.
Windows and Linux windows now follow macOS in having no native window frame, but instead they employ the same strategy as macOS: The toolbar is the top element inside the main window of Zettlr, featuring window controls and, additionally, a button to open the application menu from the toolbar.
Zettlr correctly selects words containing apostrophs so that you can correct them adequately without the app "forgetting" the l' or 'll-part (or similar) of the word.
There's now an option to copy a file's ID to clipboard, if the file has one.
We've updated the Zettlr icon! It now matches the brand colour and has a modern look.
The image size constrainers look nicer and more intuitive now.
Added controls to determine which elements are rendered inside Markdown documents.
Simplified the attachment file handling and enabled dragging the paths of the files into the editor (e.g., to insert images).
Now the ID- and tag-search is case-insensitive.
Changes to the ID generation: Now if you press Cmd/Ctrl+L, the generated ID will be pasted wherever your cursor is currently (e.g. inside all text fields). Zettlr tries to back up your clipboard's contents and restore them afterwards.
Zettlr recognises IDs inside the name of a file. If the ID pattern returns a match in the file name, this ID takes precedence over any ID that may be in the file's content!
Added context menu entry to open link in the browser.
Images can now be dragged from the attachment pane onto the editor and will automatically be converted into valid Markdown links.
The tooltip that displays footnote texts when you hover over footnote references now displays formatted text, and not raw Markdown.
The zoom level of the editor's text is not lost on toggling the distraction-free mode anymore.
Update to the citeproc search. If you type an @ and begin searching for a work to cite, you can now also search through the title and don't necessarily have to know the ID anymore!
Added basic tag cloud functionality. You have now a new button in your toolbar that shows you all the tags that you've used somewhere in your files. You can also copy the full list into the clipboard!
Updates to the search functionality: Now the AND operator works as a requirement again (until now files have also reported search results if one or two of the search terms have matched, even if they were all required). Additionally, the tag search within files now accounts for a hashtag in front of the search term.

Under the hood

Documentation update in ZettlrValidation.
Updated the .dmg-installer file with a better background image.
Consolidated the package.json build fields.
Warning: The app ID has changed from com.zettlr.www to com.zettlr.app. For the implications please check this link -- the change only affects Windows users.
Refactored the complete menu logic to make it more accessible.
Added a global notify() method in the renderer process for convenience.
Added an option to make footnotes inside files unique prior to project exports.
Moved the dictionary functions to the main process for asynchronous background loading.
Began using tern.js for better autocompletion.
Fundamental Core Update: Now on each request for a new file tree (using the command paths-update) not the whole object is sent towards the renderer because of app crashes arising from the use of synchronous messages via the new typo-channel. Instead, a dummy list is sent containing only the properties that the renderer accesses anyway. This way not only the amount of data is reduced quite significantly, but also the app does not crash on file and directory operations.
Removed an additional openPaths-update during the renaming of root files.
Now the current directory is re-set correctly after renaming the current directory.
Refactored the context menu to resemble the same structure as the application menu.
Switched to the handlebars.js templating engine.
The askSaveFile()-dialog is now non-blocking.
ZettlrFile objects won't forcefully try to move a file to trash while handling watchdog events anymore.
ZettlrRendererIPC and ZettlrIPC now access the ipc-modules consistent with all other classes.
Generalised the askFile() function in ZettlrWindow for further purposes.
The ZettlrConfig now acts as an event emitter and emits update-events, whenever the configuration object changes. It can be subscribed to using global.config.on (to unsubscribe use global.config.off).
Added a global.ipc.notify-function to easily send notifications to the renderer.
Added a "cachebreaker" to the preview images in Zettlr.
Moved a lot of files around: The CSS, Fonts, JavaScript and the template files are now in the common directory, so that it makes sense that there can be multiple windows that share those files.
ATTENTION: We've stopped committing the compiled Handlebars templates and CSS files to the repository, so even if you don't develop styles or templates, you now need to run yarn/npm less and yarn/npm handlebars before you run the application!
Removed a bunch of superfluous pass-through functions from the ZettlrRenderer class.
Bugfixes in the ZettlrExport class.
Switched to documentation.js for generating the API documentation.

GUI and functionality

Fixed a bug during import that resulted in crashing the app if no Pandoc was found.
Updated the styling of the app to make it feel more modern.
To open a file directly by typing its name into the search bar you don't have to get the capitalisation correct anymore.
It is now possible to traverse the file tree directly by clicking on the directories inside the preview pane. Use a single click to make that directory your current one, or use an Alt-click to traverse back up to its parent directory.
Now the "Save changes before quitting?"-Dialog won't appear — all your files will be saved immediately before quitting.
Zettlr now remembers your last opened file and the last selected directory and restores them on each restart (if they still exist).
Images can now also have pandoc attributes assigned (in curly brackets after the image tag) and will both render correctly inside Zettlr and work as intended on export.
The app will now remember its size and position on screen and restore it after a restart.
Changes to the design of the dark mode. It's now a little bit blue-ish and the colours are finally adapted to the brand.
The directory list is now way less cluttered and looks way better than before.
Dropping images onto the app is now possible!
Added the long-commented-out blockquote command to the context menu.
iframes will now be rendered as well (such as the embed codes by YouTube or Vimeo). Note that only <iframe>-tags will be rendered, so Twitter embed won't work, for example.
Removed a small bug that would use the text selection cursor over directories after you've dragged a file.
Zettlr now remembers the last directories you were in when you successfully imported a file or opened a directory.
Added Droid Sans Mono as monospaced font family and updated the fonts around the app.
The Zettelkasten ID doesn't need to be in the format @ID:<your-id> anymore. Also the zkn-links can be customised.
The generation of IDs is now up to your creativity.
Made the search progress indication better. Now, instead of the background filling up with sometimes ugly colours, a circle just as for the Pomodoro timer is used.
The file snippets now hold additional information, such as the ID of the given file or the amount of tags. Additionally, if you hover over the number of tags, a popup will tell you which tags the file holds. Directories also now show their number of children elements (both directories and files).
The text snippets have been removed from the app.
The Quicklook windows now follow the application's theme.
Fixed a bug that generated a falsy first search cursor and prevented case insensitive searching.
Added extended statistics. Now you can exactly see when you've written how many words by clicking the new button in the small statistics popup.
You may now use #-characters inside tags.
macOS users now have an inset titlebar to make the app feel more immersive while not in fullscreen as well.
QuickLook windows now display the headings in the correct size again.
On smaller displays, Zettlr now has smaller margins and paddings so that each display size's space is used best.
Removed the ID-button from the toolbar. The command is still present in the menu and still works using the shortcut Cmd/Ctrl+L.
Fixed the bug that the attachment pane tooltip was partially hidden.
Quicklook windows are now constrained to the body area, and cannot be dragged over the toolbar.
Added validation to the settings so that you can't accidentally set wrong values.
The default buttons for dialogs are now reactivated, so you can remove files and folders by simply hitting Return to confirm the removal.
Anything markdown-specific (links, tasks, images) won't be rendered in any mode other than markdown anymore. So you can now rest assured that your links won't be converted and comments won't be displayed the size of headings in comment blocks or something.
Indented tasks are now rendered.
The table of contents now ignores comments in comment-blocks (no matter which language) and also has a better detection for the level of these.
Fixed a bug that threw errors on moving directories around.
Added Math inline-rendering.

Under the hood

Implemented the try/catch construct around ZettlrImport to actually catch the errors that were thrown by this function.
Added globally accessible config getters and setters so that the ZettlrConfig-object is now reachable from within all classes in the app.
Changes to ZettlrWindow to create windows using programmatical boundaries.
Updated the image finding regex again.
Reorganised the font families in the less resources.
The popup is now much simpler to call.
Removed instantiation from both ZettlrImport and ZettlrExport.
All Zettlr installations now receive a unique UUID.
Using global.config.get it is now possible in the renderer to access the configuration programmatically without the need to send events.
Replaced all renderer configuration requests with the new, faster and synchronous method.
Fixed a missing dependency in ZettlrAttachment.
Updated to electron 3.
Changed app.makeSingleInstance to app.requestSingleInstanceLock as recommended by the docs.
Updated dependencies to the newest versions.
Image preview rendering is now independent of path.
Refactored the complete configuration setting process.
Explicitly set defaultId on confirmation dialogs.
detach() is now called only after the move operation of a ZettlrDir has been completed to remove the parent-pointer.

GUI and functionality

Import functionality: Now you can import from nearly all file types pandoc supports into Zettlr. Simply select the desired target directory and select File -> Import files!
Added a lot of exporting options. More are still to come!
Export Markdown files as reveal.js presentations: From 0.19.0 on, Zettlr will support the export of reveal.js-presentations. Also, there's theme support built in!
If you insert a footnote, the cursor is not moved throughout the document so that the writing flow is more immersive.
The text field used to edit a footnote reference text is now automatically focused.
The editor will now directly mute lines when in full screen as soon as you change the preference setting for this. You don't have to move the cursor anymore for this.
Fixed a bug that showed a dedicated file menu when right-clicking directory ribbons and then threw errors if you clicked on anything in the menu.
Fixed the strange behaviour of Zettlr telling you there are no suggestions for a word, although you did not right-click a wrongly spelled word.
Inline links rendered inside headers are now always the correct size.
Email-addresses are now correctly identified and will be rendered as clickable links as well. If you Alt-click on them, they will open the default email option (i.e. they are the same as clicking on any website's email addresses).
Fixes to the project feature.
Made the dictionaries finally independent from the four default translations.
Added about 70 languages to the four default translations. This means: If you now include a custom dictionary or a custom translation, chances are high that it will be detected and translated automatically!
Added a bunch of dictionaries that now come shipped with the app.
Finally found & fixed the bug that kept detecting whole swathes of text as links and inserted them on link insert or didn't detect any link at all.
Transferred the download page in the updater to the new download landing page at zettlr.com/download.
Clicking on marked tags in the preview list will now trigger a search for these tags.
Added support for TeX-files. So in case you want to export something to PDF, you can add custom LaTeX statements in their respective file to amend the styling Zettlr applies.
You can now rest assured that on export of projects with nested files all images, even relative ones, will successfully be rendered in your PDF output.
Changes to the HTML exporting template. Now, images should always fit on screen.
You can now create LaTeX files by using the extension .tex when creating new files.
Better Pomodoro counter.

Under the hood

Changes to the runCommand method in ZettlrEditor.
Changes to the insertFootnote command.
Changes to the _editFootnote() method in ZettlrEditor.
Changed the event type the editor is listening to when you finished editing a footnote from keyup to keydown.
Moved the inline and block element rendering functions to their own commands to reduce the file size of ZettlrEditor.
Fixed the task recognition regex to prevent ugly errors logged to the console if you entered on an empty line a task list item directly followed by braces (such as - [ ](some text)).
Additional security checks while building the context menu.
Amended the regex for rendering links. Also provided a callback option for CodeMirror to be able to port the plugin fully externally and integrate it into other instances.
Added ZettlrImport class for handling file imports.
Removed the unnecessary PDF exporting LaTeX template from the pandoc directory.
Added another newline character when gluing Markdown files together on project exports.
Fixed a bug that would not read in a saved project config on restart.
Huge changes to the selection and retrieval of dictionaries for the spellchecking algorithm.
Made the regular expression detecting links in the clipboard non-global and limited it to only detecting single links in the clipboard.
The download page will now count all updates by users to keep track of how many users are using the app (only the click is counted, no personal information is collected). To avoid detection of you updating, simply visit zettlr.com/download manually.
Amended ZettlrRenderer by a function to programmatically trigger global searches.
Added .tex to the list of supported file types. Added a mode switch to ZettlrEditors open() method.
Small fix to the toolbar CSS for not having a hover effect on the Pomodoro button in dark mode.
Change to the less.js script. It now minimises the CSS output to further optimise the styling.
Spell checking is now off by default in fresh installations to speed up the first start.
Amendments to ZettlrProject, ZettlrFile and ZettlrExport to ensure relative image paths are accurately converted into absolute ones on exporting them.
Streamlined setting the ZettlrWindow title. Zettlrwindow::setTitle() is now deprecated.

GUI and functionality

Minor fix to the style of code-blocks in modals.
Fixed a bug that prevented you from immediately re-selecting the previous file by simply clicking it again, after you opened an external markdown file in Zettlr, which then was selected automatically.
Fixed an error thrown if a root file was removed remotely.
Fixed Zettlr always asking to replace a file although it hasn't been modified remotely.
Fixed a missing translation for changed files.
Fixed the threshold for being close to surpassing average from 50 words below average to the half of average. 50 words were definitely too narrow for anyone to really see the intermediary message.
Fixed some design rules.
Reallowed arbitrary text selection inside the editor (mainly necessary for macOS's quick lookup functionality).
Added styling for horizontal rulers (* * *) and escaped characters (e.g. \*).
Fixes to the new tooltips. Now all tags receive the nicer tooltips on mouse over.
Replaced the old footnote tooltip bubble, which did not look nice, with the much better tippy.js-bubbles.
Added HTML syntax highlighting.
Fixed an error on the export of Markdown files with code blocks.
Added syntax highlighting capabilities in fenced code blocks for the following languages (use the words in brackets after the beginning of a code block, i.e. \``javascript`):
- C (c)
- C# (csharp)
- C++ (cpp)
- CSS (css)
- Java (java)
- JavaScript (javascript)
- LESS (less)
- Objective C (objectivec)
- PHP (php)
- Python (python)
- R (r)
- Ruby (ruby)
- SQL (sql)
- Swift (swift)
- YAML (yaml)

Under the hood

Added an additional check to definitely determine if chokidar has choked or the file has indeed been modified remotely.
Lots of documentation has been added to the source code.
Moved the tippy() function from the ZettlrRenderer to the correct classes (ZettlrToolbar and ZettlrPreview).
Changes to the link detection regex in ZettlrEditor.
Changes to the export.tex LaTeX export template. It now provides the Shaded-environment Pandoc requires on exporting files containing fenced code blocks.
Added some amount of HTML syntax highlighting.
Added a multiplex mode that can highlight fenced code blocks.
Changed signature documentation of ZettlrRenderer's setCurrentFile method to reflect the actual process (it is being passed a hash, not a file object).
Changes to the _tags-array in ZettlrPreview. Now, the array is never completely regenerated, but resized according to the actual _data-array. The changes have affected the functionality of the functions _gen() and refresh() in this class.
Added a remove() method to Zettlr for root files wanting to delete themselves.

GUI and functionality

Now it's possible to download and install custom translations for Zettlr! If you want to use a translation that is not (yet) officially bundled with the app, simply import the translation JSON-file into Zettlr using the respective option. It will immediately be available for selection within your preferences (but a restart to apply the change is still necessary). The language file must be in the format aaa_AAA.json so that the app can detect the language by looking at the file name.
Numbers are now localised with the correct delimiters.
Zettlr now automatically indents text using four spaces to better work with other Markdown parsers.
Changed resizing constraints: Editor can now have 90 percent width at maximum.
Fixed a small bug that lets you open non-markdown files as roots.
You can now copy selected Markdown text as HTML! Just press Cmd/Ctrl+Alt+C instead of Cmd/Ctrl+C.
Added an online-check. From now on, if you are offline, Zettlr won't show you ugly error messages, but a simple notification that you are, in fact, offline and Zettlr can't check for updates.
Improved footnote placement.
Improved the placement of images in exported PDF files.
Increased search speed and fixed internal errors in displaying search results.

Under the hood

Changes to getSupportedLangs(): The function now returns a dynamically generated array of all available translations. This also includes language files that are placed inside the app's data directory (in the subdirectory lang).
Changes to i18n.js to reflect the fact that a language could also be located inside the application data directory (it now first tries to load the file from within the app, and if this fails searches for the file in the app data directory).
Zettlr now preserves the linefeeds of a file on saving.
Refactored the app's LESS and style handling.
Simplified the theme toggling.
Consolidated CSS styles.
Updated dependencies. Switched to Electron 2.0.6.
Removed package-lock.json, because nobody uses them anyway and yarn 1.9.2 just complained about them.
Changed resizing constraints: Editor can now have 90 percent width at maximum.
Fixed a logical error in ZettlrConfig that allowed non-markdown-files to be opened as root files.
Buffered the update check with an online-check. Renamed the original check() to _fetchReleases().
Fixes to the footnote placement.
Removed an unused function from ZettlrEditor.
Removed excess console.log from ZettlrBody.
Added an additional security check before marking results in the editor instance.

GUI and functionality

Added the project feature: Now you can convert directories into "projects" (via context menu). A project is simply the possibility for you to adjust PDF options for a set of files differently than in your general PDF settings and tweak the generation a little bit more. It is thought especially for exporting many files into a single PDF file, and has options to generate a table of contents or a title page. All files in the project directory and all of its sub-directories are concatenated in the same way as the preview list does it. Directories themselves are ignored. Then all these files are simply glued together and exported using the special settings you've given the project.
Included tag preferences. These allow you to assign colours to specific tags, so that you can see in the preview list directly which files contain specific tags (such as, e.g., #todo or #in-progress) to have an overview over the work you need to do or categorise your files.
Now the editor should correctly resize itself if the window itself changes its size.
Now, if you use the combined view, Zettlr recognises a second click on an already selected directory and switches to the preview list instead. If you do so while the expanded mode is active, nothing will happen.
I finally found the bug that was showing NaN instead of real numbers in the stats view. Now it should work on all systems just fine. (It only happened when there were less than thirty days of recorded statistical history available.)
Adjusted the placement of the dialogs. Now they should definitely be placed in the center, if they are smaller than the window and should never result in a scrollable window.
The dialog windows should pop up much faster now.
Changed the styles of all dialog windows, and made pretty especially the PDF preferences windows.
Replaced the system default's title popups with nicer looking popups.
Changed image preview rendering. Now, images smaller than the viewport will not scale up to fill the full width, but remain smaller than the viewport width.
Added a preview rendering of task items with checkboxes.
Now Zettlr will directly react to you clicking with your mouse into the window and doesn't require you to click a second time after the app has been focused again.
Snippets are now off by default.
Fixed a small error that led to the editor behaving strange after resizing the sidebar.
There is now no lag anymore on saving files. As a side effect, the global search is not exited when you change a little bit and then save the file.
Changed PDF export.
Small fix to the ZKN tag detection.
Added additional error handling in the updater (so you know why Zettlr couldn't tell you why no update check is possible).
Renaming files is now faster.
If you now begin to drag a file, after you have stopped dragging the file (i.e. either you dropped it onto a directory or you dropped it somewhere else to cancel the move), the preview pane will be shown again.
Now it is possible to drag out Markdown files from Zettlr into other apps.
Clicking on the "No open files or folders"-notification when there are no open folders or files in the directory tree will automatically show the open-dialog.
Fixed the theming in the QuickLook windows. Now they will be the same theme as the app itself.

Under the hood

Finally renamed the strong element in the file tiles in the preview list to a simple p to re-gain semantic correctness there.
Lots of LESS-code added, several other files have been changed.
Added an event listener to Window resizes to change the editor's width accordingly with the resizable activated.
Changes to requestDir() function in ZettlrRenderer.
Changes to the Statistics viewer.
Changes to ZettlrDialog.
Changes to ZettlrRenderer. Now the translation strings will be copied into the memory of the renderer process directly. This results in better overall performance, especially in dialogs, for which a lot of such strings are needed.
Updated development dependencies: electron is now 2.0.4, electron-builder is now 20.19.2 and less.js is now 3.5.3.
Changes to ZettlrBody-proceed function.
Added tippy.js to the list of dependencies; replaced standard system titles with Tippy titles.
Added the acceptFirstMouse option to the creation of new BrowserWindows.
Now refreshing the editor instance after dragstop of the divider between combiner and the editor.
Removed an unnecessary if-statement in ZettlrToolbar.
Added a method to only update the current file in the renderer process, which speeds up saving a lot.
Additional check in ZettlrVirtualDirectory.
Changes to the LaTeX export template.
Replaced the complicated and unreliable tag recognition to a much simpler regular expression.
Error handling in ZettlrUpdater.
Changes to the process of renaming files. Now the renaming process should be reflected quicker in the renderer, because we don't send a complete new path object, but only the specific, renamed file.
Fixes and changes to the dragging behaviour in the renderer.
Added a dragging event, so that the main process automatically enables dragging out of the app.
Added the getRenderer()-function to ZettlrDirectories, so that the EmptyPaths-object can send the respective event to the main process.
Combined the setContent() and save()-functions in ZettlrFile, because there was simply no need to have them separated. Also, removed the modified-flag from the file.

GUI and functionality

Added full stops after TOC-ordinals.
The HTML-export (e.g., for printing) does not rely on pandoc to be present on the system anymore. In other words: HTML-export is now working everywhere and has no prerequisites anymore. Attention: As we do not rely on pandoc for HTML exports anymore, this means that the HTML format is likely to suffer from some inconsistencies, as the rendering engine is way less advanced than pandoc. Yet, this should not pose a problem, as the HTML-export is intended to be for quick previews and prints only.
Added a bunch of options for exporting files, such as:
- Choose whether to save the exported files in the temporary directory (which is expunged on each restart of the system) or in your current working directory (meaning they are persistent across system reboots and are also accessible normally through your file explorer).
- Strip Zettelkasten-IDs (such as @ID:yyyymmddhhmmss).
- Strip tags (in the format #tag).
- Completely remove internal Zettelkasten-links (e.g. [[<link-text>]]).
- Only unlink internal Zettelkaten-links (i.e. transform [[<link-text>]] to <link-text>).
Switched to the better xelatex engine to render PDF documents.
Added a great number of PDF export customization options. More will be coming in the future (depending on necessities and user wishes).
Added a feature that search results now also are shown on the scrollbar so that you know exactly where the matches reside in your document.
Replaced the ugly find-in-file dialog with a Zettlr-style popup and added a replace-function as well. Simply press Return while inside the replacement-field to replace the next occurrence of your search term, or press ALT+Return, to replace all occurrences at once. The search is case-insensitive.
Introducing a distraction free mode, which can be toggled by pressing Cmd/Ctrl+J. This makes the editor fullscreen and mutes all lines except the one in which you are currently working.
Added option to recall up to ten recently used documents.
Hashtags are now not rendered, when they are not preceded by a space or are at the start of a line. This prevents links with anchor-names being displayed wrongly.
Added a shortcut for inserting footnotes: Ctrl+Alt+F (Windows+Linux) or Cmd+Alt+R (macOS).

Under the hood

Moved all exporting functionality to a separate class, ZettlrExport.
Removed unnecessary CodeMirror plugins.
Removed unnecessary styles and some unnecessary (b/c unused) functionality.

GUI and functionality

Introducing Virtual Directories. Now it is possible to add "ghost" directories to your directories that act as a subset of these directories. They are not actually present on disk (but are persistent with a so-called dot-file named .ztr-virtual-directory) and therefore can be used to create collections of files by manually adding files to them. You can only add files to these virtual directories that are present in the containing directory. Also, you cannot move them because they are bound to their parent directories.
Fixed a bug that threw an error every time you tried to delete a directory with no file open currently.
Fixes to the inline commands. Now, when you press Cmd/Ctrl+I or Cmd/Ctrl+B a second time after you finished writing your strong/emphasised text, Zettlr will actually "exit" the bold/italic markings and not try to insert them a second time. (Note that it will still insert the end-markings if the characters directly after the current cursor position are not the end-markings).
Fixed a bug that threw errors if you were to rename a non-opened file.
Fixed a bug that threw errors if you were to rename a directory, while none was selected.
Prevent arbitrary selection in the app to make it feel even more native.
Huge performance boost on selecting directories and files.
Translated remotely triggered file- and directory-events.
Finally fixed the bug that the end-search button disappeared and the input field went in disarray when the window size was too small.
Re-introduced feature that Zettlr asks the user to replace the current editor content, if the current file has been changed remotely.
Now, if the current file is removed remotely, Zettlr automatically closes the file in the editor as well.
On updates, the download URL to GitHub now opens on the system's browser.

Under the hood

Removed an excess console.log.
Implemented indentlist plugin directly in Zettlr core.
Continued work on virtual directories.
Small changes to Zettlr and ZettlrDir classes.
Small changes to the markdown shortcut plugin.
Fixed a small error in Zettlr class.
Removed a huge bottleneck in the directory selection logic (now the Zettlr main process will not send the complete ZettlrDir-object to the renderer, but just the hash, because the renderer has a full copy of the objects in memory).
Removed the same, big bottleneck in the file selection logic.
Updated all dependencies to their latest version. Thereby we've switched to Electron 2.0.3.

GUI and functionality

Switched the directory indicator with the collapse indicator on root directories, so that the first always stays first.
Huge performance increase in rendering the preview list.
Small fix to the word count. Now an empty editor does not show that there's a word written.
Removed the Zoom menu entry from the Window menu on macOS.
The Reload-shortcut in debug-mode is now F5.
Small fix to the Tag-recognition (now a # sign immediately followed by a delimiter character (e.g. spaces, line breaks or apostrophes) will not render a tag formatting).
The Attachment pane will now scroll if there are too many attachments in it.
Added an option to open the currently selected directory in the system's file browser (e.g. Finder on macOS or Explorer on Windows). The respective button resides next to the attachment pane's header.
Small fix to the context menu: It will popup where the click occurred, and not where the mouse is when the menu is actually shown (noticeable especially when right-clicking a misspelled word).
Augmented the autoclose-pairs with the default German quotes „ and “.
Changed the save function so that it does not save immediately, but gracefully implements a way to save changes any time a potentially file-closing command is issued (such as selecting another file).
Changes to the design of the preview list.
Removed the save-button from the toolbar and now Zettlr will not show you an indicator whether or not there are unsaved changes, because normally everything should be saved. In case changes are not saved under strange circumstances, Zettlr will still prompt you to save them if they would be lost.
Fixed a small error that led Zettlr to believe that it doesn't need to reorder the opened root files and directories, although it should have, thereby having newly opened files pop up not at the top of the directories' list but at random positions somewhere in the directories.

Under the hood

Switched Preview-list rendering to Clusterize.js to keep huge lists renderable and reduce loading times.
Removed the now unnecessary ListView and ListViewItem classes.
Removed the unnecessary file-revert command handler in ZettlrIPC.
Removed a console.log in ZettlrPreview.
Added a isModified() function in ZettlrRenderer.
Changes to ZettlrRendererIPC to accomodate graceful saving procedure.
Upgraded dependencies.
Coloured the output of the less compiler script so that it's easy to discern whether or not an error or a warning occurred.

GUI and functionality

Fixed the button text color in popups.
More shadow under the popups (makes them stick out more in the white mode).
Now it is possible to open Markdown files directly with Zettlr by double clicking them or dragging them onto the app. Dropping also works for directories (#3).
Zettlr now tells the Operating System that it is capable of handling .md- and .markdown files.
Small fixes to the translations.
Added an about dialog.
Now Zettlr also converts "standalone" links (e.g. simple detected URLs without Markdown formatting around them) into clickable links. Attention: Clicking now works with ALT instead of Shift!
Added a small popup to view some stats on your writing.
Fixes to the word count (now also splits along line breaks).
Moved all formattings to a small popup (indicated by the carriage return symbol). Also added other formatting possibilities, such as code, headings and blockquotes.
Fixes to the formatting commands.
Added an attachment pane (#6).
Added an option to sort directories chronologically or according to name (#4).
Begun adding zkn-functionality to Zettlr:
- Now it is possible to use @ID:<your-ID> to give an ID to a file (generate one using the Toolbar Button or by pressing Cmd/Ctrl+L). If multiple IDs are defined in such a way, the first found will take precedence.
- You can now tag your files using the Twitter-like syntax: #hashtag. Alt-Clicking on them will trigger a search for the tag.
- You can now link searches in your files. If you type [[search terms]] this will trigger a directory-wide search for the search terms. If the link contains an ID in the format [[@ID:<your-ID>]], Zettlr will try to get an exact match. If there is a file using that ID, it will be immediately opened. Also, a directory-wide search for all files referencing this ID will be conducted.

Under the hood

Fixed a small bug in the ZettlrWatchdog that prevented remotely added directories from being detected by the app.
Given the classes ZettlrFile and ZettlrDir more authority over what happens with them. Now they're handling all events by themselves.
Made the paths mandatory on creation of new ZettlrFile and ZettlrDir instances.
Added isFile() and isDir() helper functions to check if paths actually denote a valid file or directory.
Added openPaths configuration option to hold all opened paths and re-open them on every start.
Small fix to the loading mechanism of the configuration to allow flexible arrays (needed for the openPaths option).
Found A LOT of unnecessary and duplicate code in the Zettlr main class and removed it.
Handle open events in main.js and make Zettlr definitively a single app instance.

Upcoming These changes are part of beta and nightly releases

Full TableEditor Rewrite

Changes to the snippet $FILENAME variable

Image Viewer and PDF Viewer

New Citation Parser

Modified Zettelkasten Link Workflow

Footnote Workflow Improvements

GUI and Functionality

Under the Hood

3.6.0

Text Transformations

GUI and Functionality

Under the Hood

3.5.1

GUI and Functionality

Under the Hood

3.5.0

GUI and Functionality

Under the Hood

3.4.4

GUI and Functionality

Under the Hood

3.4.3

An Important Note for Windows Users

GUI and Functionality

Under the Hood

3.4.2

An Important Note for Windows Users

GUI and Functionality

Under the Hood

3.4.1

GUI and Functionality

Under the Hood

3.4.0

GUI and Functionality

Under the Hood

3.3.1

GUI and Functionality

Under the Hood

3.3.0

Please Backup Your Writing Statistics

GUI and Functionality

Under the Hood

3.2.3

GUI and Functionality

Under the Hood

3.2.2

Changes to Pandoc Profiles

GUI and Functionality

Under the Hood

3.2.1

GUI and Functionality

Under the Hood

3.2.0

Resolved Data Loss Issues

Changes to the file filtering logic

GUI and Functionality

Under the Hood

3.1.1

GUI and Functionality

Under the Hood

3.1.0

Changes to the link detection

Introducing Wikilink Titles

Re-enabling old Link-Title-Syntax

Preferences Window Overhaul

Project Overhaul: Full Control Over Your Files

LanguageTool Improvements

GUI and Functionality

Under the Hood

3.0.5

Dropping Support for macOS 10.13 and 10.14

Linux ARM builds functionally again

GUI and Functionality

Under the Hood

3.0.4

Security patch -- Please Update immediately

GUI and Functionality

Under the hood

Changes to the snippet `$FILENAME` variable