New Release | Zettlr v3

Hello everybody! It is finally time — after more than a year of constant development and improvement, we are more than proud to finally be able to deliver you the next iteration of Zettlr. We have been extra careful to provide you in this version a bug-free and enjoyable writing experience that you will love. Many things have changed; way too many to quickly go through them, so as with every release, we welcome you to do two things before updating:

First, please read our accompanying blog post, in which we place this update into perspective and explain the reasoning behind certain changes to the application.

After you are done, immediately read the "READ THIS FIRST!" section of the changelog below. This is crucial this time around, which is why it's in all caps. Afterwards, we invite you to also read the rest of the changelog, which you should do anyway.

Are you satisfied with Zettlr?

Then please consider becoming a patron over at Patreon, or make a one-time payment via PayPal. These contributions help us pay the server bills and the occasional coffee for tired developers ;)

Changelog

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:

1. 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.
2. There are no more unsaved in-memory files.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. Quicklook windows are completely gone now.
7. 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.
8. 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.

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

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

Debian Installer Issues | Project Export Settings

This almost final beta for Zettlr 3.0 fixes a bunch of issues users were experiencing with the Debian installers. Additionally, we fixed the project export format selection, which unfortunately broke during the last beta.

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/compare/v3.0.0-beta.7...v3.0.0-beta.8

Custom Commands | Better WYSIWYG | Quality of Life

This release contains a few features and enhancements and another set of bug fixes. As always, the comprehensive list of bug fixes can be found in our changelog.

Most notably, this beta …

• fixes an issue with persisting project settings
• fixes further things regarding the citation engine
• improves the WYSIWYG mode
• allows to match whole words with AutoCorrect
• adds the ability to define custom commands for your exports
• better layouting
• some additional bug fixes

New Contributors

• @JonRoo made their first contribution in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4520

All Changes since last version: https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/compare/v3.0.0-beta.6...v3.0.0-beta.7

Fixes in the Citation Engine, Exports, and Projects | Quality of Life Improvements

This beta release fixes many small nuisances. Most notably, it fixes:

• the citation engine (better handling of file-specific libraries, better rendering, better autocompletes)
• projects (handling of settings files, glob pattern application)
• footnotes (better insertion, editing, and display)
• exports (Simple PDF, Textbundle, and Textpack now work as expected)
• opening of Zotero attachments
• Update of all dependencies
• Update of the Russian and Catalan translation
• There is now an easy menu item allowing you to clear the FSAL cache should that be necessary

New Contributors

• @justjack2347 made their first contribution in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4338
• @and4po made their first contribution in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4478

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/blob/develop/CHANGELOG.md

Layout Fixes | Tag detection | Autocorrect improvements

This update fixes a few more issues to the last beta and is mainly focused on layouting issues, tag detection, and autocorrect. It also includes an updated Taiwanese translation.

Note: If this is the very first beta you are switching to since 2.3, you may want to read the "Upcoming" section in our Changelog first.

What's Changed

• fix: Renamed footnotes test file by @josh-133 in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4336
• Fixes the tag-extraction from files and searching by tags by @UFOMelkor in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4379
• Fix regression error from #4379 by @UFOMelkor in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4385
• Run the check workflow on pull-requests by @UFOMelkor in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4386
• Update readme to reflect deprecation of --frozen-lockfile by @mattstring in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4396
• Update zh-TW.po by @asd153866714 in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4415

New Contributors

• @josh-133 made their first contribution in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4336
• @mattstring made their first contribution in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4396
• @asd153866714 made their first contribution in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4415

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/compare/v3.0.0-beta.4...v3.0.0-beta.5

Performance Improvements | Bug Fixes

This next beta release for the upcoming 3.0 release mainly includes small improvements that further increase stability of the release. Most notable changes are:

• Improved typing performance that has dropped in the last beta
• Improved startup performance due to a bug in the FSAL subsystem cache
• Fixed a few issues with the Markdown parser
• Fixed a bug that could lead to corrupted layouts when opening and closing editor panes
• Added novel Windows/Linux icons
• Re-enabled clicking on plain links in the assets manager
• Improved plain link colors (most notably in the changelog view)
• Improved the RevealJS profile to match Pandoc 3.x options
• Improve Portuguese (Brazil) translation and the French translation of the tutorial

What's Changed

• Update pt-BR.po by @TheMemoir in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4243
• refactor: Simplify overall editor layout by @nathanlesage in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4279
• feat: New Icon by @nathanlesage in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4286
• Update French Tutorial by @framatophe in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4296

New Contributors

• @TheMemoir made their first contribution in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4243

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/compare/v3.0.0-beta.3...v3.0.0-beta.4

Stability and Performance Improvements

This fourth beta ships with a large amount of stability and performance improvements. This means that most changes have happened under the hood and should only be noticeable by you in terms of better response, better behavior, and smoother experience. Notably, the following changes have been made:

• Upgrade the bundled Pandoc to version 3
• Improvements to the status bar
• The tag suggestions are now gone from the tag cloud
• Improvements to the new Markdown AST parser
• Re-enabled in-place editing of footnotes
• Re-enabled minimized starting behavior
• Better window management
• Citation databases now properly reload on change
• Copying and pasting has been improved
• Upon changing certain settings, Zettlr will now automatically offer to restart
• Improved a race condition on document save that could lead to data loss
• Fixed the word and character counter
• The FSAL file parser now utilizes the Markdown parser, ensuring that the detected metadata matches what the editor shows you

What's Changed

• Do not crash on empty window_state.yml by @UFOMelkor in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4128
• chore(deps-dev): bump @typescript-eslint/eslint-plugin from 5.48.0 to 5.52.0 by @dependabot in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4149
• run Linux builds on Ubuntu 20.04 machines by @marado in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4155
• chore(deps): Bump http-cache-semantics from 4.1.0 to 4.1.1 by @dependabot in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4126
• fix: Prevent search panel text from being selected by @kyaso in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4177
• Use existing lastLeafId computed property in App.vue by @kyaso in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4189
• refactor: Simplify link detection for file preview by @kyaso in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4197
• chore(deps-dev): bump eslint-plugin-n from 15.6.0 to 15.6.1 by @dependabot in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4036
• chore(deps): bump chart.js from 4.1.1 to 4.2.1 by @dependabot in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4143
• chore(deps-dev): Bump @types/uuid from 9.0.0 to 9.0.1 by @dependabot in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4166
• chore(deps): Bump ky from 0.33.1 to 0.33.3 by @dependabot in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4206
• chore(deps): Bump minimatch from 5.1.2 to 7.4.3 by @dependabot in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4210
• chore(deps-dev): Bump electron from 22.3.0 to 23.2.0 by @dependabot in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4212
• arch linux: upgraded from aur to a regular package by @UweKrause in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4217
• Insert DisplayName instead of FileName after an zkn-link by @UFOMelkor in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4209
• chore(deps-dev): Bump webpack from 5.75.0 to 5.77.0 by @dependabot in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4226
• chore(deps-dev): Bump @typescript-eslint/eslint-plugin from 5.53.0 to 5.57.0 by @dependabot in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4225
• chore(deps-dev): bump eslint-plugin-import from 2.26.0 to 2.27.5 by @dependabot in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4064
• refactor: Make MainEditor single-document only by @nathanlesage in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4215
• refactor: Move FSAL parser to utilize the Markdown AST Parser by @nathanlesage in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4242

New Contributors

• @UFOMelkor made their first contribution in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4128
• @marado made their first contribution in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4155
• @UweKrause made their first contribution in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4217

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/compare/v3.0.0-beta.2...v3.0.0-beta.3

Bug Fixes | Native Modules Support | No Windows ARM

This next beta again ships with a set of bug fixes. Here's the shortlist of what's changed since the last beta:

• Native modules are now correctly compiled for the right architecture, so no more issues with wrong architecture crashes
• This also means, however, that we cannot currently ship Windows ARM builds, as those have been consistently failing. We are on it, but cannot guarantee to maintain Windows ARM support for now.
• The editor search now uses the build-in panel. It's larger than what Zettlr had previously, but will work much better than it.
• LanguageTool authentification with a Premium plan should now work
• Updated translations for French and Russian
• Document tabs are now deduplicated, i.e. if you have two files with the same name open, Zettlr will show you the containing directory name as well
• Unified the Markdown-to-HTML transpilation. This means that now copying and pasting "with style" (a.k.a. from and to HTML) should give you a more consistent experience

Changelog

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:

1. 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.
2. There are no more unsaved in-memory files.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. Quicklook windows are completely gone now.
7. 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.
8. 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.

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.

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
• 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
• 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 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

Under the Hood

• Refactored the main editor component further
• Refactored the Sidebar panels into their own respective components
• Upgrade Electron to 22.x.x
• Upgrade Pandoc to 2.19.2
• Upgrade Chart.js to 4.x.x
• Upgrade CodeMirror to version 6
• Upgrade to Yarn v2
• 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

LanguageTool integration | Status bar | Bug Fixes

This new beta includes a many bug fixes and a few new highlights, such as a new integration with LanguageTool! Here's what has changed since the last beta in all brevity:

• LanguageTool integration: Now you can have your texts checked against LT's official API, or a custom server that you operate. See all settings in the Spellchecking tab of the preferences window.
• New Status bar: In the editor tab, you can now activate a status bar that offers you some more info on your current document for each editor pane (including a way to see all spelling mistakes and grammatical info at a glance)
• Fixed a bug that would ship the ARM releases (incl. Apple Silicon) with wrong hunspell binaries
• Removed a ton of bloat from the build pipeline

And here's the changelog as it stands thus far:

Changelog

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:

1. 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.
2. There are no more unsaved in-memory files.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. Quicklook windows are completely gone now.
7. 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.
8. 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.

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.

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
• 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
• 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 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

Under the Hood

• Refactored the main editor component further
• Refactored the Sidebar panels into their own respective components
• Upgrade Electron to 22.x.x
• Upgrade Pandoc to 2.19.2
• Upgrade Chart.js to 4.x.x
• Upgrade CodeMirror to version 6
• Upgrade to Yarn v2
• 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

Multiple windows & panes | Update Internal Links | New Profile System

Happy New Year everyone. We start 2023 with a bang: Zettlr 3.0 goes public beta! Tons of improvements have made it into the app, so brace yourself. As always, we've accompanied the start of the beta with a blog post which you can find by following this link.

Attention: Many things have changed, so please read this Changelog carefully before upgrading!

Changelog

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:

1. 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.
2. There are no more unsaved in-memory files.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. Quicklook windows are completely gone now.
7. 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.
8. 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.

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.

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
• 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
• 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 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

Under the Hood

• Refactored the main editor component further
• Refactored the Sidebar panels into their own respective components
• Upgrade Electron to 22.x.x
• Upgrade Pandoc to 2.19.2
• Upgrade Chart.js to 4.x.x
• Upgrade CodeMirror to version 6
• 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

New Contributors

• @radifar made their first contribution in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/3611
• @Etienne-TR made their first contribution in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/3845
• @learn-more made their first contribution in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/3956
• @luzpaz made their first contribution in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/3817
• @MyGodItsFull0fStars made their first contribution in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/3988
• @Leviter made their first contribution in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/4008

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/compare/v2.3.0...v3.0.0-beta