Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements | Quality of Life Improvements
We are pleased to announce the next update for Zettlr. In this version, we have focused more on fixing issues and improving your ability to work on your texts efficiently rather than shiny new features – similiar to what Apple did for their upcoming 27 version of their operating systems!
Concretely, we have fixed a series of regressions and bugs that have occurred during our transition of the editor CSS away from direct styling towards the usage of CSS variables. While this has made applying Custom CSS more easy, it has also caused a few styles to break. This version fixes many of these small issues.
A bigger change involves the full-text search. We haven't really touched this since its introduction many years ago, and it showed. Rewriting the core logic, we were able to significantly improve the search performance. Searches should now be 50% to 100% faster, and deliver more relevant search results. The autocomplete suggestions for both recent searches and restricting the search to directories have been re-implemented to work around a long-standing bug in Chromium that has made the pure-HTML implementation unfortunately unusable.
Another feature this version brings affects primarily francophone Zettlr users. The default trigger character to summon the snippets autocomplete is the colon (:), but unfortunately, this has in the past interfered with how the French language assumes colons are being used. To improve the usability of the app for French speakers, it is now possible to change the trigger character to a forward slash or a percentage sign.
Finally, we have also fixed a few issues with tables. On the one hand, we have improved how you can interact with tables by improving the various commands that automate a lot of the work when working with tables. On the other hand, we have improved the accessibility of these commands with new and improved keyboard shortcuts and a generally better UX.
As always, read the full changelog below to know exactly what has changed. We wish you productive writing sessions with this new update!
Do you enjoy Zettlr? Then consider making a donation to help us pay for the development costs. You can donate monthly on Patreon or once via PayPal. Additionally, you can directly sponsor Hendrik Erz on GitHub or send a tip on Ko-Fi. Thanks for your support!
Changelog
GUI and Functionality
- Feature: Allow changing the trigger character for snippet (and emoji)
autocomplete. Until now, this was hard-coded to : (which is still the
default). However, since that interferes with the way French speakers use the
colon character (Pour exemple : cette.), we now allow different trigger
characters, relieving the colon where necessary. Currently supported are /
and % as alternatives (#5185; #6325).
- Feature: The tutorial is now also available in Portuguese for new users
(#6373).
- Feature: The "Remove line breaks" transformation in the editor is now also
available via the keyboard shortcut Cmd/Ctrl-Alt-J (#5913).
- Change: This release brings many improvements to the full text search
(#6339):
- The full text search was completely rewritten to improve performance by 50%
to 100%.
- The autocompletes for both previous searches and the restrict-to-folder
functionalities have been drastically improved and work reliably (#5686).
- Ability to switch between case-insensitive and case-sensitive searches.
- Improvements in the presentation and layout of search results.
- Change: On macOS, the default setting for window vibrancy is now off. This
makes the file manager opaque, but improves visual design with the new sticky
folder headers.
- Add Elixir syntax highlighting for code blocks; identifiers: elixir, ex,
or exs (#6368).
- Fixed missing click handlers for clicking links in tables (#4694).
- Fixed an issue that would sometimes open the same link twice.
- The file manager now uses tabular digits for displaying numbers in filenames.
- Fixed an issue where code elements had a background color that overlaid the
selection (#6328).
- Fixed a wrong font selection for comments.
- Fixed strikethrough-elements no longer being stricken-through (#6330).
- Fixed triple-clicks within tables to select entire table cells (#6344; #6100).
- Add "Curl quotes" text transform to convert straight quotes to curly (smart)
quotes, the inverse of the existing "Straighten quotes" transform (#6259).
- The main window's title now includes the current active file's title. This
allows automation that depends on the window title (#6283).
- The table of contents now clears out when the last file of the editor is
closed (#6251).
- Allow Escape to close the search panel regardless of whether it is currently
focused (#2970).
- Moved the editor "Indentation," "Font size," and "Autocomplete" settings into
their own preferences groups.
- The menubar on Windows is no longer styled using the system's accent color to
reduce potential distractions for users.
- Update Brazilian (pt-BR) translations (#6348).
- Fixed TableEditor swap rows/columns commands on macOS. Until now, they were
mapped to Ctrl+Shift+Arrow, which was misaligned with the main keymap.
- Fixed an issue in the TableEditor where adding new rows could increase the
amount of surrounding whitespace in the newly inserted rows (#6369).
- Fixed the alignment command for the TableEditor which previously would clear
out the entire column, if the column had no alignment set.
- Fixed a regression from the previous version that disabled the references list
CSS (#6380).
- Fixed a regression from the previous version that could lead to visual
artifacts in the thin and expanded file manager modes when switching files
(#6385).
- Fixed a long-standing bug that would cause the application to go out of sync
with the operating system's UI theme on macOS when the application is set to
"follow the OS" in terms of UI theme, but the user has manually changed the
theme to light or dark. In that case, the app would lose synchronization with
the macOS theme source, causing the auto-switching mechanism to fail when the
operating system's UI theme changes.
Under the Hood
- Upgrade Electron to v42.3.3.
- Upgrade Pandoc to v3.10.
- Pinned a transitive dependency of electron forge, yauzl to fix a bug on
newer Node versions (context: https://github.com/electron/forge/issues/4277).
- Migrate the openAttachment utility from got to ky.
- Migrate the LanguageTool API utility from got to ky.
- Enforce proper comment styling.
- The StartupWMClass has been switched back to lowercase, since apparently the
build step has correctly reverted the binary name to lowercase on Linux.
- Handle symbolic links in chokidar watcher explicitly.
New Contributors
- @wyl2003 made their first contribution in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/6317
- @RTnhN made their first contribution in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/6283
- @felipe-f-rocha made their first contribution in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/6348
Full Changelog: https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/compare/v4.5.0...v4.6.0
