After yet another huge delay, here's the next version. It brings major changes to all aspects of Zettlr, enhancing your experience a lot. There are three major improvements that deserve to be mentioned here.

But first some smaller changes:

• Shift-Clicking links does not work anymore! Now the modifier key used for opening links in Zettlr is the ALT-Key!
• All formattings have been moved to a single pane in the toolbar, indicated by the carriage return.
• If you open your app for the first time after the update, nothing will be opened. You will have to re-open your previous root directory again!

The multi-root feature

Now Zettlr is able to open multiple root directories and root files at once. This means that you can now do the following:

• On the first start of Zettlr, there won't be any open files or directories. You can open directories by pressing Cmd/Ctrl+O, just as you opened the one root directory in previous versions. Files can be opened by two ways: First, double clicking on them in your file browser (just as you would do with all other files) or, second, drag and drop them on the app. It will automatically detect whether or not this is a directory or a file and will open it accordingly.
• The opened paths will be persistent, meaning that all open files and directories will be re-opened on any start of the app.
• Close them by right-clicking them and selecting the respective menu item.

This should now bring an extreme increase of comfortability for all users.

The attachment pane

Now we've added an attachment pane that can be opened using either Cmd/Ctrl+3 on your keyboard, selecting it from the View-menu or simply clicking the paperclip on the right hand side of the toolbar. It will simply list all files that are in your currently selected directory that are not markdown files. To decide, which files should be listed there and which are not, head over to your preferences and select the Attachments-tab. There you can list all the extensions of the files you wish to have available in the pane, separated by comma and with leading dots (e.g. .pptx instead of only pptx. Zettlr will try to add the dot if you forgot it.)

Clicking on them will simply open them in your default system viewer.

First features using the Zettelkasten method

You may have heard of the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann's method of storing information using a complex note taking system, called Zettelkasten. There's a huge amount of literature covering the field, and Zettlr wants to enable you to use the methods scientists around the world use to organize their notes and ideas. Therefore, beginning with this release, you will have these first options to make more of your notes:

• Give a file a unique ID by typing @ID:<your-id> somewhere inside the file. Zettlr will automatically detect it and assign the ID to your file. In this way, you are not only able to find your ID using the global search, but also link to the ID.
• If you type in something enclosed in square brackets (like [[these are search terms]]) you will trigger an internal search for these terms. You can trigger the search by ALT-Clicking these links.
• In case Zettlr finds such a "Wiki-Link" that contains an ID in the format [[@ID:<your-id>]], it will automatically try to find an exact match. If there is a file with the exact ID, it will directly open it in your editor. This way you can quickly navigate through all of your notes and are not reliant upon the tree view and preview pane to do so.
• Also, in case any such Wiki-Link exactly matches the name of a file, excluding the extension, it will also try to open it directly, so that a Wiki-Link that matches a file name will automatically open the file in the editor. Such links are not completely stable, because you can always rename files. That's what the next feature is for:
• In case, you ALT-Click a Wiki-Link, this will automatically trigger a global search in the current directory for the ID or the terms inside the square brackets. This way you can find out first, which files link to a specific file, if the search term is an ID, or, second, you can find out which other files contain the specified search terms, making it something like a "saved search", because you don't have to type it again every time.
• The last feature we've introduced in this version is tagging. Now you can simply tag files using Twitter-like hashtags (e.g. #your-hashtag-here). These links also ALT-Clickable, triggering a search for the exact tags.

We hope that these changes show the dedication I am putting into the App and hope you can make a lot of use of them.

As to the nature of this big release, there also have been a lot of breaking changes to the API which are listed below in our changelog:

Changelog

GUI and functionality

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

Under the hood

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