New Features
- HTML live preview is now in a split pane view rather than in a separate window.
- New options were added to hide HUD windows while typing, in full screen mode, or in live preview mode.
- A new button was added to the status bar and a new shortcut was added to the View menu in the menu bar to toggle hiding/showing the open HUDs.
- Github's cmark-gfm can now be detected and used as a Markdown processor.
- Block quotes and code blocks now have an inobtrusive background color to differentiate them.
- Buttons have been added to the status for existing features.
- HUD windows and scrollbars can be stylized to have square or rounded corners in the Settings, and are no longer theme dependent.
- New "Typewriter" focus mode was added by @hirschenberger.
- The style sheet and Markdown processor to use with the HTML live preview can now be selected in their own dialog box accessible both from the status bar at the bottom of the window and from the menu bar in the Settings menu.
- The "Copy HTML" button has been moved to the "status bar" at the bottom of the main window.
- The "Copy HTML" button / menu bar option can copy just the selected Markdown text as HTML (using the currently selected Markdown processor). It will still copy the entire Markdown text document and convert it to HTML in the system clipboard if no text is selected.
- Themes now support options for emphasis color and block text color. Note that emphasis color will also affect the color of headings, and block text color will affect the color of block quotes and code blocks.
Fixes
- Issue #302: ghostwriter will now look for default Qt translations on the standard Qt translations path (for standard buttons/text). These default Qt translations have been included in the Windows installer translations folder and portable Windows Zip, and will be loaded automatically based on the currently selected application language.
- Some tweaks have been made to the parsing/highlighting of emphasized text to handle nested emphasis cases better. As part of this effort, ghostwriter uses a Qt 5-specific regular expression class that is not available in Qt 4. As such, ghostwriter can no longer be built with Qt and must be built with Qt 5.
- Issue #272: Fixed issue with Focus mode where inserting matching characters around a selection was causing the application to crash.
- Issue #260: Added compatability with Pandoc version 2 and MultiMarkdown version 6.
- Fixed issue where HTML preview scrolls to the top if the new HTML from a modified document matches the old HTML, even if the markup used in the source document did change.
- Fixed issue where current word is not live spell checked if the user switches the text cursor to a different line.
- Fixed issue where prompt to reload a file that has been modified externally was being displayed multiple times per file change. This seems to have been triggered by some editors like Sublime Text that perform multiple file saves for a single file modification.
- Issue #228: Selected text can now be dragged and dropped to a different location within the editor.
- Fixed issue where if setext heading markup line is selected and deleted with the cursor position beginning at the end of the previous line, the heading is not removed from the Outline HUD.
- Fixed issue where Preview HTML menu item and button were not in sync to appear checked or unchecked.
- ghostwriter now clears the Outline HUD when loading or reloading a document to prevent a crash in case bad data is in the HUD.
- Fixed copy HTML issue to ensure Markdown text has proper formatting (i.e., greater than signs aren't converted to
>). - ghostwriter will now search in the mozilla-dicts installation location for dictionaries on OpenBSD.
Notes
Since version 1.4.0, if you are using the portable version of ghostwriter for Windows, please note that you no longer require the translations folder in your data folder. The translations folder has been moved up one folder, so you don't need to have your settings and themes mixed with an application dependency. When moving the contents of your old data folder to the new one, please delete the old data\translations folder.
Version 1.5.0 brings various HiDPI improvements. However, SVG icons for the full screen button and the HUD window buttons will look overly large and clipped. Drop shadows on text and buttons will also look somewhat pixelated. This is due to QTBUG-60026, which has been fixed in Qt 5.9. At the time of this release, Qt 5.9 is still in beta. It is recommended for users using Qt versions below 5.9 to use a FHD screen resolution when using ghostwriter.
Version 1.6.0 will no longer compile with Qt 4 due to new features that depend on Qt 5. Please use Qt 5 when building ghostwriter from the source code. Also, the Windows editions of version 1.6.0 come bundled with Qt 5.10.1. As such, you might enjoy using FreeType font rendering with ghostwriter, which looks superb under this Qt version. Please see the wiki page for a quick guide on how to enable this feature. Moreover, this version removes print support from the HTML live preview, as future versions of ghostwriter will switch from QtWebKit to QtWebEngine, which does not support printing. Finally, the Windows version of 1.6.0 comes bundled with annulen's QtWebKit for displaying the HTML preview. Special thanks goes out to this hard-working team for providing a QtWebKit build for newer Qt versions!
Linux Downloads
Ubuntu Linux users can download the latest version of ghostwriter from the Launchpad PPA using the following commands in a terminal window:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wereturtle/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ghostwriter
You may also visit the wereturtle package archive page directly. For more information on how to add a PPA to your system, please see the Launchpad guide. Note that this version of ghostwriter has been packaged in the PPA solely for the following Ubuntu versions:
- Xenial (16.04)
- Artful (17.10)
- Bionic (18.04)
The following are links to unofficial packages/repositories for other Linux distros, kindly provided by volunteers. Note that they may not have been updated to the latest version of ghostwriter, but may be in the future.