This is the second beta for Zettlr 1.8. It again includes numerous bugfixes and enhancements. Notable new things are:

• We've finally switched to Electron 10
• We've updated many dependencies
• There's now a WindowManager that handles all windows

For everything else, see the changelog (compare the changes)

Changelog

Breaking Changes

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

GUI and Functionality

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

Under the Hood

• Moved (almost) all window functionality to a dedicated WindowManager module. The added benefits of this are:
  • Centralised window functionality
  • A correct place for window-controls-commands
  • Sleeker design
  • Enable a much better window handling: (1) Now all windows are closed automatically before the main window is being closed; (2) When someone requests a Quicklook/Print/Main window, an existing window is being searched first and made visible, instead of (re)creating it.
  • New window types can be added much faster.
• Switched to Electron forge (thanks to @tobiasdiez for implementing).
• Bumped dependencies:
  • @clr/icons 4.0.4
  • @electron-forge/cli 6.0.0-beta.53
  • @electron-forge/plugin-webpack 6.0.0-beta.53
  • @teamsupercell/typings-for-css-modules-loader 2.3.0
  • @typescript-eslint/eslint-plugin 4.5.0
  • @typescript-eslint/parser 4.5.0
  • archiver 5.0.2
  • chokidar 3.4.3
  • citeproc 2.4.45
  • codemirror 5.58.2
  • chart.js 2.9.4
  • copy-webpack-plugin 6.1.0
  • electron 10.1.5
  • eslint 7.8.1
  • eslint-config-standard-with-typescript 19.0.1
  • eslint-plugin-import 2.22.1
  • eslint-plugin-standard 4.0.2
  • eslint-plugin-vue 7.0.0-beta.3
  • file-loader 6.1.1
  • fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin 5.1.0
  • fsevents 2.1.3
  • got 11.8.0
  • md5 2.3.0
  • mermaid 8.8.2
  • mocha 8.2.0
  • moment 2.29.1
  • node-loader 1.0.2
  • nspell 2.1.4
  • raw-loader 4.0.2
  • reveal.js 4.1.0
  • tippy.js 6.2.7
  • ts-loader 8.0.7
  • typescript 4.0.3
  • uuid 8.3.1
  • vue 2.6.12
  • vue-template-compiler 2.6.12
• Removed dependencies:
  • uglify-js
  • on-change
• Added a new Handlebars templating helper function, i18n_value that allows you to translate something passing a value to the translation helper (e.g. {{i18n_value 'trans.identifier' someValue}}).
• Refactored the main build Workflow file. Now it doesn't run on a matrix, but due to the many dissimilar steps involved, there are three distinct jobs. Other than that, we switched to the GitHub tag name instead of utilizing a node script to retrieve the package.json version, switched to yarn everywhere and cleaned up the code.
• Removed the now unused scripts get-pkg-version.js and afterSign.js.
• Finally removed the verbose IPC calls from the logs.
• Migrated the toolbar logic from jQuery to vanilla JS.
• Migrated the main renderer from jQuery to vanilla JS.
• Migrated the popup class from jQuery to vanilla JS.
• (Mostly) migrated the dialog classes from jQuery to vanilla JS (tabs are still done using jQueryUI).
• Added a popup provider for easy creation of popups across the main renderer process.
• Added an update provider for easy access to specific updating functionality (such as downloading an update, and automatically running it).
• Migrated any popups that were defined inline into their respective handlebars template files.
• The TableEditor is now finally a module.
• Outsourced the CSS computations from the main module of the TableEditor.
• Migrated the CodeMirror editor instantiation into its own module (MarkdownEditor).
• Transformed all event listeners on the CodeMirror instance to "hooks" to reflect the fact that they are plugins, except they are not run like parameterless commands but hook into certain events of the application.
• Moved the CodeMirror assets from the old folder into the MarkdownEditor module.
• Moved some general utility functions to the common/util-folder.
• The rendering plugins have been optimized. They now take less time to run and also don't keep an additional array of all the textmarkers in memory, decreasing the computational load especially for big documents.
• The app now saves the last opened file again.
• Moved the Turndown and Showdown converters to two utility functions, md2html and html2md.
• Moved the regular expression for detecting image files by extension into the global RegExp module.
• Moved the moveSection helper function to the common/util-folder.
• Documentation fix for safeAssign.
• Fixes in the tests.
• Completely refurbished the test command. Now, a full-fledged testing directory will be set up to test features within the GUI without endangering your regular configuration in case you use Zettlr regularly.
• Better handling of the custom paths for both the Pandoc and the XeLaTeX executables in the advanced preferences.
• Migrated the FSAL to TypeScript so that the different descriptors can be better handled. Also, this showed countless logical errors, which are now mostly fixed.
  • Furthermore, the responsibilities have been readjusted: The FSAL is now responsible for emitting events whenever the internal state changes. This is not being done by the commands anymore.
  • The actions are now proper methods on the FSAL class in order to enable better tracking of the function arguments and to help ESLint fix possible signature errors.
  • Moved every piece of state logic from the commands to the FSAL.
  • Now, the general way anything regarding the files works is as follows: User --> one of the commands --> an action on the FSAL --> emits which part of the state has changed --> the application main class receives these notifications --> triggers potential updates in the renderer.
  • Additionally, now the distinction between the meta objects which can be serialized and sent to the renderer and the tree objects within the FSAL is made more clear: Metadata files can have content attached to them (in order to save new content to a file), whereas the full objects, which are never getting sent to the renderer, do not contain a content property anymore.
  • Also, we managed to fix errors regarding remote change detection.
• The log provider now also outputs on the console, if the app runs unpacked (app.isPackaged === false).
• Updated all service providers. They are now loaded immediately after application boot (right after the ready-event fires on the app-object) and not when the Zettlr main class loads.
• Created a new directory app which provides functionality that pertains only to the lifecycle of the application itself, such as boot and shutdown functionalities. Service providers have been migrated to there.
• Fixed the issue that only the en-US-language of the CSL styles was loaded for the citation provider.
• CSL locales and CSL styles are now bundled with the app as native_modules.
• Began providing first global interfaces which the service providers make use of in order to enable ESLint to detect errors.
• Provide a test library, which you can load to debug citeproc-related issues and test the provider.
• Converted the CSS Provider to TypeScript.
• Converted the Log Provider to TypeScript.
• Migrated the Quicklook and Print window classes to Typescript.
• Added a utility function to quickly broadcast arbitrary IPC messages to all open Zettlr windows.
• Migrated many functionalities that are important for all windows on the renderer side to a dedicated TypeScript module (register-window).
• Divided the menu template into templates for macOS and Windows (+ all other platforms).
• Simplified the menu building process.
• Added classes and event listeners to show custom built menus within frameless BrowserWindow instances.
• Deprecate the remote-module.
• The md2html-function can now make anchors renderer-safe, so that they don't open within the main window anymore.
• The menu handler is now a service provider.