Tisty 1.6.0
Emoji, because that is what people were already using.
The icon catalogue had 1,381 drawings and exactly six faces. Lucide, where they
come from, has seven in total — it is a set for interface work, and expressive
faces are not what it is for. So the shelf of documents in this store told the
real story: across 247 documents, the icon picker had been used once, and emoji
had been typed straight into the text 388 times. Ninety-three different ones.
The answer was not another drawing library; every one of them has the same six
faces.
There are now 1,609 marks alongside the drawings, in the nine groups Unicode
itself defines: faces, people, animals, food, travel, activities, objects,
symbols, flags. They are not a hand-picked selection — a script reads Unicode's
own list and CLDR's Spanish and English annotations and writes the catalogue, so
searching for «basura» finds the bin and «coche» finds the car, with eight words
of their own for each mark on average.
What is left out is left out for a reason. Nothing newer than Unicode 15, which
is the ceiling both macOS and Windows can be trusted to draw — anything later
would be an empty box on one of them. No skin tones, which are the same hand six
times over. And no country flags: Windows draws them as two plain letters, which
would look like a bug rather than a flag.
Marks and drawings each get their own tab, and the colour strip only appears
under the drawings. Tinting a monochrome stroke means something; tinting an
emoji means nothing. An assistant is told it may send one too — a tool whose
description still recites a closed catalogue of names would never offer an
emoji, however well the store accepted it.
An emoji written into the middle of a paragraph could be picked but not kept.
The rule that decides which HTML the editor can hold accepted only plain letters
in an icon's name, so a mark made the whole document read as foreign markup and
the editor offered to convert it — and the store refused to write it at all.
Both now know what a mark is.
Underneath, a list of documents no longer opens every file on disk to learn what
they are called. A document writes its own name into the log when that name
changes, so the window draws the list from what it already knows and fills in
what it does not in the background, without holding anything up. Ten thousand
documents feel like ten. When the file is there the file still decides; the note
is only what the document last said it was called, never a replacement for it.
And the things that were quietly wrong. Coming back from a page landed at the
top of the document instead of where you left it, because the restore gave up
after sixty frames and a document with diagrams in it takes longer than that to
have a height — it now waits for as long as the page keeps growing, and gets out
of the way the moment you scroll yourself. A code block's name was dropped when
a document was tidied on the way in. Pasting into that name box put the text in
the document instead. A folder created with a colour was created without it, the
colour only sticking if you edited the folder afterwards. And a document with
pages sat two pixels to the left of one without them, because the space its +
button occupies was being compensated with the wrong number instead of simply
being reserved.
The sidebar is wider, the tree's text a little larger, and a document is set at
16px rather than 15 — at the old size a full-width line ran to about ninety-five
characters, which is half again what is comfortable to read.
Full Changelog: v1.5.0...v1.6.0