The Archive v1.7.0--v1.7.1 Brings MultiMarkdown to the Masses 🎉

ctietze

How to get v1.7.x

On the Cutting Edge update channel, v1.7.0 just hit, and it brings the new MultiMarkdown-aware editor.

What's different?

If everything goes well, then at the end of this testing phase, everything should look exactly like it did before.

But everything should be so much faster now.

If everything should look the same, what's different?!

The editor now recognized Markdown better. Less unhandled edge cases. Less styling surprises.

But since applying theme styles is different, there are the occasional visual quirks, like the bracket colors in link definitions being color of links instead of being the color of link definitions. Please report anything you notice via email or here. I'll be patching these mostly in the upcoming days.

Some things also look different, but on purpose: e.g. #hashtag detection now correctly skips code blocks and inline code styles. That's fixing a years-old inconsistency that required this overhaul to be complete. Sorry if you relied on this!

Next steps before and after a regular release

In my testing, all existing themes looked quite good and worked as expected, apart from the occasional wrong color. Backwards compatibility is the highest priority to make this a regular release available for download on the website.

Once that's settled, though, it's time to begin implementing and shipping all the cool extensions we postponed until now. To whet your appetite: We can begin to highlight new things, like tables; we can start working with the structure of documents (e.g. all headings/table of contents); we can start to do more with lists, especially nested lists, and then some

Since the editor is fully MultiMarkdown-aware, we can do things with what's considered "extensions" to classic Markdown more easily. This includes tables, footnotes, and annotations, and "doing something with it" is not limited to applying the correct color according to the theme.

I don't want to spoil too much. Unbeknownst to the end user, the new editor brings a whole new level of structural awareness about what's in a note to The Archive, and we'll be exploiting that heavily.

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If you're wondering what happened to the scripting/scriptability milestone: I had help with the editor, and work on the editor finished while I was working on the scripting stuff. It made sense to include it in the app as fast as possible discover problems while the development was still fresh on everyone's mind, and iron out all the inevitable kinks as soon as possible. This also means that we'll be seeing a v1.8.0 with scriptability unusually soon-ish.

alexchabot

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I just tested the new version on a 500-line file that's made up of mostly links and I can now search and scroll smoothly. Before that, the app would regularly beach ball. I can't wait to see what else is coming up. Thank you!

verivox

1.7.0 is nice and zippy! Large files open immediately. Thanks for your hard work.

ctietze

Happy to hear the experience is good

xal

Hi,
It seems that I can't open a note in a new tab (Cmd+Click) anymore since v1.7?

ctietze

@xal Thanks! Will fix with the next update

JonJia

good job!

I have a catalog of books with a few hundred lines. It used to be very lagging, but now it has become very smooth.

pryley

I am seeing some inconsistencies with this update.

1. Words in brackets are highlighted as links:
   

2. Wiki links in front-matter are no longer clickable (tags still are):
   

ctietze

Thanks for the reports!

1. This surprised me, too. Bracket pairs can by default constitute a reference link, so 123 [foo] 456 = 123 [foo][] 456 = 123 [foo][foo] 456, so in all 3 cases there's a link definition of the form [foo]: ... expected. Thinking some more on this. (e.g. check if a link definition is found first)
2. Wiki links in frontmatter will ship in the next update

pryley

Interesting.

Here is another inconsistency I came across, when entering URLs in lists.

ctietze

@pryley The link retention is also fixed in the upcoming update (due this week). Your example helped figure this out because my original failing example case was way more complicated

ctietze

v1.7.1 just shipped

Extract from the release notes:

• Fixed: Wiki link detection in MultiMarkdown front-matter.
• Fixed: "Problems during archive initialization" is presented only once, and after you dismiss the alert, the same errors will not bug you again.
• Fixed: Opening a note in The Archive for the first time could auto-select text sometimes. Now looking at a note for the first time appropriately starts at the beginning of the document.
• Fixed: Restoring the old scroll position of a note now works reliably.
• Fixed: Opening links in new window or new tab with the new editor.
• Fixed: Auto-linking of URLs: clean-up of broken links fixed, and while links lists used to work while you type, once you changed the list layout, the clickable link would vanish.
• Fixed: While we don't allow inline images to be displayed in some cases, the paths are now always clickable. Now also skips image syntax inside comments.
• Fixed: Character composition using accents, or using Japanese or Chinese input methods, used to be interruptible by external file changes.
• Changed: When a file is removed before The Archive could read it for the first time, this will not raise an error anymore and is just going to be ignored. This improved compatibility with apps like Typora that implement non-standard file save operations.
• Changed/Fixed: Links and other URLs inside code blocks and inline code spans aren't recognized as clickable anymore.
• Changed: Definition list items that span multiple lines indent all lines visually like all the other lists.
• New: Hidden preference isRestoringScrollPosition to disable restoration of note scroll positions.
• New: If you want to use real tabs, you can customize their width to 2 or 4 characters (n-width).
• New: Pressing the tab key inside a list always indents the current line.

ctietze

i skipped announcing the previous 2 updates, but v1.7.4 is out since 5 minutes.

It's one of the final steps that will make the new MultiMarkdown-based highlighting engine settle. I don't know a better way to phrase this: the updates since v1.7.0 have still been a bit exploratory, and the occasional speed bump was noticeable, esp. in very large documents, sometimes because I messed up a calculation

Getting rid of these kinds of problems was a priority for this release. It's all about speed and accuracy.

I'm hunting for the last glitches and visual oddities. So if you notice anything that looks stupid, please do report.

E.g. up until today, all [bracket] pairs were colored in your theme's link colors, which looked weird in blockquote ellipses like [...] this. Sounds like a stupid little thing, but as is often the case with software, the underlying issue went deeper than expected.

prometheanhindsight

@ctietze said:

E.g. up until today, all [bracket] pairs were colored in your theme's link colors, which looked weird in blockquote ellipses like [...] this. Sounds like a stupid little thing, but as is often the case with software, the underlying issue went deeper than expected.

I'm weirdly excited about this change. It always bothered me that single bracket pairs in my LaTeX equations were highlighted.