Inkdrop Desktop v5.6.0

craftzdog · October 23, 2023, 4:40am

Hey Inkdroppers,

I’m excited to announce that Inkdrop v5.6.0 is out!
There are a lot of improvements in this release. Please enjoy

Faster launch speed

Managed to make it 500-700ms faster

Here is a demo:

file_Gs-9UL_8u

STORY: How I made Inkdrop 500ms faster to launch🚀

Loading plugins lazily

Along with v5.6.0, some plugins have been updated with performance improvements as well. mermaid and math load their modules only when you open a note that uses one of them. It would keep the launch speed fast even if you installed plugins that require massive modules like them.

Markdown renderer engine update

v5.6.0 has upgraded Remark and Rehype packages to the latest versions. It isn’t only an internal improvement but also gives you more possibilities to get useful features. It now has mdast and hast data in the preview state, which allows to add syntax-aware features like outline views more easily without relying on regular expressions.

STORY: Refactoring the extensible Markdown renderer

On the other hand, it may cause some plugins not working due to the breaking changes. For plugin developers, I’ll post another topic to help you update your plugins.

Built-in paste-as-markdown support

Plugins are useful but it’d be a burden to explore and decide which plugins to install for light users. I wanted to make the app just work out of the box. As a starter, paste-as-markdown is now bundled into the app by default. It allows you to paste HTML as Markdown from the clipboard. It’d be useful for copy-and-pasting formatted texts from browsers.

I’m planning to bundle Mermaid, GitHub Emoji, and Math plugins as well.

Acrylic window style is not working on Windows

Lag when resizing the window with Acrylic background

On Electron@25.1.1, the module that the app used to support the acrylic window style no longer works, unfortunately. The good news is that Electron itself officially supports the acrylic style for Windows:

feat: support Mica/Acrylic on Windows by codebytere · Pull Request #38163 · electron/electron · GitHub

The bad news is that it is not stable and working as expected – It doesn’t work with frameless windows, besides, it becomes unresizable and loses shadows. So, unfortunately, the acrylic window style is not supported on Windows in this release.

Nested workspace views

In previous versions, pressing the “Detail” button on the notebook would take you to the workspace view, but you couldn’t press the “Detail” button again once you were in that view.
In this update, the “Detail” button is now functional within the workspace view as well!

The sidebar now displays the path of the current and parent notebooks:

Quick notebook picker for moving notes

You can more quickly choose a notebook

New API documentation (WIP)

I’ve been working on redesigning the documentation and the new API documentation is now available as WIP.

The design is heavily inspired by Stripe, built on top of Tailwind UI. It supports full-text search now. There are still many missing pages and broken links though, your help to improve the doc would be greatly appreciated. It will be more comprehensive and easy to understand and I hope you like it

I’ll be working on creating a new user manual as well!

Other bug fixes and improvements

improvement(note-list): The sidebar now has the “Pinned Notes” section. In “All Notes”, pinned notes are no longer displayed on top of the note list.
Copy/paste bullet point from the web unexpected behaviour
Memory consumption is very high - #15 by Seito_Tanaka
Images are converted into PNG when inserting from the toolbar button
fix(export): Some image files do not have file extensions
fix(security): Show a confirmation alert when clicking non-https links on the preview (CVE-2023-44141)

Can’t change tag colors (Thanks Lukas)
Defer updating the preview a bit longer when the preview is not visible (Thanks Seito)
When exporting, use Untitled if the note title is empty
Different modules like react get loaded from an incorrect path, which causes the app to crash (Thanks Jaime)
The cursor jumps to a wrong position when toggling the side-by-side mode
The app crashes when uninstalling a plugin from Preferences (Thanks Lukas)
The note counts are not updated correctly in the workspace views (Thanks SDO)
open() does not open the url in a browser but opens it in an internal browser window instead (Thanks Shimizu)
Sidebar display all notes after toggling off a distraction free (Thanks Bundit)
Export does not include notes with completed or dropped status (Thanks @Lukas Issue)

fix(preview): number of task list items not updated correctly (Thanks Lukas)
fix(html): do not load browser-commons.js (Thanks Lukas)
fix(share): The app crashes when sharing a note (Thanks Martin)
fix(preferences): Add a note on the acrylic background effect on Windows
fix(login): The login screen is broken

fix(server): Local HTTP server not working (Thanks Raivis)
fix(editor): floating action buttons not appearing right after the launch (Thanks Lukas)
fix(ipm): The CLI command ipm install not working (Thanks Raivis)

Special thanks

I’d like to mention a few guys who helped me fix bugs and make the app stable.

Thank you so much for your support as always