Textus v1.3.0

What's new

Textus 1.3.0 opens Textus up to plugins and comes to iPhone and iPad. One store in Settings › Extensions has plugins, themes and skills - mind maps, Vim and Emacs keys, Marp slides, Zotero citations, a graph of your notes, Notion-like pages and databases, charts and more - and plugins run on iPhone and iPad as on the computer. The window splits into as many panes as you like, a command palette runs everything by typing, Track My Changes keeps your own edits for review the way Textus AI's are, and the whole app has one look, with themes that recolour all of it.

New

• Plugins, installed from inside Textus: Settings › Extensions lists the plugins, themes and skills you have, then what you can add, with one search for all of them. Each plugin has a page with its pictures, its guide and the permissions it asks for before you install it, one button to install, update, turn off or on, and its own settings - for every document, or for the folder you have open. Uninstalling moves what it kept to the Trash.
• Official plugins to start with:
  • Writing: Vim and Emacs keys, Quick Insert (/ for headings, lists, tables, formulas, callouts and emoji), Templates, Markdown Lint, CJK Spacing, Heading Numbers, Writing Stats, LaTeX Completion, Natural Dates and WakaTime.
  • Notes: Pages (pages inside pages), Database (a folder's documents as a table, board, calendar or gallery, with Notion import), Graph View, Backlinks, Tags, Tasks, Bookmarks, Calendar & Daily Notes, Quick Notes, Quick Preview, Reminders and Version History.
  • Drawing: Mind Map (Markmap), ECharts, Chart.js, PlantUML, Timeline, sheet music in ABC notation, WaveDrom and Function Plot, drawn below their code block and carried into exports as pictures.
  • Reading and research: Marp slides, Zotero citations, Link Cards, and PDF, Word, image and web page viewers in tabs.
• iPhone and iPad: Textus comes to the App Store, the same app in a narrower layout - plugins, themes, skills, Textus AI and tracked changes included. Documents live in the Files app; hold a tab to drag it or split the screen.
• More than two documents at once: View › Split Right (Ctrl/⌘ + Alt + S) and Split Down split the pane you're in, again and again; drag a tab or a file to an edge to open it there, or out of the window for a window of its own. Each pane has its own tabs, and every window comes back with its tabs and panes.
• View › Command Palette… (Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + P) finds and runs everything the menus do and every plugin command, also by pinyin (bs finds 背诵).
• Track My Changes, in the View menu: your edits show as changes - what you deleted struck through, what you added marked, by character in Chinese and Japanese - to accept or reject one by one or all at once from the review bar, in the same three views as Textus AI's edits. The file keeps the original with what you accepted; changes still to decide wait beside it in the .textus folder and come back when you open the document.
• Your own notes in the margin: select some words, right-click › Add Note, and the note stands beside the text, marked Me, next to Textus AI's.
• View › Read Only, or a tab's menu, keeps a document from being changed; a padlock beside the title shows it.
• Back and Forward (Ctrl + - and Ctrl + Shift + -, Alt + ←/→ on Windows and Linux, or the mouse's buttons) return to where you were after a link, a heading or a tab switch.
• Alt/⌥ + ↑/↓ moves the paragraph, list item or selected blocks up or down.
• Right-click a picture to turn it a quarter left or right, or open it in the zoomable viewer; a double click opens it too.
• File › Reopen Closed Tab (Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + T), Copy Path, and Close Others, Close Tabs to the Left and Close Tabs to the Right in a tab's menu; a middle click closes a tab.
• Help › Report a Problem sends a report from inside Textus, with your version, system and plugins shown before anything goes - no GitHub account needed.
• The textus terminal command works on Windows and in the Linux AppImage too.
• Textus AI: switch the chat's model from the message box, search past conversations, keep a request worth repeating as a skill, give plugins' tools to Textus AI, and redraw one proposed picture from your own description.
• For plugin authors, the plugin API 1.0 is typed in docs/dev/textus.d.ts, with a JSON Schema for textus-plugin.json; plugins can draw code blocks, mark the text, add / items and AI tools, keep their own storage, remind you with notifications and work on a schedule in the background. A manifest says where its plugin runs, and third-party plugins can be listed in the store.

Improved

• One look across the app: every panel, card and dialog shares the same corner sizes, buttons and switches are capsules, and text sizes follow one scale. Themes recolour the whole window - sidebar, Settings, menus and the AI panel - and the sidebar runs up behind the title bar.
• Copy puts Markdown in the clipboard's plain text, so GitHub, Obsidian and chat apps get the formatting while Word and Notion still paste it formatted; Edit › Copy as Plain Text and Paste as Plain Text (Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + V) give the words alone. Copying and pasting as plain text can also be added to the right-click menu in Settings › Editor & Appearance.
• The right-click menu puts what you clicked first, keeps Cut, Copy and Paste on top - Cut and Copy greyed out with nothing selected - and adds Format: bold, italic, headings, lists, quote, code block and table. Submenus stay open while the pointer heads for them.
• Each paste, cut, drop and replacement is an undo step of its own, as in Word, and Find starts from the words you selected.
• Opening a file follows one rule: a file already open comes to the front, an untouched blank document gives way to it, and anything else opens in a tab of its own.
• A document another app changes updates in Textus within a moment while its window shows; your unsaved edits are never replaced. (#468)
• Source mode, Source and Preview, zen mode and typewriter mode are one setting for every tab and window. Split View is now called Source and Preview.
• The margin's revision and note cards stay beside the text at any zoom and with the sidebar open, without covering it or flickering, and with no room left the review bar takes over. In the view with the original in the text, new text alone waits in its card too, a thin mark showing where it goes.
• [[Wikilinks]] read as the note's name, showing their brackets only while the caret is on one.
• Error messages say what happened in your language - a missing file, no permission, a full disk, no connection, a balance run out - instead of the system's words.
• Settings is tidier: what you change often comes first, the rest under Advanced; General › Help has the tour, guides, Report a Problem and the community.
• Settings › Editor & Appearance can put pictures on the left, and, on a Mac, export PDFs in light colours while you write in dark mode. Track My Changes and Read Only sit beside the other view switches there.
• Four skills come with Textus - Proofread, Design a theme, Make a plugin and Make a skill; Expand, Tighten, Translate, Summarize and Check continuity are a click away in the store, and a skill of your own can be switched off for now.
• A long document is translated or rewritten chapter by chapter at once, with names and terms kept the same throughout, and Textus AI's memory tidies itself.
• Windows open faster: Split View, Export, the tour and the plugin host load the first time they're used.

Fixed

• Backspace, Delete, Enter and paste keep code blocks, maths blocks, quotes, lists and tables in shape: no block is poured into the line beside it, indented code keeps its blank lines, and a pasted table fills the cells it lands on.
• On macOS, Undo and Redo take back pastes, cuts and formatting, not just typing, and undo in a text field or the chat window never reaches the document behind it.
• Files dragged in from Finder, File Explorer or a Linux file manager open again, and a dropped folder opens in the sidebar. (#429)
• A click in the empty margin beside the text puts the caret in the nearest line.
• On Windows and Linux, Settings and other menu commands open in the window you used them in.

Platform notes

• iPhone and iPad: plugins that work in the background or need a program on the computer - Quick Notes, Reminders, Zotero and Web View - stay on the computer.
• Windows and Linux: Settings › Editor & Appearance › Show the menu bar puts File, Edit, View and the rest along the title bar instead of behind ☰.

Installers for macOS (Apple silicon and Intel), Windows and Linux (x64 and ARM64) are below; the app updates itself.