Rune v0.4.0

The biggest release so far — Rune is substantially faster to use, and looks the part.

Fixed

Random freezes. The cause: PDFium was being called on the UI thread in several hot paths — most damagingly, a hit-test on every mouse move while selecting text. Each call blocked on the PDFium lock held by the render thread, freezing the window. Meanwhile sidebar thumbnails and full-document search competed for that same lock and starved the visible page.

All PDFium work now runs on a single render thread behind a priority queue (interactive edits beat tile rendering, tiles beat thumbnails and search), and text selection is a pure in-memory lookup that never touches PDFium. Scroll work is coalesced, and night mode no longer allocates a GPU effect per tile per frame.

Pages opening pinned to the left edge. The layout was built before the window had been measured, so the page was laid out against a guessed size and left-aligned until you nudged it.

Pages not re-centering when the sidebar toggled, leaving ghost strips of the previous render on screen. A ScrollViewer reports its new size only after the resize event fires, so the layout was rebuilt against the old width — and the canvas was never invalidated afterwards.

Arrow keys did nothing. They were unbound, and the tab strip was swallowing them.

New

• Full keyboard navigation, always on — arrows scroll and page, PgUp/PgDn, Home/End. Vim keys (j k h l, gg/G, p/n) remain a Settings toggle.
• Presentation mode (F5) — fullscreen, one page at a time; arrows, space or click to advance, Esc to leave. Exits onto the page you finished on.
• Page editing in the thumbnail sidebar — multi-select, drag to reorder, Delete, and copy/cut/paste pages with Ctrl+C/X/V including between open tabs. Drop a PDF onto the sidebar to insert its pages.
• Undo / redo (Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y) across both annotations and page edits.
• Bookmarks (Ctrl+B) — name a page, jump back to it later; saved per document.
• Keyboard shortcuts overlay (F1).
• Sidebar open by default, with a switcher for thumbnails / chapters / bookmarks (turn off in Settings).

Redesigned

The interface now follows GNOME Papers' proportions, built entirely from native Windows 11 controls:

• One slim header bar replaces the old 15-button toolbar — everything else lives in a single menu
• A floating zoom control sits over the page, bottom-right
• Bigger, sharper sidebar thumbnails
• A clean recent-documents grid on the start page, with proper placeholders and an empty state

Notes

• Page edits only touch your file when you press Ctrl+S. Undo is available until you save.
• Deleting an annotation created by a different PDF editor works, but can't be undone — Rune can only faithfully rebuild its own annotation types.
• 93 automated tests (up from 50), all passing.

Install

Portable (recommended) — download rune-v0.4.0-win-x64.zip, extract anywhere, run Rune.exe. No installer, no registry.

MSIX (for "default PDF app" integration) — download the .msix and rune-signing.cer, then trust the certificate once from an admin PowerShell:

Import-Certificate -FilePath rune-signing.cer -CertStoreLocation Cert:\LocalMachine\TrustedPeople
Add-AppxPackage -Path Rune.App_0.4.0.0_x64.msix

Rune is not yet code-signed by a recognised authority. Machines with Smart App Control enabled will block it, and SmartScreen may warn on first run (More info → Run anyway). The portable build on a machine with SAC off is the smoothest path.

Packages aren't size-optimised yet — the download carries the full self-contained .NET and Windows App SDK runtimes.