ZenNotes v2.77.0

ZenNotes 2.77.0 is about links and ideas. Every [[link]] to a note you have not written yet now waits in one Unresolved Links list, and a link popover lets you read, edit or create the linked note without leaving the one you are in. A tag now finds the idea itself: the Tags view and Search notes list the tagged blocks inside each note, not just the note. It also fixes three Vim mode annoyances, keeps links looking like links in lists, headings and table cells, and makes ZenNotes Cloud far more patient on slow or filtered networks.

Released from 3f0356de through #996 on 2026-10-26. All installers are verified.

Features

• Every unresolved link in one list (asked for by uNyanda). A [[link]] you write before its note exists is easy to forget. The Unresolved Links view lists every link in the vault that points at no note, most linked first, with each note and line that links to it. Enter on a line opens that note on the link, Enter on a name creates the note where gD would, and K writes it in the link popover without leaving the list. Open it with Space u or :unresolved in Vim mode, Open Unresolved Links in the command palette, or the new row under the Connections panel's missing links. Links inside code are text, and a link to an existing note's heading, block or alias counts as resolved, exactly as the editor draws it.
• Edit or create a linked note without leaving yours (asked for by uNyanda). Rest the pointer on a [[link]] and the linked note opens in a small floating editor over the note you are in. It is the real note: what you type saves like any edit and shows in its tab if it is open. K in Vim mode or Shift+Cmd+K (Shift+Ctrl+K) opens it from the keyboard, Escape gives the cursor back where it was, and Cmd+Enter opens the note in a tab. A link to a note that does not exist yet offers Create note: Enter creates it and you are already typing in it. Hover can be turned off under Settings, Writing, Link popover on hover (link_popover_on_hover under [editor] in config.toml).
• The Tags view lists the ideas, not just the notes (#837, thanks to @uNyanda). Opening a tag, from the sidebar, a #tag in a note or :tag, now lists each note with the blocks that carry the tag under its title: a list item with its sub-items, a paragraph, a quote, a table row, or, for a tag on a heading, that whole section. Enter opens the note on that line, highlighted, and Ctrl+O comes back; } and { hop from note to note in Vim mode, and the filter narrows to the blocks whose text matches. Tags in frontmatter still tag the whole note.
• Search notes shows tagged blocks too (#837). With a #tag in the query, each note lists up to two of its tagged blocks, then a "+N more" row that opens the rest in the Tags view. Words after the tag narrow the blocks and are marked in them, and Enter on a block opens its line. Without a #tag the palette is exactly as before, and "Show tagged blocks in note search" in Settings, Editor, Search turns it off (tagged_blocks under [search]).

Fixes

• Vim mode (#993, thanks to @athu16). On Linux and Windows, Ctrl+A in Normal mode now increments the number under the cursor, as Ctrl+X already decremented it, instead of selecting the whole note; insert mode keeps Select All. Ctrl+J and Ctrl+K in Settings walk the categories in the order the list shows them, where they used to jump back and forth. And l on a collapsed folder in the sidebar keeps the cursor on that folder; the first expand of a folder used to throw it onto the note you had open.
• The sidebar cursor stays on its row. A note added or removed by another app or a sync could slide the Vim cursor in the sidebar onto a neighboring row, or onto the open note after a folder had been clicked. It now stays on the row it was on.
• Links keep looking like links. A link inside a list item, a heading or emphasis kept only its underline and took the text color around it (since 2.50.3); it is the link color again, in every theme. And a [[link]] to a missing note inside a table cell now looks unresolved, grey and dashed like everywhere else, and turns into a link the moment the note exists.
• Code in Windows notes stops showing up as tags. In a note saved with Windows line endings, a #include inside a code block was counted as a tag, because the code block was never recognized. It is now.
• ZenNotes Cloud on slow or filtered networks (thanks to yeminn and Dave). The conflict review opened while a sync was still running waited for that sync, up to five minutes on a stalled connection, with Finish later greyed out; it now opens at once, shows Retry with the details after 20 seconds, and Finish later always works. A phone now notices a stalled request after 30 seconds of silence instead of 300 and retries it, and catching up on many changes no longer slows down as the vault grows.
• On the phones (thanks to Dave): moving the open note to the Trash leaves you on Home instead of in an old note, and the calendar opens from Home with no note open, where a second tap on a day opens or creates its daily note. These ship in the next phone releases, built on this core.

For contributors

• Unresolved Links and the link popover (f69b5fa5): wikilinkReaches (lib/unresolved-links.ts) is now the one decision behind the editor's broken-link style, table cells and the view; the occurrence scan is shared-domain/unresolved-links.ts on scanMarkdownLines, which gained includeFrontmatter. LinkPopover.tsx is a real editor on noteContents, held through cache prunes by linkPopoverHolds; createNoteInPlace writes a missing note without opening it. New keymap ids vim.linkPopover, editor.linkPopover, vim.leaderUnresolvedLinks; new portable pref linkPopoverOnHover.
• Tag blocks (69f34c0f, 878225d3): extractTagBlocks and tagBlockJumpOffset in shared-domain/tag-blocks.ts, read by the scan rules of the note-level index; app-core's code mask moved to shared-domain/tag-scan.ts (still five copies of stripCodeContent). lib/tag-block-index.ts reads only the notes a view lists, through readNote, cached by updatedAt:size. openNoteAtOffset gained highlightLine. Keymap ids tags.nextNote / tags.previousNote; portable pref searchTaggedBlocks.
• Vim fixes (61eac765): vimAwareDefaultKeymap(vimMode, mac) defers Mod-a to Vim outside insert mode off macOS; inNavigationOrder (settings-search.ts); the Sidebar's reveal effect follows only a changed selection (sidebarSelectionChanged). The sidebar cursor keeps its row by key in lib/sidebar-cursor.ts (37a68a33), and the reveal remembers the open note while the sidebar is unfocused too (3f0356de).
• Editor (03df3dde, fa200ea3): .cm-editor :where(.tok-link) .tok-link-syntax restores the pre-2.50.3 cascade; renderInlineCell takes a resolver and a view plugin re-decides idle cells in place. CRLF (7afe7a3b): FENCE_OPEN_RE / FENCE_CLOSE_RE and the stripCodeContent copies accept a trailing \r.
• Cloud (dc4210a6, 4f50b8ca, 0000cc4c): a conflict opens outside the sync queue and reads one file (cloud-sync-coordinator.ts, cloud-sync-portable-filesystem.ts), with a 20 s bound in CloudPendingConflictResolver.tsx; cloud-sync-stall.ts gives phones a 30 s idle bound and retryCloudTransfer (desktop does not opt in); reduceCloudSyncChangeInto keeps one working copy per pull.
• Phones (4050388f, 95f48cde): rewritePathsInTree marks activeTabWasPicked and the phone-only installHomeGuard shows Home on it; @zennotes/app-core/calendar exports DateCalendar, and a touch tap on the selected day opens it.

Demos

Screenshots of this release on the release build, attached to this release:

Unresolved Links: every link to a note that does not exist yet, most linked first.

The link popover: rest the pointer on a link and the note opens over yours.

Tagged blocks in the Tags view: each note with the ideas that carry the tag.

Tagged blocks in Search notes: #idea plus a word narrows to the matching ideas.

Verification

How to test locally. Build once with npm run build --workspace @zennotes/desktop and launch with isolated stores: ZENNOTES_USER_DATA_PATH=$(mktemp -d) ZENNOTES_CONFIG_DIR=$(mktemp -d) npx electron apps/desktop/out/main/index.js. Put these notes in the vault:

Launch plan.md     Before we ship we need the [[Pricing page]]. The list is in [[Beta testers]].
Beta testers.md    - Priya
                   - Tom
Ideas.md           - Weekly digest email #idea
                     - start with the three most edited notes
                   - Offline mode for the mobile app #idea
                   ## Onboarding checklist #idea
                   Show five steps on first launch.

1. Unresolved Links. Open Launch plan: Pricing page is grey and dashed. Press Space u (Vim mode) or pick Open Unresolved Links from the command palette: Pricing page is listed with its line. Enter on the line opens Launch plan on the link. Before: there was no such list.
2. Link popover. Rest the pointer on Beta testers: the note opens in a popover; click in, add a line, Escape. The line is in Beta testers.md. Put the cursor on Pricing page and press K (or Shift+Cmd+K): Create note; Enter, type, Escape, and the link turns solid.
3. Tagged blocks. Click #idea in the sidebar (or :tag idea): Ideas lists three blocks, the list item with its sub-item and the heading with its section. Enter on Onboarding checklist opens that line highlighted; Ctrl+O comes back. Cmd+P, #idea mobile: one block, with "mobile" marked. Turn off "Show tagged blocks in note search" in Settings and the palette lists notes only.
4. Vim mode (#993). On Linux or Windows, Ctrl+A on count 41 in Normal mode gives count 42. Open Settings and press Ctrl+J: Appearance, Typography, Editor, Tasks, Keymap and on, in the list's order. In a folder of 30 or more notes, l on it in the sidebar keeps the cursor there.
5. Links and tables. A [[Beta testers]] in a list item is the link color, not the list's. In a table cell, [[Pricing page]] is grey and dashed until the note exists.
6. Cloud conflict review. Needs two devices on one Cloud vault with a conflict pending: while a sync is running, Review opens both versions at once, and Finish later closes it. Before: it waited on the sync, up to five minutes on a stalled connection, with Finish later greyed out.

Distribution channels

• GitHub release: installers for macOS (Apple silicon and Intel DMG and zip), Windows (x64 and ARM64 installer) and Linux (x64 and arm64 AppImage, deb, rpm, pacman, tar.gz), with five update manifests; the four screenshots in Demos are attached too.
• AUR: zennotes-bin 2.77.0-1 (AUR clone 794ebf5, repo 6c7a5272), pinned to ZenNotes-2.77.0-linux-x64.tar.gz SHA-256 84ab011c…3e6a, after the tarball check confirmed the bundled CLI folder is world-readable.
• Nix: packaging/nix/release-data.json lifted from the update workflow (run 40410308185, bot PR #998 closed) as 4f4cda45, and nix-build on main passed.
• nixpkgs: another contributor's PR took the package to 2.74.0 (with Electron 44) and closed ours in its favor, so NixOS/nixpkgs#579420 now proposes 2.74.0 -> 2.77.0, changing only the version and two hashes; the source hash comes from the tag tarball, and the same command reproduces master's 2.74.0 hash.
• Homebrew: zennotes 2.77.0 in the tap (ec8fccf), mirrored in 41c0c4c7; both DMGs' SHA-256 match the cask and GitHub's digests; brew style clean.
• zn CLI: the bundled zn is still 0.11.0, the latest ZenNotes/tui release; no change.
• Website: ZenNotes/website#91 merged with the 2.77.0 entry and five captioned clips (Unresolved Links, the link popover, tagged blocks in the Tags view and in Search notes, and the #993 Vim keys), and the docs for Unresolved Links, the link popover and tagged blocks. Laravel Cloud deployed it at 2a6152d8, and the live check passed: /releases leads with 2.77.0, every clip matches the local file byte for byte, seeking works, and /docs has both new sections.
• Server and Docker: ZenNotes/znserver v2.77.0 pins the browser app web-2.77.0-web.h7401d7675ced65e4 (ee4b839, ZenNotes/znserver#45); all five binaries match SHA256SUMS, and the released darwin-arm64 binary served the 2.77.0 app on a scratch vault and answered 401 without its token. adibhanna/zennotes:2.77.0, 2.77 and latest are published from the tag (one digest, amd64 and arm64). The server README points at 2.77.0 since ZenNotes/znserver#46 (4a31df6).
• Boundary packages: core-2.77.0-core.hfe38f5ee2a70bd64 and web-2.77.0-web.h7401d7675ced65e4, built by CI from 3f0356de and published as pre-releases (core once both phones were submitted on it). No viewer this time: nothing in 2.77.0 changes how a published note renders. "Latest" still names v2.77.0.
• Phones: iPhone 1.33.0 (build 49, ZenNotes/zennotesios#78, on core 2.77.0) replaced 1.32.0, which was still waiting for review, and is Waiting for Review in App Store Connect, set to release automatically. Android 1.1.47 (versionCode 50, ZenNotes/zennotesandroid#135) is in Google Play review at 100% rollout with no devices lost, and its GitHub release carries Play's signed universal APK. Both carry the tagged blocks, the Calendar from Home, Trash landing on Home, the 30-second stall bound and retry for Cloud requests, fewer native calls per pulled file (ZenNotes/zennotesios#77, ZenNotes/zennotesandroid#133), and the Windows line-endings fix for code blocks (ZenNotes/zennotesios#76, ZenNotes/zennotesandroid#134).

Release validation

Every CI failure since 2.76.0 was read before this release: ci-sweep.py v2.76.0 found one on main, the dependency audit on the 2.76.0 Homebrew commit (a body-parser advisory published after that cut, fixed by 2e87b125), plus unmerged Dependabot branches and the Nix bot's usual zero-job run. hazard-scan.py --since v2.76.0 found no hazards and one warning: the Windows line-endings fix changed four of the code-masking copies. The Go server's copy was not affected (Go's . matches \r), and the two phone copies got the same fix in this release.

Release-time gates, in a clean worktree with its own npm ci at 3f0356de: typecheck 8/8 with no turbo cache, test:run with no cache (shared-domain 2,145, app-core 3,541, desktop 1,194, quicklook 15), a fresh build, the production dependency audit, a Developer ID signed pack, and the packaged launch check (page target and drawn app in 1.5 s, version 2.77.0). Smoke suites vim-editor and sidebar-vim passed; editor-improvements failed one check once and passed 19/19 after its cause was found: What's New opens about a second after launch with focus on its Close button, and on a machine busy with another build it opened after the suite's 4-second wait, mid-run, so the suite's Space keystroke closed it instead of reaching the editor. That is a gap in the test, not in the app; skipping the dismissal reproduces it every time.

Two problems were caught and fixed before the release shipped: while recording its clips, the sidebar Vim cursor still jumped to the open note on the first outside write after a folder had been clicked (3f0356de); and the hazard scan found that the phone shells' copy of the code masking had the same Windows line-endings gap as the desktop (fixed in both phone apps). Before the tag, a core packed from the release commit was tried in the iPhone app on the simulator to confirm the new link popover never opens from a tap on a phone.

Release PR #996: all 10 checks passed on the first run. CI on main for 3f0356de (run 40404956103): all six jobs green before the tag, and CodeQL too. Release run 40407512757: all six jobs green (macOS 49 minutes, Windows ARM64 49); verify-installers.py ALL GOOD by SHA-512 on the five manifests (14 files); the app in both DMGs is Notarized Developer ID with a valid stapled ticket. npm run verify:channels -- 2.77.0: every channel serves v2.77.0 (Homebrew, AUR, Nix and the website's eight download buttons).

On the phones, the tagged blocks (one note, two blocks, a tap opening the line), the Calendar from Home with no note open and its New daily note offer, and Trash landing on Home were walked in the iPhone build at phone size; the Android build launched on CI's emulator, and the calendar entry was walked on an Android emulator when it was built.

After the tag, CI on main for the packaging commits: the AUR commit's run (6c7a5272) was cancelled by the Nix push a minute later, and the Nix commit's run (4f4cda45) passed all six jobs; the Homebrew commit's run (41c0c4c7) failed once on macOS in a timing test from this release's pull-cost change, which compared two measurements of a microsecond or two against a 5x bound (25 µs against 2.7 µs). The re-run passed all six jobs, and 8eac8604 on main makes that test bound the large vault's cost per change in absolute time instead (250 µs, against 2 to 5 µs now and 3.6 ms before the fix).