Divan 0.6.0

Themes, and a place to choose them

Divan now has four themes, each in light and dark: Default, Sedef, Dracula and Cobalt2. Pick one from View → Theme, or from the new Settings dialog behind the gear at the right of the top bar.

A theme changes colours only. Your choice under Type stays yours.

If you were using Mermer, it has been folded into Default with the new higher-contrast option turned on, so the page should look much as it did. You can turn that off in Settings.

Two new reading options

Both are in Settings, and both are off until you turn them on.

• Increase text contrast pushes the page and the text further apart in whichever theme you use.
• Color Markdown elements tints headings, bold, italics, inline code and quotations, so the structure of a long document reads at a glance. The colours carry into the HTML export too.

A fourth face

Monaspace (GitHub's Monaspace Neon) sits beside Mono, Serif and Sans under Type. It is bundled, so it works without installing anything.

Smaller

Typewriter mode no longer nudges the page up and down as the caret moves between a heading and ordinary text.

Thanks to Alberto Canepa for the themes and the Settings dialog.

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Requires macOS 26 or later, Apple Silicon. Signed with a Developer ID certificate and notarized by Apple, so it opens normally.

Divan 0.5.0

Divan can tell you when there is a new version

Off until you turn it on — Help → Check Automatically.

With it on, Divan asks GitHub once a day whether a newer version exists. If there
is one, a small dot appears beside the word count. Hover it for the version,
click it to read what changed and open the download page.

It never downloads or installs anything. It tells you; you decide, and you
install it the same way you installed this one.

It sends nothing about you or your writing. GitHub sees your IP address, the time,
and which version of Divan you are running — the same things any download shows
it. No account, no identifier, no request body. With the setting off, Divan opens
no network connection at all.

Help → Check for Updates asks once, immediately, whether or not the automatic
check is on.

Install this one and Divan will be able to tell you about the next.

A way to tell me something

Help → Send Feedback opens a short form in your browser, with the build and
your macOS version already filled in — the two things every bug report needs and
nobody remembers to include. You can see them in the address bar before you send
anything.

Divan fetches nothing here either; it hands the URL to your browser. The form is
hosted by Tally, not by me.

If something is broken, missing, or merely annoying, that is the place.

Smaller

The About panel is a little shorter.

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Divan's privacy document spells out exactly what the update check sends, when, and
how to turn it off — including the commands to prove that with it off, the app
opens no sockets at all.

Requires macOS 26 or later, Apple Silicon.

Divan 0.4.0

A folder panel

Divan can now show you the Markdown around the file you are editing.

Press ⌘J, or use View → Folder, and a panel opens on the left listing the
Markdown files and folders next to your document. Click one to open it. The
panel follows whatever you have open, so it re-roots as you move between
projects — or pin a folder and it stays put.

It remembers how you left it: open or closed, and how wide you dragged it.

The panel is deliberately read-only. It will not create, rename or delete
anything, because a writing app with no undo for the filesystem should not be
the thing that loses your work. If you add a file from the Finder while Divan is
running, the panel notices.

Search no longer freezes on long documents

Searching a long document used to lock the app up — nearly a full second of
frozen window per keystroke on a 10,000-word file, and four seconds at 20,000.
Typing a query into the find bar was close to unusable in anything book-length.

It is now about two milliseconds. The find bar repaints only the lines whose
highlighting actually changed rather than the whole document on every keystroke.

A lone asterisk stays an asterisk

5 * 3 and 2 * 4 no longer turn the text between them into italics. An
emphasis marker now has to sit against the word it emphasises, which is what
CommonMark specifies and what every other Markdown editor does.

A quieter, faster start

Divan asked macOS for a font it will never hand over, and paid about 200ms and a
console warning for it on every launch. It now asks only for faces the system
actually has. Nothing looks different; it just starts sooner.

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Requires macOS 26 or later, Apple Silicon.

Divan 0.3.0

Right-click in the editor. That is most of this release, along with the export
finally agreeing with the page about what you wrote.

Right-click

The editor had no context menu at all. It now carries cut, copy and paste,
Apple's Writing Tools, and the same bold, italic, inline code and link the Edit
menu has. Right-clicking inside a selection acts on that selection; clicking
anywhere else moves the caret first, the way every other Mac text field
behaves.

Writing Tools is Apple's, not Divan's. The menu item asks the system to do what
the Edit menu could already do, and puts it where your hand already is. Divan
still ships no AI of its own.

The export now matches the page

The editor and the HTML export each carried their own idea of what a line was,
and they had drifted apart in five places. All five are fixed, and one grammar
now answers for both.

• An indented blockquote — > like this — was a quote while you wrote it and
  a paragraph with a stray > in the export.
• Two callouts written back to back exported as a single container, with the
  second [!warning] left sitting in the text as words.
• > [!NOTE] in capitals was a callout in the export and an ordinary quotation
  on the page.
• A heading written ## Like this ## kept its closing hashes on the page and
  lost them in the export.
• An over-indented *** was a rule in the export and plain text on the page.

Also

The About panel said 0.1.0 for the whole of 0.2.0. It now tells you what you
are actually running.

Requirements

macOS 26 or later, Apple Silicon. Signed with a Developer ID certificate and
notarized by Apple, so it opens normally — no right-click, no quarantine
warning.

Divan 0.2.0

Divan is a writing room for one Markdown file. One file at a time, no library,
no second pane. Live preview tucks the Markdown markers away as the caret
leaves and brings them back when you edit, and the file on disk stays plain
Markdown that any other tool can read.

This is the first public build.

The page

Three themes, each in light and dark. Divan is the warm book paper the app
was built around. Sedef is mother-of-pearl, a natural white with the warmth
left in. Mermer is marble, a cool light grey. Every colour pairing is checked
against contrast thresholds rather than chosen by eye.

Three faces. Mono, Serif and Sans. They are corrected for x-height, so
switching changes the shape of the text rather than how big it looks.

Your measure. Drag either edge of the column to set the line length, from
45 to 200 characters. Double click to return to the default.

Callouts and decisions are containers. > [!note] and > [!warning] sit
in their own tinted, inset blocks, told apart by hue. **Decision:** gets the
same treatment with a neutral wash. All of it is still ordinary Markdown on
disk — a callout is a blockquote, a decision is a bold label.

Writing

• Live preview: markers hide as the caret leaves a span or a line, including
  the # on headings, and return when you move back to edit.
• Fenced code blocks are literal. Nothing inside one is styled as Markdown or
  turned into a link.
• GFM tables, laid out on the page and scrollable when wide.
• Image drop copies into ./assets/ beside the document, with a
  collision-safe name. Unsaved documents ask you to save first, then complete
  the drop.
• Find and replace, word count with reading time, typewriter scrolling,
  autosave, crash recovery, and a warning when the file changes underneath you.
• Apple's Writing Tools, from the Edit menu. Divan does not ship an AI of its
  own.

Sharing

• Export HTML carries the same type and colour as the page, with a dark
  mode that follows the reader's system.
• PDF via Print renders at print sizes with a real heading hierarchy.
• Copy Markdown puts the source on the clipboard.

Requirements

macOS 26 or later, Apple Silicon.

The build is signed with a Developer ID certificate and notarized by Apple, so
it opens normally. No right-click, no quarantine warning.

Notes

Inline constructs must sit on one line. A link or an emphasis run split by a
hard wrap is not recognised, because highlighting reads one line at a time.

Divan is MIT licensed and forked from
omawrite by omacom / DHH. The bundled iA
Writer Mono S typefaces are under the SIL Open Font Licence, included in the
application.

Provided as-is, without warranty.