Parker 0.4.5

Four new themes

Parker had four themes, all of them monochrome chrome over vivid syntax. It now has eight, and the four new ones are somewhere else entirely:

• Playa — noon, white dust, hard sun, nothing in shade. The only light theme here that isn't paper: the ground has a colour of its own.
• Playa at Night — the same place after dark, when everything visible is lit from within.
• Matrix — phosphor green on black. One hue and a brightness ladder, which is what a P1 tube actually gave you.
• Blueprint — cyanotype: pale technical linework on deep drawing-office blue, where white is the ink rather than the paper.

⌘⇧T cycles through them. The palette button had promised that shortcut for a while and nothing was listening; now it is. Double-click the button to go back to the default.

To-do colours now belong to the theme

The eight to-do states used to be eight fixed colours. That works only while every theme has the same kind of ground — and Matrix does not. Its body text is green, so the old DONE was green on green: the state that matters most was the one you couldn't read.

Each theme now names its own. On the playa, DONE is creosote and ATTN is the sun; on the phosphor tube, DONE is the tube at full brightness and ATTN borrows the amber of the other tube these terminals came in. The relationships hold everywhere — arrival, its approach, two kinds of stall, the two failures — only the colours change.

On the light themes the marks stepped down a rung, because the old ones washed out on white.

Three shortcuts that were lying

• Copy line is ⇧⌥↑ / ⇧⌥↓. The help window said ⌘⌥↑ / ⌘⌥↓, which adds a cursor above or below — a real shortcut that was hiding behind the wrong label.
• The empty pane offered ⌘T for a new note. New note is ⌘N; nothing was listening to ⌘T.
• The default summon shortcut is ⌃⌥P. Some of the docs still claimed ⌥Space.

And two that worked but were never written down: ⌘⌥G goes to a line, Esc backs out to a single cursor and closes the find bar.

Also

The site grew a features page — getparker.dev/features — with real screenshots of all of this.

Note on first launch

The app is ad-hoc signed, so macOS shows a Gatekeeper warning the first time you open it, and asks again for access to your Documents folder after each update.