Arf v2.0.0

Changed

• A redesigned interface. Arf's surfaces have been reworked while the ink-on-paper palette, EB Garamond, and the single iron-gall accent stay exactly as they were. The command palette and right-click menus now rest on a soft frosted glass; hairlines, shadows, and corners were retuned so every panel reads the same way; and chrome buttons press in like letterpress. Motion is deliberate throughout — notes cross-fade as you move between them, the sidebar animates when you reorder notes and folders, the segmented toggles slide, and a theme change fades instead of snapping. All of it honors your reduced-motion setting.

Added

• Reduce transparency. A setting in Settings → Appearance makes the frosted menus and command palette solid, for anyone who prefers opaque surfaces. Arf also applies it on its own under Windows High Contrast and the system "reduce transparency" preference.

Fixed

• Renaming a note keeps its links. When you change a note's title, every [[link]] in your other notes that pointed to it is rewritten to the new title, so an in-app rename no longer leaves those links dangling. Aliased links ([[Title|shown as]]) keep their display text, and links written inside code stay untouched. (Renaming or moving the file on disk was already safe.)
• The command palette opens reliably right after launch. Summoning it with Ctrl/⌘+K or the search box in the first moment after the app started could leave it blank; it now opens with your notes every time.
• The right-click menu on a note is correct right after launch. In that same first moment, right-clicking a note could show the general menu instead of the note's own actions; it now shows the right one.
• Frosted surfaces stay solid in High Contrast mode. Under Windows High Contrast the glass menus and palette now render opaque, so nothing shows through the text.

---

Installing — these builds are unsigned (no paid certificate yet):

• Windows — SmartScreen may warn: More info → Run anyway.
• macOS — open the app once, dismiss the warning, then allow it under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway.
• Linux — the .AppImage is portable: chmod +x and run.
• Verify (optional) — every asset is listed in SHA256SUMS.txt, signed with the release key: gpg --verify SHA256SUMS.txt.asc SHA256SUMS.txt

Free and open source. Read the source, not the privacy policy.

Arf v1.9.1

Added

• Signed release manifests. Every release now ships a SHA256SUMS.txt covering all assets, with a detached GPG signature made by the Arf release key (RELEASE_SIGNING_KEY.asc in the repository). Verification steps are in SECURITY.md.

Changed

• The macOS first-launch instruction in the release notes now matches macOS 15 and later (System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway).

---

Installing — these builds are unsigned (no paid certificate yet):

• Windows — SmartScreen may warn: More info → Run anyway.
• macOS — open the app once, dismiss the warning, then allow it under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway.
• Linux — the .AppImage is portable: chmod +x and run.
• Verify (optional) — every asset is listed in SHA256SUMS.txt, signed with the release key: gpg --verify SHA256SUMS.txt.asc SHA256SUMS.txt

Free and open source. Read the source, not the privacy policy.

Arf v1.9.0

Added

• Highlighter colours. Mark a passage in the reader in one of five colours from the swatch row; click a highlight to remove it. Highlights travel with your vault and sync as before, and old single-colour highlights are kept.
• Figures with automatic numbering. A standalone image with a caption becomes a numbered figure — Figure 1, Figure 2, … — in the reading view and in exported PDF and HTML. Click any image to set its caption.
• Image sizing. Click an image in the reading view and choose Small, Medium, Large, or Full; the size is written into the note (![caption|width](…)) so it holds in the reader and in exports. You can also type the width by hand.
• Fullscreen. A Fullscreen control in the top bar (and F11) fills the screen. Focus mode now also goes fullscreen, and the two can be turned off independently.
• A reading-width setting. Choose Tight, Middle, or Comfy for the writing and reading column; each scales with the side panels, so the text uses the room it has without the lines ever running too long.

Fixed

• Highlighting a sentence with brackets or a link now works. The reader matches text without being thrown off by parentheses, square brackets, or a citation or wikilink inside the passage — cases that previously left no mark.

Changed

• Focus mode shows only your writing. It hides everything but the read/write column and the open reader; the top bar stays out of the way and slides in when you move the pointer to the top edge.

---

Installing — these builds are unsigned (no paid certificate yet):

• Windows — SmartScreen may warn: More info → Run anyway.
• macOS — right-click the app → Open the first time (Gatekeeper).
• Linux — the .AppImage is portable: chmod +x and run.

Free and open source. Read the source, not the privacy policy.

Arf v1.8.0

Added

• Show or hide either side panel. A button in the top bar collapses the notes sidebar, and another collapses the right panel (backlinks, Resonance, and the local graph — or the reader when a document is open). Each choice is remembered between sessions, and opening something in the reader brings the right panel back on its own.

Changed

• The side panels resize much wider. The old fixed width limit is gone. A panel now grows until the note column reaches a readable minimum, so a PDF or a reference can take most of the window when you want to read it. The note column never collapses: a width saved on a larger window, or set while the other panel was hidden, is reined back within the current window when the window shrinks or the panel returns.
• A PDF fits the reader's width as you resize it. The page rescales to the panel on every drag and stays fit-width by default. A manual zoom (− / +, Ctrl-scroll, or the percentage) pins the scale until you press Fit again; a newly opened PDF starts fit-width.

---

Installing — these builds are unsigned (no paid certificate yet):

• Windows — SmartScreen may warn: More info → Run anyway.
• macOS — right-click the app → Open the first time (Gatekeeper).
• Linux — the .AppImage is portable: chmod +x and run.

Free and open source. Read the source, not the privacy policy.

Arf v1.7.0

Added

• A page-view PDF reader. An attached or fetched PDF now opens as rendered pages in the side reader — scrollable, zoomable (fit-width, − / +, or Ctrl-scroll), with a selectable text layer — instead of a plain text column. Quote and highlight work directly on the page.
• EPUB reading. Attach or fetch an EPUB and read it in the side reader as clean, reflowable text with its images inlined; chapters follow the book's own reading order.
• Project Gutenberg as a reference source. Search the Add-reference box for literary and philosophical texts (Kant, Shelley, and the rest of the public domain) and fetch a public-domain EPUB copy to read inside Arf.
• Highlights that travel with your vault. Reader highlights are written to a reader-highlights.json sidecar and carried in the .arf bundle, so they sync alongside your notes and references and re-appear on another device. Highlighting works in both the PDF viewer and the EPUB reader.
• A mark on exported pages. Exported PDF and HTML carry a small, transparent Arf mark in the top-right corner — and nothing else in the header or footer.

Fixed

• Fetching an open-access PDF now works for publisher-hosted papers, not only arXiv. The download runs through a native HTTP client that isn't bound by the web view's cross-origin rules, so a paper hosted on PLoS, Nature, MDPI, and other open-access sites downloads correctly. Discovery queries Unpaywall, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, arXiv, and Europe PMC, prefers a repository copy over a bot-walled publisher copy, and verifies every download is a real PDF before saving it.
• The side reader no longer opens a PDF to a blank panel. Applying highlights had corrupted the reader's content region on a later update, which blanked PDFs whose text arrives after extraction.

Changed

• Reference search now also covers Project Gutenberg, alongside Crossref and Open Library.
• Reader scrolling is smoothed.

---

Installing — these builds are unsigned (no paid certificate yet):

• Windows — SmartScreen may warn: More info → Run anyway.
• macOS — right-click the app → Open the first time (Gatekeeper).
• Linux — the .AppImage is portable: chmod +x and run.

Free and open source. Read the source, not the privacy policy.

Arf v1.6.1

Fixed

• Drag and drop now works in the desktop app. Moving notes into folders, nesting folders,
  reordering notes and folders, and dragging references onto Library folders were silently broken in
  the packaged app because the window's OS-level drag-drop handler intercepted the events. It is now
  disabled so in-app HTML5 drag and drop works — and dropping an image file into the editor works too.
• PDF export works on macOS and Linux. Export now prints the document itself rather than a hidden
  frame, which the macOS/Linux system webviews silently ignored.
• Note images render wherever your vault lives. Images are inlined directly in the reading view
  instead of through a scoped file protocol, so they show correctly for a vault on any drive or
  folder, including after a restart.
• Copy and paste from the right-click menu now use the system clipboard reliably on macOS and Linux.
• Turkish author names make correct citekeys. A dotless ı (Kılıç, Yıldız, Işık) is folded to i
  rather than dropped.
• The end-of-note reference list is always readable prose. Its style is limited to APA and Nature
  (the machine formats — BibTeX, RIS, CSL-JSON, Zenodo — stay in the Library export where they
  belong), and same-author/same-year entries carry the a/b suffix that matches the in-text citation.
• The on-device model's status and Disable control in Settings are vertically aligned.

Added

• Search online databases to add a reference. Alongside pasting a DOI/ISBN/arXiv ID, you can now
  search Crossref and Open Library by title, author, or keyword and pick a result to add.
• Choose where a citation appears. For each [@key], pick in-text + reference list (the default),
  in-text only, or reference-list only (like \nocite) — from the citation picker, no syntax to learn.
• Click a dangling [[wikilink]] in the reading view to create that note.
• The sidebar auto-scrolls while dragging near its top or bottom edge, so an off-screen folder is
  reachable without releasing the drag.
• Keyboard focus rings on text fields, dialog focus containment (the background is inert while a
  dialog is open), and focus returns to its origin on close.

Changed

• Faster at scale: the weekly Synthesis no longer computes while closed, the folder sync skips its
  re-read while the window is hidden, the link index is rebuilt on a short debounce instead of on
  every keystroke, and the Rust core is compiled for speed.

---

Installing — these builds are unsigned (no paid certificate yet):

• Windows — SmartScreen may warn: More info → Run anyway.
• macOS — right-click the app → Open the first time (Gatekeeper).
• Linux — the .AppImage is portable: chmod +x and run.

Free and open source. Read the source, not the privacy policy.

Arf v1.6.0

Added

• Side reader. Open another note, or a reference's attached PDF, EPUB, or article, in a panel
  beside the editor and write from it. Select a passage and quote it into the open note as an
  attributed blockquote, or highlight the sentences that matter — from the reader's right-click
  menu or its header.
• Reference attachments. Attach a PDF, EPUB, or other reader file from your disk, or fetch an
  open-access copy where one exists, and read it in the side reader. Files are organized under an
  attachments/ folder in the vault and travel in the .arf bundle.
• Library keyword search across every field — author, title, year, venue, DOI, ISBN, abstract —
  with prefix and light fuzzy matching, and a nested folder tree for references that matches the
  notes sidebar, including empty folders you make ahead of time.
• Drag to reorder notes and folders in the sidebar; the order is remembered in a sidecar file
  and travels with the vault.
• Specialized right-click menus for the knowledge graph (nodes and background), the Library
  (folders and background), and the reader, alongside the existing note, folder, tag, link,
  citation, editor, and reading-view menus.
• Insert images from the editor toolbar or its right-click menu. In the desktop app images are
  stored as organized files under attachments/images/ and shown in the reading view; images export
  centered and fit to the page, keeping their proportions.
• A control to turn the on-device model off again, not only on.
• Each note's header now records both local time (with the system's UTC offset) and UTC, so
  timestamps read correctly wherever a note was written.

Changed

• The Export dialog shows only the options that fit the chosen format — Markdown offers a
  keep-frontmatter toggle; PDF offers page size and margins — instead of PDF page settings for every
  format.
• Interface transitions were smoothed throughout and honor the operating system's reduced-motion
  setting.
• The .arf workspace bundle now carries the Library's folder tree and inlines note images, so the
  file stays self-contained.

Fixed

• A Markdown, text, or HTML file attached to a reference is no longer mistaken for a note.
• Moving or deleting a note or folder no longer leaves a stale manual-order rank behind.
• The reader's quote and highlight actions stay reachable even when a link or citation sits under the
  pointer in the reading text.

---

Installing — these builds are unsigned (no paid certificate yet):

• Windows — SmartScreen may warn: More info → Run anyway.
• macOS — right-click the app → Open the first time (Gatekeeper).
• Linux — the .AppImage is portable: chmod +x and run.

Free and open source. Read the source, not the privacy policy.

Arf v1.5.1

Fixed

• Dialog windows that are taller than the screen — Settings in particular — now scroll,
  so their lower rows stay reachable on short windows, zoomed-in views, and small screens.
  Previously the bottom of a long dialog could run off the edge with no way to reach it.

---

Installing — these builds are unsigned (no paid certificate yet):

• Windows — SmartScreen may warn: More info → Run anyway.
• macOS — right-click the app → Open the first time (Gatekeeper).
• Linux — the .AppImage is portable: chmod +x and run.

Free and open source. Read the source, not the privacy policy.

Arf v1.5.0

Added

• Automated test suite: unit tests (Vitest) for vault parsing, wikilinks and tags,
  the folder tree and folder-move planning, citation formatting in every style,
  the .arf bundle, and the sync-merge/conflict logic; plus a Playwright end-to-end
  smoke test that creates a note, links and renames it, adds a citation, exports
  Markdown and HTML, and reloads to confirm nothing is lost.
• Continuous integration: builds and runs the test suite on every push and pull request.
• Open-source project files: CONTRIBUTING.md, SECURITY.md, CHANGELOG.md,
  ROADMAP.md, CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md, and GitHub issue and pull-request templates.
• A concrete data-safety section (README and the docs "Your data" page) describing
  exactly what happens on rename, folder move, sync conflict, backup, and export failure.

Changed

• The sync-merge, conflict-copy, .arf bundle, and folder-move logic were pulled out of
  the main component into small, separately tested modules. Behaviour is unchanged.
• Release notes are now generated from this changelog, so the release title and body
  always match the tag.

Fixed

• The documentation site's top navigation no longer crowds on narrow/mobile screens.

---

Installing — these builds are unsigned (no paid certificate yet):

• Windows — SmartScreen may warn: More info → Run anyway.
• macOS — right-click the app → Open the first time (Gatekeeper).
• Linux — the .AppImage is portable: chmod +x and run.

Free and open source. Read the source, not the privacy policy.

Arf v1.4.1

Arf 1.3 — organize by dragging.

New

• Drag & drop in the sidebar. Drag a note onto a folder to file it there; drag a folder onto another to nest it — its notes and subfolders come along; and drop onto Vault to move something back to the top level. A circular move (a folder into its own descendant) is refused, and moving a folder renames every path underneath it in one step.

Everything is still local-first — plain Markdown on your disk, and every move is written straight to the files.

Installing — these builds are unsigned (no paid certificate yet):

• Windows — SmartScreen may warn: More info → Run anyway.
• macOS — right-click the app → Open the first time (Gatekeeper).
• Linux — the .AppImage is portable: chmod +x and run.

Free and open source. Read the source, not the privacy policy.