Version 2026.2 Beta 2

[vkbo]

Release Notes

This is a beta release of the next release version, and is intended for testing purposes. Please be careful when using this version on live writing projects, and make sure you take frequent backups.

Detailed Changelog

Bugfixes

• Fixed an issue where the wrong theme colours were used for the active and inactive icons in the project tree context menu. Issue Context menu "Set Active to ..." has hardcoded colors #2941. PR Fix minor theme issues #2946.
• Removed the placeholder text in the Manuscript Tool preview since it used the wrong text colour on dark themes and anyway is never visible for more than a few milliseconds. Issue Problem with string "Press the Preview button to generate ..." #2942. PR Fix minor theme issues #2946.
• Fixed a bug from the beta 1 release where selecting a piece of text and moving it would cause a crash. Issue "Highlight current line" can cause crash #2917. PR Fix drag and drop crash #2918.
• Fixed a re-entrancy bug in the project search tool. Issue Project search re-entrancy guard can be cleared by a nested invocation #2924. PR Fix project search reentrancy #2937.
• Fixed a re-entrancy bug candidate in the status bar message display logic. Issue Remove processEvents() from GuiMainStatus.setStatusMessage #2925. PR Fix various concurrency issues #2938.
• Fixed a potential segfault candidate, and an incorrect thread pool runnable in the version check widget. Issue Version check runnable destroys its signals object on a pool thread #2926. PR Fix various concurrency issues #2938.
• Fixed a bug in the loop that collects navigation headers in the editor, which was ignoring the max count. Issue iterBlockByType walks all blocks and ignores maxCount #2930. PR Fix document block search #2939.

Improvements

• Added more granular theme variables to improve contrast for GUI components. Issue Tabwidget active tab tends to have not enough contrast #2910. PRs Add an accent text colour #2911, Tab widget colour and tool buttons #2915
• Updated themes with new colours and other improvements. By @vkbo and @HeyMyian. Issue Tabwidget active tab tends to have not enough contrast #2910. PRs Add an accent text colour #2911, Missed accent text #2912, Theme followup #2916 and Theme updates #2943.
• Added five new themes, by @HeyMyian. PR Theme updates #2943.
• Added a character count toggle for project writing goals. Issue Allow writing goals to show character count #2913. PR Writing goal character count #2919.
• Removed all usages of the Qt find block methods inside loops in the editor. These are binary searches, not lookups, so the cost is higher than I expected. Issue iterBlockByType walks all blocks and ignores maxCount #2930. PR Fix document block search #2939.
• The word counter ran twice on every document search. First once in the editor, then in the indexer. The run in the editor was removed. Issue Duplicate full-text word count on every document save #2928. PR Refactor project autosave #2944.

Other Changes

• The way the check against overwriting documents that have been changed on disk is performed has been improved so that it doesn't always have to read the existing document before writing. Issue Document save re-reads and hashes the file on disk on every save #2929. PR Document format update #2945.
• Project documents are now saved as a text document with the .md extension and a standard TOML header instead of the old custom format and extension. Issue Use txt extension for text documents #1964. PR Document format update #2945.
• Pinned the Python garbage collector to the main gui thread to prevent it from accidentally triggering in the Qt thread pool. Issue Pin Python garbage collection to the main GUI thread #2927. PR Run the Python GC on a timer #2940.
• The index cache and project-local gui state JSON files are no longer written on every autosave. Instead they are only written on manual saves or project close. The index cache is verified against a revision number on open to catch any stale caches. This was also a potential problem before, so this change is a general improvement. A stale cache is rebuilt on project open. Issue Index file is rewritten on every project autosave even when unchanged #2931. PR Refactor project autosave #2944.

Installation

• Added flatpak for Linux installation. Based on work by @Ryex. Issue Flatpak #1651. PRs Add Flatpak #2906 and Flatpak build follow-up #2908.

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This discussion was created from the release Version 2026.2 Beta 2.