Version 2026.2 Beta 1

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 with kerning when printing the manuscript preview on Windows, and changed the page break marker to a dashed line instead of a solid text block. Issue #2640. PR #2838.
• Fixed tooltip and scrollbar colours not matching the selected theme, a compatibility issue with newer versions of Qt; custom stylesheets have been replaced with other styling methods, and the Fusion Qt style is now hard coded, to resolve this properly. Issue #2871. PRs #2877 and #2881.
• Fixed a reentrancy issue when opening documents, and removed a stray call that could delay cleanup of objects, improving overall application stability. PR #2840.
• Fixed five memory leaks related to freeing Qt objects created from Python, and added regression tests to catch similar issues in the future. PRs #2829 and #2830.

Features

• Added EPUB 3 as a new manuscript export format. Issue #2058. PR #2283.
• Added dialogue statistics to manuscripts, showing the number of characters used in dialogue and the ratio of dialogue to prose text. The statistics panel has been moved from below the manuscript preview to a new tab in the panel on the left. Issue #2096. PR #2841.
• Added a horizontal rule format for manuscript headings. Using four hyphens ("----") as a heading inserts a line across the page in all output formats. Issue #2755. PRs #2771 and #2772.
• Added a setting for the automatic backup interval, allowing backups to be limited to one per session, day, week, or month by overwriting the previous backup file, using an unambiguous ISO8601-based file name format. Issue #2754. PRs #2834 and #2835.
• Added a line height setting for the editor and viewer, applied consistently including to pasted text. Issues #654 and #2874. PRs #2817 and #2875.
• Added a text zoom feature for the editor and viewer, using the standard Qt zoom shortcuts. Issue #1280. PR #2822.
• Added highlighting of all search result matches in the editor, in addition to the currently selected one. Issues #2736 and #2798. PR #2820.
• Added a new format checker that highlights trailing spaces at the end of lines, alongside the existing check for multiple spaces between words. Issue #2800. PR #2821.
• Added hover cards for tags in the editor and viewer, with buttons to quickly open the referenced document for editing or viewing. Issue #2857. PR #2859.
• Added filters for text content, document type, and root folder to the project search tool, available in a new collapsible panel below the search box that updates automatically as root folders change. Issues #1927 and #2256. PRs #2847 and #2848.
• Added a collapsible panel widget, now used for the item details panel below the project tree and novel view, which can be hidden, and for the new project search filters panel. PR #2843.
• Added support for pasting rich text (HTML) into the editor, without stripping leading or railing whitespace. Issue #2601. PRs #2876 and #2878.
• Added project writing goals with daily progress tracking, shown as progress bars with sufficient colour contrast in all themes, and correctly reset when starting a new day. Also added an option to exclude specific root folders from the count. Based on work contributed by @BlayW. Issue #2223. PRs #2870, #2878, #2887, #2889, #2891 and #2892.
• The symbol auto-replace feature can now also be used in the editor's search and replace boxes, the project search box, and the header format field in Manuscript Build Settings, and can be toggled on or off in each. Issue #2261. PRs #2866, #2867 and #2868.
• It is now possible to recursively set the active or inactive state of all documents under a folder in the project tree from the right-click menu. Issue #2188. PR #2784.
• A checkbox now shows the active project's spell check language in the Tools menu, and the spell checker is re-run automatically when the language is changed. Issue #2311. PR #2785.

Improvements

• Manuscript Build Settings now has an option to enable or disable justify-expansion of lines with manual line breaks, extended to Open Document and Word Document formats. Issue #2764. PRs #2769 and #2770.
• The reference list panel now refreshes automatically when the references in a document change, instead of requiring a manual refresh. Issue #2124. PR #2782.
• Keypress handling in the editor's auto-complete menu has been improved: arrow keys navigate the list, Left and Escape close it, and Tab, Enter, Return, and Right accept the highlighted entry or close the menu if nothing is selected. Issue #2742. PR #2743.
• The editor's auto-complete menu has been rewritten to use Qt's native completer widget instead of a custom menu, improving its look and behaviour. PR #2856.
• Performance of the spell checker has been substantially improved by caching computed highlights and dictionary lookups, and syntax highlighting and spell checking are now skipped for excessively long paragraphs (over 20 000 characters) to keep large documents responsive. A related concurrency issue in the background word counter has also been fixed. PRs #2808, #2861, #2862 and #2863.

User Interface

• Toggle buttons, such as those in the search tools, are now more visible when active, using a new "toggle" theme colour. A new "searchMatch" theme colour is also used to highlight search matches in the editor and project search results, and now refreshes immediately when switching themes. Existing themes have been updated accordingly, including contributions by @HeyMyian. Issues #2827, #2845 and #2886. PRs #2833, #2844, #2846, #2882 and #2887.
• Restored the flat look of tabs in tab widgets, now implemented with a custom painter instead of stylesheets for better compatibility with recent versions of Qt. PR #2890.
• Fixed handling of long labels in switches, and in the quick link and header navigation menus. PR #2850.

Other Changes

• The document editor's underlying text widget has been switched back to a full rich text editor instead of a plain text editor, enabling several of the features in this release, such as line height, zoom, and pasting rich text; copying text from the editor still produces plain text as before. This also required narrowing down when the editor is re-initialised, which had caused some Preferences settings to stop refreshing the GUI properly. Issue #2815. PRs #2816, #2860 and #2878.
• Spell checking has been moved out of the syntax highlighter and now runs as a chunked, timed background process, using the same block-based caching approach as the new search highlighting. PR #2812.
• The application configuration file and all theme files have been converted from Linux-style config formats to TOML. PRs #2883 and #2885.
• The project search panel has been internally rewritten to use a model/view architecture, with no intended functional change. PR #2842.
• Internal handling of icons has been changed, with no expected functional impact. PR #2852.
• The viewer code has been merged into the editor folder ahead of further refactoring work. PR #2880.
• Cleaned up how menu actions with additional data, such as icons and custom data, are created internally. Issue #2828. PR #2832.

Code Maintenance

• Enabled branch coverage in the test suite, added tests for previously uncovered branches, and fixed a few minor bugs found in the process. PR #2807.
• Hardened flaky tests to reduce occasional segfaults during test runs. PR #2864.
• Updated the default Python version used for testing and embedded in builds to 3.14. PR #2786.
• Updated the Ubuntu versions targeted by packaging and CI. PR #2802.
• Updated icon packages, test helper scripts, and documentation build tooling. PR #2853.
• Added tests to the Debian package build process. PR #2896.
• Various internal linting, naming, and code style improvements, including dropping the redundant NW prefix from most class names. PRs #2779, #2826 and #2831.