litman 1.3.5

Changed

• litman is now under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 or later. It was MIT through 1.3.4. For using litman nothing changes: install it, read with it, script it, use it at work or on paid research, no permission needed and no fee. What changes is what happens to a modified copy — if you alter litman and then pass it on, whether by shipping a build or by running it somewhere other people can reach over a network, the source of your version has to be available under the same licence. Every release up to and including 1.3.4 stays MIT; that grant is not withdrawn.

Added

• Following a citation no longer strands you. Clicking a reference in a PDF used to be a one-way trip: the reader jumped to the bibliography and finding your way back meant scrolling until you recognised the page. Alt+← now returns you to the exact spot — same place on the page, same zoom — and Alt+→ goes forward again, however many links deep you went. A small pill floats at the bottom of the page after a jump showing where back leads (← Back to p.7); it shrinks to a plain arrow after a moment, and it is there to click if you would rather not use the keyboard. The trail is remembered for as long as the window is open, including across switching to another tab and back, and nothing is written into the PDF.
• Preview a note before you save it. Notes and discussion now have a Preview button next to Save: it renders the draft you are writing — headings, lists, links to other papers and all — and Edit takes you back to the text with every character still there. Flipping between the two keeps your place in both: the cursor where you left it in the text, and the spot you were reading in the preview. It sits where Cancel used to, which is the point: cancelling only ever did one thing, throw the draft away. Abandoning an edit is still possible — close the tab and answer "Don't save", the same question an unsaved PDF asks — but nothing inside the editor can lose your work any more. Ctrl+S saves from either view.
• The shortcut list mentions undo. Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y have always worked on annotations without being written down anywhere. ? now lists them, together with the part that is easy to trip over: they work while an annotation tool is on, not in Cursor.

Fixed

• The window keeps up with the work happening outside it. A paper added, retagged or promoted from the terminal — or a paper's notes rewritten by an agent — now appears in the open window within a few seconds, without you touching anything. Until now litman only re-read your library when its window regained focus, so an agent filing papers while you watched looked exactly like nothing happening. The refresh button and R still force a re-read on demand, a note you are in the middle of writing is never overwritten by one of these refreshes, and a window you have switched away from goes quiet until you come back to it.
• The paper list no longer stays filtered after a search. Picking a result from the search box now clears the box, so the list goes straight back to your whole library instead of holding the last query until you deleted its text by hand. Esc clears the box too, and a ✕ sits in it whenever there is something to clear.
• Selecting text in a PDF lines up with the text. The blue band used to sit low — cutting across the tops of the letters while leaving an empty strip under them — and drifted further off the line the further down the page you read, until near the bottom it was most of a line out. Both are fixed: a selection now brackets the line it is on, at the top of the page and at the bottom, at any zoom. Highlights you make from a selection follow the same rectangles, so new ones sit about a point higher on the page than ones saved by earlier versions.
• "Unsaved annotations" now means there are some. Draw a highlight and erase it, or undo it with Ctrl+Z, and the Save button used to stay lit and closing the tab still asked whether to save — over a document that was back exactly where it started. litman now compares the annotations themselves, so undoing or deleting your way back to the saved state is recognised as saved. Saving and immediately switching tabs also writes the PDF once now, not twice.
• Escape works on the dialog underneath. Opening a dialog from inside another one — Vaults → Register existing, Projects → New project, a rename in a field's Manage list — used to leave the outer dialog deaf to Escape once the inner one closed, whether you cancelled it or completed it; only the mouse could get you out. Escape now closes it as it should.
• Escape leaves an annotation's note, and keeps what you typed. The note box in the annotation popover had no keyboard exit at all: Escape did nothing. It now saves the note and closes the popover, and a second Escape puts the toolbar back to Cursor.
• The annotation popover is dark in dark mode. It stayed a white card around a dark text box.
• Escape no longer throws away a note you are writing. In the notes and discussion editor it discarded everything since your last save — no confirmation, nothing to undo, one keystroke. It does nothing there now. (Escape still clears the search box and puts a PDF back to Cursor.)
• On macOS, closing a dialog no longer drops you out of full screen. With the window in full screen, Escape on an open dialog did two things at once: it dismissed the dialog and left full screen with it, so getting back meant reaching for the green button. Only some dialogs behaved that way, which made it look random. Escape now closes the dialog — or the tab's right-click menu — and nothing else. With no dialog open it still leaves full screen, the way any other Mac window does.
• A missing library or project folder can now be pointed at its new home — or removed — right from the prompt. When litman notices that a registered library, or a project a paper is linked to, is no longer where it was recorded, it asks about it on your next command. That question used to offer half the answers: for a library, only "remove the registration", so a library you had merely moved had to be re-registered by hand afterwards; for a project, only "type the new path", so a project you had genuinely finished with kept asking forever unless you went and found the right command. Both now take the same three answers — the new path, rm, or Enter to skip — and Enter never destroys anything. rm hands you to lit vault remove / lit project rm with their usual warning and confirmation, and a library is asked about one at a time so each can get its own answer.