Releases

Jump straight to a tab: {count}gt and Alt+1 through 9

gt and gT could only cycle, so reaching a specific tab meant hammering the same key past every stop. The vim half now follows vim's own contract: 2gt goes to tab 2, a count past the end lands on the last tab, plain gt still cycles, and {count}gT stays relative. The non-vim half is nine rebindable shortcuts, Alt+1 through Alt+9 (Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+9 on macOS, where Option types characters on many layouts and the Cmd digits are already taken). Tab numbers count across panes in the same order gt cycles, so cycling and direct jumps always agree about which tab is number 3. The shortcuts also know when to stand down: they yield while a modal, palette, or menu is open, they lose on purpose to any combination you had already rebound to another action, Alt plus numpad digits stay reserved for Windows Alt-code character entry, and digit bindings match the physical digit row so Alt+1 works on layouts like French AZERTY where the digit keys type punctuation. One macOS note: with multiple Spaces, Mission Control claims Ctrl+digit before the app sees it; rebind under Settings, Keymaps, or free the key in System Settings.

#497 requested by @uNyanda

Saved tabs paint before the vault scan finishes

Opening a big vault left the tab strip and editor blank for seconds while the app walked every note on disk, because startup awaited the full index before restoring the saved workspace. The order is reversed now: the workspace snapshot (a few hundred bytes) is restored and painted immediately, and the scan lands behind it. Everything the snapshot could get wrong has a corrector: the active tab is read straight from disk and dropped if its note is gone, background tabs whose notes vanished are pruned the moment the real listing arrives, and once that first listing lands every restored tab is checked against it, so a stale snapshot synced from another machine cannot leave a ghost tab with a blank editor alive for the session. The bigger the vault, the bigger the win.

#564 reported by @junereycasuga

Template variables stop doubling their closing braces

With auto-pair brackets on, accepting a variable from the template editor's {{ popup produced four closers: typing {{ auto-pairs to {{}} with the caret in the middle, and the completion then pasted a full {{cursor}} without consuming the closers already sitting there. Accepting a variable now swallows up to the two braces its insert replaces, and only when they can belong to the variable's own opening pair: prose documenting Handlebars or Jinja syntax keeps its literal braces. Editing an existing variable in place is fixed by the same change.

#566 reported by @ryanthara

Vim's pending f motion owns the next key over the m menu

In visual mode, f m opened the editor context menu instead of extending the selection to the next m, and the orphaned motion then swallowed the first key typed after the menu closed. The m shortcut lives in a window-level listener that runs before the editor ever sees the event, so vim never got the chance to consume the key as an operand. The shortcut now yields whenever vim has a sequence in flight: f, t, and r keep their target character, counts and registers keep their prefixes, and a plain m on a selection still opens the menu.

#568 reported by @uNyanda

:wa saves everything instead of closing everything

The :wa and :wall ex commands were registered as aliases of :qall, on the theory that autosave leaves nothing to write. But :wa is a save command, not a quit: typing it reflexively after an edit demolished the whole tab layout. It now writes every unsaved note across all panes and closes nothing. The quit-and-write family keeps closing, exactly as vim defines it, and :wqa / :wqall is newly registered so the common spelling of save-everything-and-quit works too.

#569 reported by @simonlearnscoding

Image size hints actually resize the image

![[assets/pic.jpg|100x50]] and the markdown spelling  rendered full-width with the hint leaking into the alt text, even though the help promised size hints for images. Both spellings now work in Edit, Preview, and PDF export: |300 sets width with height following the aspect ratio, |600x400 sets both, and captions keep their text. The edges hold too: a zero dimension is not a resize, a purely numeric alt in the markdown spelling stays your caption ( is a year, not a 2024px width; write  to size it), and an image that scrolls away and back does not resurrect a hint you edited out.

#570 reported by @corpserot

Typst preambles stop dirtying your tag list

A Typst preamble is Typst source, not prose: #let vec(x) = bold(x) defines a variable and formulas call it back as #vec, and every tag scanner read those as hashtags, so vaults using tag-driven preambles grew a tag list full of let and variable names. Notes in the preamble folder are now left out of the tag index everywhere: the app, the zn CLI, MCP, and the self-hosted server. Tags are the only thing skipped, so a preamble keeps its excerpt, its wikilinks and its searchability. The preamble folder is configurable now, under Settings, Editor, because skipping it is not free: if you already keep ordinary tagged notes in a folder called typst, point the preambles elsewhere and those notes get their tags back. The name lives in the vault, so every runtime agrees. Upgrading corrects an existing vault on the first scan rather than waiting for each file to change.

#562 reported by @Batres3

Plus and minus stay visible in table cells

A table cell holding just a + or a - rendered blank in Edit mode while Preview showed it perfectly, so a table of signs looked like an empty grid. The live-preview table widget ran each cell through the block markdown parser, which read a lone - or + as a bullet-list marker and produced an empty list item: the character was parsed away, not mis-styled. A GFM cell holds inline content and never blocks, so a cell is now parsed as a cell, through the same parser as the reading view. The same cause blanked # and 1., turned --- into a rule inside the cell, and ate the marker in "- x"; all fixed together, with bold, code, links, wikilinks, tags and math in cells untouched.

#559 reported by @ShowhyT

Databases discover your notes

Type [[ in any text cell and the editor's note search opens right there, inserting a wikilink. A Select or Multi-select column can source its options from the vault: point it at a folder or a #tag from the column menu and the cell popover suggests matching notes live, with anything you pick saved as an ordinary option so boards and filters keep working. And the new Note link / Note links column types store real wikilinks: chips show each note's title and open it on click, and titles with commas survive. Every picker is keyboard-first: type to search, arrows or Ctrl+N/P, Enter picks.

#500 asked for by @lawtj

The zn CLI speaks database

Agents and scripts get the same powers: zn base list, create, rows, get, add, and set. Pipe a meeting transcript into zn base add and it becomes a row WITH its record page, frontmatter mirrored and the transcript as the body; zn base set edits fields with the grid's exact semantics, minting select options and re-mirroring the page. Everything works on a local vault or, with --server, against your self-hosted ZenNotes, and the open app shows CLI-made rows live through the watcher.

#556 asked for by @lawtj

Nested lists you can actually read

Every nested list level now renders a full tab size deep, whatever the note's source spacing, so two-space-indented notes stop blurring together on large monitors. Vertical indent guides mark each level, on by default with a toggle under Settings, Editor. The Tab size slider (1 through 8) governs the step width, and the raw markup never changes.

#491 asked for by @Brachistocronium

Reference pane frontmatter, fixed

Pinning a note as a reference now renders its YAML frontmatter as the same styled properties card as the main editor, instead of raw fences with the properties blown up into a heading. Also fixed underneath: a YAML quoting gap that could corrupt a record page when a cell value started with brackets or a list marker, and the database filter menu no longer throws on column types from a newer version.

#553 reported by @naingyeminn

Full asset operations on remote vaults

Every asset action now round-trips through your self-hosted server: delete parks the file in the vault's own Trash with an undo token, restore puts it back, and duplicate, rename, move, drag-drop import, and clipboard paste all work exactly like a local vault. The Trash store lives in the vault itself, so a vault served remotely today and opened locally tomorrow shows the same history. Opening a non-previewable attachment (a ZIP, say) downloads it from the server first instead of failing on a path that only exists there.

reported by Kta on Discord

A default view mode, and Preview picks up where you were editing

Settings, Editor, Default view mode chooses what a note opens in before you have picked a mode for it: Edit to write, Preview to read, Split for both. Each note still remembers the mode you last used on it, and the choice travels with your portable config.toml. Switching from Edit into Preview now opens the reading view at the line your cursor was on instead of the top of the note, so switching to Preview to read what you just wrote lands exactly there.

#543 asked for by @XYZ123TMP

Remote vaults sync live again, and stay synced

A server-side bug silenced every sync feed 25 seconds after it connected, on every release that had the feature, which is why changes from other devices only appeared after a manual refresh. The desktop's watch socket also reconnects with backoff now and resyncs everything it missed after any gap, without ever touching a buffer that holds unsaved edits.

reported by Kta on Discord

Callout titles keep their links, math, and color in the reading view

A callout title with a link or an inline formula in it fell apart in Preview: the text before the link stayed in the colored title while everything after dropped into an uncolored paragraph a full gap below. The title is now everything on the first line, inline markup included, and multiline callouts lost their phantom empty line. PDF export prints the preview, so it picks the fix up too.

#549 reported by @DaveDavenport

Sidebar polish: auto-reveal, the m key, and Favorites icons

Auto-reveal now expands the tree in Vault Root mode vaults and for database tabs; pressing m on a highlighted folder opens its context menu even when a database grid held the keyboard; and notes pinned to Favorites finally show their custom icons and colors instead of the generic document glyph.

reported by Kta on Discord

Separate checklists from tasks

Add tasks: false to a note's frontmatter and its checkboxes stay checkboxes: they render and toggle as always, but stop feeding the Tasks list, the boards, the calendars, the CLI, and MCP. On a #task note, tasks: note keeps the project's own card on the board while silencing its internal checklist, so a project is one card instead of twenty. Whole folders can opt out from the sidebar ("Exclude from Tasks") or Settings, and because a database is a folder on disk, that covers databases too. The setting lives in the vault itself, so desktop, web, the self-hosted server, and the CLI all agree; zn task list --include-excluded lists everything when you want to see past your own exclusions.

#458 asked for by @littlelinuxoid, shaped by @naingyeminn, @yfernandes, and @i-zhivetiev

Display math inside a table cell renders in the reading view

$$...$$ in a table cell rendered in the editor but showed raw source in Preview and Split: the guard that keeps "I paid $5" from becoming a formula was demoting genuine double-dollar math. Cell math now renders in display mode under KaTeX and Typst alike, and currency in prose or cells stays plain text.

reported by @BTC_1Ly on X

The Linux AppImage mounts fast instead of compressing small

A 45-second boot on Arch turned out to be squashfuse decompressing xz blocks on every scattered startup read: the same image extracted to disk started in 0.63 seconds. The AppImage (and the deb, rpm, and pacman packages) now ship gzip squashfs: a bigger download that starts an order of magnitude faster on FUSE mounts.

#547 diagnosed nearly end to end by @bert-maes's exemplary report

The macOS Dock icon falls in line

ZenNotes rendered about 9% larger than every other icon in the Dock: the tile was drawn 896px wide on the 1024px canvas where Apple's grid draws 824. It was two bugs hiding as one, since the installed app was also overriding its bundle icon at runtime with the oversized image, a leftover from a dev-mode workaround. The icon is redrawn on the exact grid with the soft shadow system icons carry, and the override now stays in dev.

#544 reported by @Christian-SC26

Cmd+L turns any line into a checkbox

The Obsidian habit, asked for on Discord in exactly its terms: turning a note into a task, and soon later marking it done. Press it on plain text and the line becomes a task; press again and it checks, again and it unchecks. Bullets and numbered items keep their markers, blockquotes and indentation survive, and a multi-line selection converts in one undo step. Forwarded and cancelled tasks are deliberately left alone, since both are records with their own commands. Remappable as editor.toggleCheckbox.

asked for on Discord

Archiving a note retires its tasks

Finish a project, archive its notes, and every completed task they held used to stand in the Done group and the Kanban Done column forever. Now a note that moves to the Archive takes its tasks with it, off the list, the boards, and the calendars. Nothing is written to your files, and un-archiving brings everything straight back. Archiving a note that still has open tasks asks first, on every path in, and a bulk archive asks once for the whole set. A toggle under Settings, Tasks restores the old behavior.

#540 asked for by @naingyeminn

The Kanban board keeps the order you drag cards into

Prioritize the Today column by hand, open a note, come back, and the column used to be sorted by due date again as if nothing had happened. Card order is now a real preference, saved like the column arrangement already was: it survives switching views and restarting the app, every board keeps its own order per column, and it degrades on purpose, so a note rewritten by another editor just falls back to the due-date sort instead of landing somewhere wrong.

reported by a user

A narrow sidebar keeps Files, Help, and Settings readable

Shrink the sidebar far enough and the file counter painted over the word Help while Settings pushed through the panel border. The footer now gives way in steps as the sidebar narrows: first the file count folds into the Files tooltip, then the labels drop and the three actions stand as icons, with tooltips and screen-reader labels carrying the names. The search row wraps its icon strip onto its own line instead of overflowing.

#539 reported by @Johnny-Taake

Notes created on a remote vault carry their title

Open Today's Daily Note against a self-hosted server and the note arrived blank, no date heading, while the same command on a local vault seeds one. The server's copy of the create operation wrote an empty file where the desktop writes the title heading; they now agree byte for byte, which also fixes plain new notes from the web client and the CLI pointed at a server. Server-side, so self-hosters get it by updating the server or the Docker image.

reported by @naingyeminn

A task can say it is in progress

- [/] joins open, done, forwarded and cancelled as a task state, following the Obsidian Tasks convention. Type it, run “Mark Task In Progress” from the palette, or press i on a task in the Tasks list, on the Kanban board, or on the calendar; it draws as a half-filled box in the editor and the reading view. The point is what separates it from forwarded and cancelled: in progress is still open work, so it keeps its place in Today, stays on the calendar and the board, and rolls forward with your unfinished tasks when a daily note rolls over. It is plain markdown everywhere: the editor, the zn CLI, the MCP server and the self-hosted Go server all read it, so a state one surface understands is never dropped by another.

#512 asked for by @NunonuN

A parent task shows how far its subtasks are

A task with checkboxes nested under it carries a chip at the end of its line, 2/5, neutral while work remains and green once every child is done, in the editor and the reading view (which also covers exported HTML and PDF and shared notes). The number is derived every time the note renders and is never written into the file, deliberately: ZenNotes is not the only writer of a vault, and a written marker goes stale the moment Obsidian, vim, or your phone checks a child off. Direct children only; cancelled and forwarded children leave the count entirely, and an in-progress child counts toward the total but not toward done.

#512 asked for by @NunonuN, including the display-only design call

Right-click a task, anywhere you can see one

The Tasks list, the Kanban board, the Tasks calendar and the calendar side panel now share one menu: open the note, the four state changes, @waiting, forward to another note, due presets, priority, and delete. Each entry shows the key that does the same thing, so the menu doubles as a way to learn the shortcuts, and typing filters it. Before this, the calendar had a menu and the list and the board had none.

Mermaid diagrams draw while you write

A mermaid fence in the editor now shows the diagram itself, not only in preview. Put the cursor anywhere in the block and the code comes back for editing; move away and it redraws. A diagram you are halfway through typing keeps its last good picture rather than flashing an error at every keystroke. Arrow keys and Vim's j/k step into a drawn diagram the same way they step into rendered math, so the source is always reachable without the mouse. Mermaid only for now: the other diagram languages either run a whole typesetting engine or are interactive, and they need their own answer.

#530 asked for by @junereycasuga, seconded by @naingyeminn

Headings fold and label themselves, and text expands as you type

Settings can show H1 through H6 labels before headings, and every heading folds from its arrow, from Ctrl+Alt+F / Ctrl+Alt+U (Cmd+Option on macOS), or from zc / zo in Vim mode. A new Text replacements settings tab expands typed triggers, starting with -> to →, and takes custom symbols, words, and phrases. Tab width is configurable from 1 through 8 spaces, Ctrl+Tab switches to the most recently used note and alternates between the last two, the cursor survives a round trip through Preview, and unstarred equation environments number themselves in document order, consistently in the editor and Preview.

#516

Select several steps on the Workflows canvas and move them together

Hold Shift (or ⌘ on macOS, Ctrl elsewhere) and click to add a step to the selection, or hold Shift and drag a box across the canvas. Mod+A takes the whole workflow. Dragging any member moves the group, and Esc clears it. The options panel edits one step at a time, so it steps aside while a group is selected. Bulk delete is deliberately left out for now: removing several steps at once has to renumber the rest of the file as it goes, and that deserves its own change.

#532 #534 asked for by @ShowhyT

The zn command works again

If you installed ZenNotes and ran zn, it printed a module error and quit, on every platform and every install method, since 2.20.0. The CLI ships beside the app in a folder with no library directory, and one dependency was left to be resolved at startup; a development checkout quietly answers that lookup from the workspace above, which is why three releases shipped a CLI nobody could run. It is now compiled in with the rest, and a build-time check runs the built CLI somewhere with nothing around it, so the build fails if this ever regresses.

#524 reported by @oliviertripet, confirmed by @naingyeminn

Vim motions follow the line you can see

In a soft-wrapped paragraph, $ and A jumped to the end of the whole paragraph and I jumped back to its beginning; they now stop at the edges of the current display row, where the cursor appears to be. A count still means logical lines, so 3j follows the relative line-number gutter. :13 jumps straight to line 13 again, and pressing H or L again at a viewport edge keeps scrolling instead of dying. Shared by the main editor, Quick Capture and floating note windows.

#536 reported by @nianiam

Hint mode survives home-row modifier taps

With Kanata-style tap-hold mods, a label letter held a beat too long reaches the OS as a bare Shift or Control, and hint mode read that as a request to leave; if the misfired Shift was still down when the letter arrived, the uppercase letter failed the lowercase-only test and closed it too. Bare modifier presses are now swallowed while the labels wait, and letters match case-insensitively, so the worst case is pressing the letter again with the labels still up.

#526 reported by @RonnyOtieno20, whose Kanata config answered what five reproduction attempts could not

A card flicked onto Today lands due today, not tomorrow

The Kanban drop applied to the column under the last pointermove the renderer processed, never to where the pointer was released; pointermoves coalesce under load while pointerup arrives immediately, so a fast flick from Waiting into Today released over Today while the trailing state still said Upcoming, whose semantics for a dateless task are “set due tomorrow”. The drop now belongs to the column under the release point, with the last hovered column as the fallback when the release lands in a gap.

Non-standard task states draw everywhere, and clicking checks the right line

A cancelled - [-] or forwarded - [>] task rendered as literal brackets in the reading view, in HTML and PDF export, and in shared notes, while the editor drew proper markers for the same lines; all three states draw everywhere now. Clicking a checkbox in a note whose first task was cancelled or forwarded wrote to a different line, one row off per stateful task above it; the reading view now counts every task line the way the file does. Editing a forwarded task on the calendar no longer strips its due:, priority, tags and backlink, the list and the board no longer draw every state as the same empty checkbox, and the Tasks view stopped advertising keys that cannot fire in the current mode.

Links to notes inside a database work on a self-hosted server

A wikilink pointing at a note inside a database resolved fine on a local vault and came back unresolved against your own server; clicking through would have created a duplicate note. The server was walking past database folders when listing notes: right for the spreadsheet parts, wrong for the pages inside, which are notes you open, write in and link to. Tasks written inside database pages and the database's children in the remote sidebar had the same hole, and all three close with the one change.

#527 #531 reported by @naingyeminn

Finishing the Workflows tutorial removes the practice folder

The tutorial promises your vault ends exactly as it started, but on a vault that keeps notes at the top level, or one whose system folders point at directories you named, the practice folder stayed behind. It referred to that folder two ways, a fixed path and “the Inbox plus this subfolder”, which are the same directory until your Inbox is not where the fixed path assumed. Everything the tutorial creates is now placed by asking the vault where the folder actually is, so cleanup reaches all of it.

#525 reported by @oliviertripet

Tags in any script can be typed on the Workflows canvas

Typing a Cyrillic tag into a step's tag field left only the hyphens behind: the per-keystroke check knew the English alphabet and nothing else, so every other letter was deleted as it was typed. Greek, Japanese, and a plain café went the same way. The rule for what a tag may contain now lives in one place shared with the file format, so the canvas cannot disagree with it again.

#532 reported by @ShowhyT

The CLI install screen reads the PATH you actually have

Settings warned that ~/.local/bin was not on your PATH while your terminal disagreed, because an app opened from the Dock never sees the PATH your shell builds. ZenNotes now asks your login shell, the same way it already finds tools installed by Homebrew or cargo, and falls back to what it knew before if the shell cannot be reached. The warning still appears when the directory really is missing.

#528 reported by @kevindiaz314

A refused folder path says why

Settings ▸ Vault ▸ Folders silently blanked the box on a path it could not accept, and a hand-edited vault.json line was ignored without a word. A refusal now explains itself, naming the actual problem, and the same sentence goes to the log when a config line is dropped. Nested paths remain unsupported on purpose: a system folder is one folder name at the top level, because everything in the app classifies a note by the first part of its path.

#533 reported by @hotondo

Mermaid diagram labels stay inside their shapes

A flowchart node reading “User types a sentence” could render as “User types a sent”: mermaid measured labels in one font and painted them in another, because the label font was inherit and the two places that word resolves are not the same place. ZenNotes now passes the resolved font stack, so the font that measures is the font that paints, including a text font you chose yourself, and it waits for fonts to load before rendering.

#529 contributed by @junereycasuga

The dock icon loads on an installed Mac app

The app looked for its icon in a folder that only exists in the source tree, so every installed launch logged a failure and fell back. Cosmetic, and wrong since 1.1.0. Found by launching the packaged app and reading its log rather than the checkout's.

Databases on a remote vault work again, whatever version your server is

Creating or opening a database against your own ZenNotes server could fail with a 500 error naming data.csv, and nothing about it was your fault or your vault's. A database is not something the server knows about: it is a folder holding data.csv and schema.json, built out of ordinary file reads. That makes one question load-bearing, "is this file missing, or did the request fail?", and the two answers point opposite ways. A missing schema.json means "this is a plain CSV, adopt it", so reading a failure as missing would write an inferred schema over your real one; a missing data.csv is how a new database finds a free name, so reading missing as a failure makes creating one impossible. 2.20.0 trusted only a clear "not found", which protects your schema but broke against servers older than 2.20, which answer every missing file with a server error. Now the app asks: on the first server error it requests a path that cannot exist and reads the answer, so a server that can say "not found" keeps having its errors treated as errors, and one that cannot stops being taken literally. Servers from this release also state it outright, and reading a folder as a file now says so instead of returning a generic error.

reported by Kta with the exact error text

2.20.0 would not launch

Every platform, straight to "A JavaScript error occurred in the main process" with no window behind it. 2.20.0's new Word export made the main process the first part of the app to parse markdown, and it loaded that parser from the packaged app's own files at startup; the packaging step laid one of them out where the module loader cannot look, so the very first import failed before the app drew anything. The main process now carries its markdown parser inside its own bundle rather than looking it up at startup, so there is no longer a file layout for packaging to get wrong. Nothing was wrong with your vault, and everything from 2.20.0 (Workflows, custom code languages, folder remapping, the new exports) is in this release unchanged.

reported within the hour by a Windows 11 user whose screenshot carried the full stack trace

Workflows: repeatable pipelines over your notes, drawn as a graph you can read

Anyone who keeps a vault long enough ends up with a ritual: find the notes tagged #book, keep the good ones, sort them, paste a table into the reading log, tag the rest for later. Workflows turn that ritual into a file. A workflow is a plain .md under .zennotes/workflows/, a few lines of frontmatter and a pipeline per line. Naming a wire is the whole grammar, and reading the same wire from two lines is a branch with no extra syntax. The canvas renders that text as a graph and the text renders back from the canvas, losslessly both ways, because the layout is computed rather than stored: no coordinates in your file, and clean diffs in a git-backed vault. The part that makes it trustworthy is that the engine can only plan, never write. Every wire shows the live count of notes flowing through it, and Run shows you every change grouped and counted before anything happens. Apply, and each file's pre-run bytes reach the disk before the write they cover, so Undo restores every file byte for byte, a run that fails midway rolls itself back, and a run the app never finished is found on the next launch and offered back to you rather than left as a silence. Workflows are off by default, deliberately: they can rewrite notes in bulk, so the view, its sidebar row, its command and its Space a binding all appear together when you flip the one toggle. Desktop only this release.

books   = tag #book
good    = books | where rating >= 4 | sort finished desc
someday = books | where rating < 4

good    | render table title, rating, finished | write-section "Reading Log.md" "Finished"
someday | add-tag #someday

Run a workflow from the command palette, from anywhere

Running a pipeline should not require visiting the view that edits it. Every active workflow is now a palette command, and Run Workflow… opens a browsable picker with your workflows and their descriptions, a writes tag on the ones that change notes, filter and Enter. Both paths walk the same ladder as the view's Run button: a fresh plan from what is on disk, the unsaved-edits question if the run would write a note you are mid-edit in, the dry-run confirmation, then apply. The receipt arrives as a toast carrying the Undo button with it, because you never left whatever you were doing.

Bring your own language: import a TextMate grammar and your fenced code blocks highlight

ZenNotes ships highlighting for the usual suspects, and until now anything outside that list rendered as flat grey text. If you write in a niche language, or you are the person who invented it, that was the end of the road. Now it is a file you drop in: grab that language's .tmLanguage.json, the same format VS Code extensions use, then Settings, Editor, Languages, Add language. From that point your fence tag highlights while you type, in split, and in the reading view, in your current theme's colours. The guardrails are the interesting part, because a grammar is someone else's file. Built-in language and diagram tags are reserved, so nothing can quietly take over python or mermaid. Grammars needing external scopes are rejected up front. And a grammar that cannot keep up is refused rather than tolerated: before an import counts as installed it is run off the UI thread against a corpus of the repetitive lines that make backtracking patterns explode, with a hard timeout. Costs nothing at all if you never install one, since none of the engine loads until you do.

#406 contributed by @rossirpaulo

Your folders can BE the system folders

Until now the four system folders were hardcoded directory names, so pointing ZenNotes at an existing vault meant reorganizing it: an Obsidian vault with "01 - Entry" for capture had to rename it inbox/ or lose the Inbox view. Settings, Vault, Folder Paths now maps Inbox, Quick Notes, Archive and Trash to a directory of your choosing, stored per-vault in vault.json so the mapping travels with the vault to every device and to a self-hosted server. Classification follows everywhere: sidebar counts, task scanning, search, the web app, the MCP server, and workflows all treat the remapped directory as the system folder it stands for.

#115 #398 requested by @danscheer, @TomSchimana and @hotondo; built by @wholetthekfcgo

Notes grew real exits: Word export, copy-for-email HTML, and every export states its title

Sharing a note outside your vault used to mean choosing between three degraded copies of it. Export Note as Word Document… now writes a .docx built from Word's own vocabulary rather than a frozen picture of the app: headings map to Word's real Heading styles, links use the Hyperlink style, lists are actual Word numbering, tables are tables, task lists keep their glyphs, and vault images are embedded. Because the structure is Word's own, the person you send it to restyles the whole document by editing Heading 2 once. Copy Note as HTML puts a fully inline-styled rendering on the clipboard, which is the only styling mail clients reliably keep. And the PDF export finally states the title instead of starting mid-thought.

reported by Jan

Renaming a note carries its title heading along

A new note starts as # <title> with an empty body, so heading and filename begin identical, and then the first rename separates them, leaving # Untitled above a note called something else. Now the heading follows the name, from the breadcrumb, the sidebar, the note list or the palette, whether or not the note is open. The rule is deliberately narrow, because rewriting text you did not ask to edit has to stay predictable: an existing top-level heading is retitled, and one is never invented. A note opening with prose, a list, or a ## heading is left byte-identical, which makes deleting the # line a permanent per-note opt-out.

#455 requested by @Denatle

MCP answers are now clickable

Point an AI client at the ZenNotes MCP server and ask about your vault, and until now the answer was a list of bare paths. Now every note-shaped result carries a zennotes:// link, and the server's instructions teach models to render note titles as markdown links with it, unprompted. Ctrl+click one in your chat and ZenNotes comes to focus with that note open; it works with the app closed too, since the OS launches it. The parser refuses absolute paths and traversal, so a link can only ever name a note inside your vault.

#509 requested by @MrClyfar

zn open against a running app no longer piles ZenNotes icons into the Dock

The helper process that delivered the file lingered for a minute and a half before quitting, because on macOS Electron never promptly fires ready in a process that lost the single-instance race, and our quit was parked behind ready. Anyone feeding files in steadily stacked up Dock icons that looked exactly like ZenNotes multiplying. The loser now exits the instant the lock is denied, which is safe because its arguments are handed to the running app before the denial even returns.

#511 reported by @rrpolanco

A table-menu action can no longer vanish because you had just typed in a cell

Type into a table cell, then open the table menu and pick an action, and the action silently did nothing. Opening the menu moves focus out of the widget, leaving a just-edited cell commits it, that commit rebuilds the table widget, and the menu you are looking at still belongs to the old detached widget. The menu now records where its table lives when it opens and commits against the current document at that anchor instead.

#485 reported by @uNyanda, whose recording cracked it

Typing [[ works again on German-family Mac keyboards

On a German, Austrian or Swiss Mac layout, [ is Option+5, and 2.19.0 quietly claimed that exact chord for the new hop-across-markers shortcut, so the keystroke that should have typed your second bracket moved the cursor instead. The hops now default to Ctrl+, and Ctrl+. on macOS, and both remain rebindable.

#514 reported by @ryanthara

Databases work on remote workspaces

Connecting the desktop app to a ZenNotes server showed your databases and then refused to do anything with them. Every database operation was guarded local-only, with a comment claiming the server had no database endpoints; the premise was stale, since the web app had been composing full database support out of ordinary file reads and writes all along. That composition now lives in one shared module bound to each transport, and database failures are no longer silent anywhere.

#499 reported by @lawtj

Remote workspaces fail loud and recover, instead of failing strange

If the server was unreachable, anything that read a file over the connection treated the failure as "this file does not exist", so a dropped connection could silently close your database tab. Absence is now only ever concluded from an answer. And launching with the server down no longer dumps you on the first-boot welcome screen as if nothing had been set up: a configured-but-unreachable workspace gets its own screen that names the server and offers Try again.

Your pre-2.10 zen CLI heals into zn on launch

The CLI was renamed in 2.10.0 because zen collides with Zen Browser, but the rename only ever migrated inside an explicit Install click, so anyone who installed on 2.9.0 or earlier kept a working zen and no zn at all, while Settings told exactly those users the CLI was not installed. The app now migrates the managed symlink at launch. A foreign zen is never touched.

zn open <folder> stops failing silently

Four quiet failure paths could make it look absent, worst on Wayland: folders whose notes sat behind a bounded scan's blind spots, a CLI that claimed victory before its child had died, focusing an already-open folder doing visibly nothing because a Wayland client cannot raise itself, and a zn open racing startup queuing paths into a queue nothing drained. All four are fixed, and Open with ZenNotes from a Linux file manager works.

reported on Discord by Olivier

Walking a Kanban card quickly no longer loses it, in either sense

Move a task across the board with quick Shift+H presses and the second hop broke: the focus ring vanished, and, invisibly, the move itself reverted on disk. Two races compounded when the next press landed before the previous write settled. Clean notes now write straight to disk, and the optimistic overlay is retired only by its own guarded timer, so the ring rides the card through every hop and every hop lands in the file.

#503 reported by @dwarjie

Visiting a daily note no longer switches the Calendar panel on everywhere

The panel is deliberately sticky, but the auto-open for periodic notes wrote into that same flag with nothing marking who opened it, so one daily-note visit turned into the panel being open on every note, quietly undoing a close you had made elsewhere. The open now carries its provenance.

#502 reported by @uNyanda

Middle-clicking a tab closed no longer pastes into the note (Linux)

On Linux the middle button is two gestures at once: close this tab, and paste the PRIMARY selection. Under Wayland, Chromium can deliver the paste to the focused editor rather than the element under the pointer, so whatever you last selected landed in the note that took over after the close. The close now also cancels the mouseup and arms a short-lived guard that catches the paste event itself wherever it is delivered.

#498 reported by @ribal-gz

The app no longer loads 2.5 MB of diagram code every time it starts

Mermaid is meant to arrive only when a note actually contains a mermaid block, and in the source it is written that way. The bundler was undoing that: a rule grouping mermaid, cytoscape and dagre into one named chunk pulled the whole thing back onto the startup path. Dropping that rule cut the boot path from 4.89 MB to 2.25 MB with no change in total download size, and drawing a flowchart now pulls three small pieces instead of every diagram type you might have asked for.

The zn CLI can talk to a self-hosted server

The desktop app and the web client could both work against a vault behind a ZenNotes server; the CLI was the odd one out, resolving every --vault to a path on the local disk. So scripting, automation and any headless box had to keep a local copy of the vault, even when the server was right there. Every command except zn open now works either way. A server you have already connected the desktop app to is nameable straight away, because the CLI reads the same saved profiles. For CI and headless machines, ZENNOTES_SERVER and ZENNOTES_REMOTE_TOKEN do the same without writing anything to disk.

zn list --server home
zn capture "from my laptop" --server home --tag work
zn list --server 192.168.1.10:7878 --token "$TOKEN"

#493 proposed by @usarral

Typst math definitions that follow your tags

Different subjects want the same notation to mean different things — a vector is an arrow in physics and bold in maths — which normally means redefining it at the top of every note. Turn on Settings → Editor → Typst definitions from tags and a note's tags decide which definitions its formulas compile against. A preamble is an ordinary note in a folder named typst, titled with the tag path in dots: typst/physics.md serves #physics, typst/physics.mechanics.md serves #physics/mechanics, layering general → specific so the narrower tag wins. Because preambles are notes rather than hidden files, they sync, they're searchable, and editing one immediately re-renders every note that uses it.

#486 proposed by @Batres3

Step across formatting markers without the arrow keys

Mod+B drops the cursor between a fresh **|**, which is right for typing and wrong for everything after: finishing the word left you inside the markers. Alt+] now hops the cursor to the far side of the next run of markers on the line, and Alt+[ hops back over the previous one. It crosses everything the formatting shortcuts write plus the bracket pairs, which makes a link three quick steps: out of the text, into the URL, out of the link. Both hops are rebindable.

#490 requested by @uNyanda

Keyboard navigation reaches every panel, by both routes

ZenNotes had two ways to move focus between panels and they disagreed about which panels existed. Ctrl+W h/j/k/l walked one set, the always-on Alt+H/J/K/L stopped dead at Connections, and the Outline panel was unreachable by either. Which route you had to use depended on which panel you wanted — precisely the thing a keyboard-first app should never ask. Both now resolve the same list, in the order the panels actually appear on screen: sidebar → note list → editor → connections → comments → outline → calendar.

#477 requested by @uNyanda

The Outline panel is now keyboard-navigable

Focus it and j / k — or the arrows — move a cursor through the headings, gg and G jump to the first and last, Enter jumps the editor to the heading under the cursor, and Esc hands focus back. It picks up where you left it. While tracing the focus cycle, one more dead end turned up: focusing the Calendar panel silently bounced focus back to the editor. Panels now keep the focus that pane navigation hands them.

Panels can be driven with Vim mode off

Reaching a panel is only half of navigating it, and until now the keys inside one came exclusively from the Vim layer — which isn't loaded when Vim mode is off. The keys that are universal everywhere else now work there too, in either mode: ↑ / ↓ move the row cursor, Home / End jump to the ends, Enter opens the row, and Esc hands focus back. The single-key motions stay Vim-only, exactly as in the sidebar.

An empty vault offers a first action instead of a hint

The home screen used to greet a brand-new vault with "No notes yet — create one to start writing." — a sentence telling you to do something, with nothing there to do it with. It now offers New note, New from template, and New database, each wired to the action it names. The template option matters most: templates are easy to miss entirely, and the moment you have nothing is the moment they are most useful.

Column alignment says what it is, and no longer undoes itself

The table menu's alignment entries were a hidden toggle: choosing the alignment a column already had cleared it back to none. Since a column with no alignment renders exactly like a left-aligned one, a fresh column was baffling. The three entries are now a ticked group with a fourth, Align default. Separately, a table edit that landed while the parser hadn't caught up with a just-created table was silently discarded; it now falls back to reading the table block out of the document.

#485 reported by @uNyanda

Ctrl+I italicises a Vim selection instead of jumping to another note

On Linux and Windows, where Mod is Ctrl, Vim's forward jump and the italic shortcut are the same chord — and the jumplist won it in every mode but insert. So selecting a phrase in visual mode and pressing Ctrl+I navigated away and discarded the selection. Visual mode now gives that chord to italic. Normal mode is unchanged, and so is Ctrl+O. macOS is untouched.

#488 reported by @ah-yah

Moving a Kanban card keeps it selected

Shift+H / Shift+L send the focused card to the next column, but the selection stayed behind. Worse: columns sort by priority and due date, so the card usually lands below what's already there, and when the moved card was the last in an auto-discovered column that column disappears — together putting the ring on an unrelated card, so the next press moved a task you never selected. The cursor now re-derives from the rebuilt board by column id and card identity.

#492 reported by @uNyanda

Tags in frontmatter show up in the sidebar

A vault written in Obsidian keeps its tags in frontmatter, and ZenNotes only ever scanned the body for #tags, so those notes landed under nothing. Frontmatter tags is now a first-class source everywhere tags are read: the sidebar, the main process index, the MCP server, and the self-hosted Go server. Inline arrays, block lists, quoted values and a leading # all parse. The frontmatter block is now excluded from the inline scan too, so a stray # in another field stops being counted.

#444 by @junereycasuga

Inline formats toggle off at the closing marker

Pressing the format shortcut again at the end of a span left a stray pair of markers behind instead of closing cleanly.

#443 by @junereycasuga

Cancelled tasks stop haunting the calendar

A cancelled - [-] task rendered in the calendar day list with an empty checkbox, sitting next to real work as though it were still open — while the editor struck the same line through.

#476 reported by @uNyanda

Forwarded tasks land under the Tasks heading

Forwarding a task into a note whose Tasks list is followed by a horizontal rule stranded it below the rule instead of inside the list.

#483 reported by @uNyanda

Go Back works after New Note from Template

Creating a note from a template left a gap in the history stack, so Go Back skipped the note you had just left.

#484 reported by @uNyanda

H5 headings keep your capitalisation

H5 headings rendered in all caps in both the editor and the preview, changing the text you wrote.

#478 reported by @ShowhyT

Task priority markers read as chips

Priorities were bold text that blended into the line in source notes, and plain text in the preview.

#479 reported by @uNyanda

Table column widths survive a table edit

Resized columns collapsed back to automatic widths after a single menu action.

#485 reported by @uNyanda

macOS can reach a server on the local network

macOS 15 requires the Local Network privacy permission for any connection to a machine on your LAN. ZenNotes never declared it needed one, so the OS dropped the attempt before a packet left the machine — surfacing as a bare "fetch failed" that looked exactly like a server being down. The app now declares NSLocalNetworkUsageDescription so macOS prompts on first use, and the error text says where to turn it back on.

#481 reported by @cipradu

The server accepts its own desktop client's origins

ZENNOTES_ALLOWED_ORIGINS=* was ignored and a null origin (which is what a desktop WebView sends) was dropped outright, so the server rejected the very clients it ships with.

#482 reported by @cipradu

Remote-vault prompts stop fighting the touch keyboard

The auth-token prompt was a plain text input, so a phone keyboard auto-capitalised the token as you typed it — turning a valid token into a 401 with nothing on screen explaining why. The prompt also claimed an empty box would reuse your stored token when it actually connects without one.