ThiefMD

Ever want to just open a Markdown or Fountain file in ThiefMD without importing into the library? Now you can.

Confused on what to do first when opening ThiefMD? Our new Library-less launch window is hopefully clearer.

There's a lot of changes under the hood. We now use the Wordpress REST API instead of XML-RPC. libsoup3 and Webkit2GTK 4.1 power network connections and previews. We're now build on the GNOME 44 SDK.

We added support for Hashnode, Forem, and Medium. Forem support means you can publish directly to DEV.

In addition, we added a Finnish Translation by Jiri Grönroos, and a German Translation by Fish and Helix.

Networking calls are now mostly non-blocking, which means startup times have decreased. Add as many connections as you like, and start writing as soon as the app launches.

Mostly a maintenance and bug fix release.

We fixed a race condition in PDF export and made some changes to adjust for Vala compiler changes.

We've been at work making Export Packages that result in beautiful PDFs, like Highlighted Headings and Mr. Noto Roboto1.

This release will use WeasyPrint or PagedJS if available. It will fallback to Webkit2GTK and GTK's PDF generator if needed.

1 Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and we think they look great! But feel free to make your own, and if you're up for it, share them with the world!

Need a second pair of eyes to look over your text? ThiefMD now has Link Grammar support 😸

This uses the revolutionary link-grammar, the same one that powers AbiWord's grammar checking. That revolutionary grammar checker that uses natural language processing to understand your sentences to see if it's grammatically correct.

Yeah. I know what you're thinking. This means ThiefMD has NLP built in.

We also fixed some bugs and icon loading (at least on the GNOME default theme).

😅 was a bit overzealous with the last release.

Fixed image issues and added a watchdog timer for when pandoc is rendering the preview.

😓 We broke image uploads.

This fixes image uploads along with rendering previews when a relative path to a CSL file is provided.

Fountain, BibTeX, Citation Preview & Export, and so much more.

We crammed a lot into this release of ThiefMD.

• Right-Click Insert Citation Support
• Open and Edit Fountain and BibTeX files
• Live Preview Fountain
• Live Preview Citations
• Single-Column support on Mobile
• Sheet Notes and Project Notes
  • Sheet Notes are tied to the Markdown or Fountain File
  • Project Notes are tied to the folder
• Preview now navigates through files in the Library
• Bug fixes

Just patching language loading.

WordPress got a huge update with Featured Image.
In the YAML, just add cover-image or featured-image to the frontmatter.

---
title: My Fancy Blogpost
featured-image: /images/my-featured-image.jpeg
---

Publishing to Write.as and have a Pro Account? Snap.as image uploading is now supported.

New Translations

Did you know Poeditor can be used to help translate ThiefMD? People have been submitting translations:

• French Translation by David Bosman
• Slovak Translation by Marek L'ach
• Swedish Translation by Åke Engelbrektson

Thanks to everyone contributing!

UI Accessibility

We've added borders to sheets in the sidebar when using the OS Theme.

Stability Improvements

We've improved how heading margins are calculated, which means... we've relaxed font selection. You're still only limited to the family, but more should appear in the selector.

We've lowered the chances of crashing in experimental mode. When selecting text with experimental mode, bold links will become normal font as invisible text can cause a crash if formatted differently from surrounding text.

We made Experimental Mode Faster! We now check your proximity to hidden URLs instead of always scanning the whole document.

Bug Fixes

Fixed and issue where PDF export tried using non-PDF themes.

More advanced Regex highlighting. Reference Links next to In-line links should look good in most cases.

More to come...

We're still working on Tagging and Categories for WordPress and Ghost. Checkout the ThiefMD Project Board to see what we have planned, and let us know how we can empower you to do more!

Export to Wordpress!

Wordpress Export is just a Connection away. Open Preferences (Ctrl + ,), and click on Connections. ThiefMD currently uses the XML-RPC mechanism for talking to your Wordpress blog.

Eye Candy & Readability

• Recessed headers aren't just for looking sleek. They help you visually identify key points in your work.
• If the theme you were using had background colors for code blocks, ThiefMD now renders the background for the entire block
• Experimental Mode: ThiefMD can now hide links to improve editor readability. Enable Experimental Mode in the Preferences, or hit Ctrl+Shift+M

To-Do Lists? Note taking with Lists? Sharing links?

This release makes it easy (hopefully).

Smart List (List Continuation) Support

If you're in a list and hit enter, the list will continue. Enter again, and the list stops and you're in a new paragraph. Tabs indent the list.

Link Shortcuts and Tab Back into Focus

We've had Ctrl+B, Ctrl+I, and Ctrl+D. We'd like to introduce you to Ctrl+K for inserting links.

We found it obnoxious to have to move the mouse and try to click out of syntax, or click inside of parentheses. So now, if you hit Ctrl+B, you can type the bold word, hit Tab, and you're out of the syntax. Ctrl+K to insert a link? Type the text, tab into the URL. Type the URL, and tab outta the syntax.

It's not quite a feature that's out of this world, but it'll help you tab back into focus1.

1 You know how Program Managers/Sales Folk come up with phrases to help sell features, we'll, we're hoping this one catches on...

• Added French Translation from David Bosman
• Added Slovak Translation from Marek L'ach
• Added ability to increase line spacing in editor
• Bugfixes! Fixed an issue with previews, and some issues in the editor.
• Hope your 2021 is going well so far!

This release brings some libhandy goodness to ThiefMD.

LibHandy fixes some graphical issues ThiefMD had. It also allows for ThiefMD to be more responsive and handle scenarios on smaller screens.

The Preferences window is now small screen and touch screen friendly. The application can scale to a single pane/window interface. If the resolution is small, the app will try to provide touch friendly menu's and interfacing when available.

We hope to improve these features in the future, but hope you like the view into the direction we're going.

We revamped our Publishing Window and Export Options yet again. This time, to allow for publishing to online blog services. In the preferences, you'll find a Connections tab that'll show our currently supported services.

• Write.as as an Export Connection option
• Ghost as an Export Connection option
• Fixed UI margin issue on opening large files (most of the time)
• There's an issue storing passwords in flatpak, so you'll have to re-add connections to publish. We choose not to store passwords/auth tokens in plain text
• Improve file modification detection. Dropbox syncing in the background? ThiefMD will load changes if they seem safe, or prompt to load the file from disk.
• Improved wording in the Preferences dialog. I know what I mean, but y'all might not. We were lucky to get a pull request that helps describe features better.

We were a bit eager with the last release. We fixed crashes in the Library Search and now sort by the number of occurrences of the search in each document. There's an essay of changes if you're willing to read them.

Search is now a modal window and you can have 'live search' which will update the search results as you type. This is an alternative for tagging and labels until we have a story around that. Don't want to search the whole library? Right-click on a Library Item and choose search.

For exporting, you can now disable the title: in the YAML from appearing in the exported document. Since there's so many export options, it now has a scrollbar to prevent it from growing off screen.

In addition to more export options, need to export an Individual file? Just right-click on the file and choose Export. Same Novel-Level Export Powers for your individual files. United or Apart, your files look great.

The header bar can now be hidden with Ctrl+Shift+H to eliminate more distractions. We're working on making it look and function better, so let us know any issues you run into. Speaking of looking better, custom fonts are here. We included our favorite Serif and Sans-Serif fonts, but everyone has their own tastes and environments that help the creative juices flow.

Files can now be dragged into the editor window. If ThiefMD thinks it knows what it is, it will Markdown-ify the content as best it can.

Talking about dragging things into the editor, certain languages are now syntax highlighted in code blocks. Sharing some code, drag the file in and bam. It's like magic, but not (it's programming).

And for dragging things around, ThiefMD now monitors for folder changes. Delete, move, or create files using your File Manager or another app. Outline your novel, then export the Markdown into your ThiefMD Library. ThiefMD will notice those changes and show them in the Library.

You can now Sort files by their Title or Date. This information is extracted from the YAML front matter (or any close guess we can come up with).

We also added a focus mode. Choose to focus on words, sentences, or paragraphs. ThiefMD dims everything but the content you're working on. With plenty of themes and Fonts to choose from, Type Writer Scrolling, Focus Mode, a minimal UI, we're hoping you can create your ideal writing environment.

We know when writing your novel you have many options. Thanks for choosing ThiefMD, and be sure to let us know if there's anything we can do to make your stay more comfortable.

Other Updates:

• Write-Good now highlights the whole phrase for passive voice or weasel words
• Write-Good highlighting accounts for emoji and unicode characters
• ThiefMD uses OS Path separator character in all instances
• New Markdown Cheat Sheet (Ctrl+H)
• Preview and Publisher Windows can now be full screened (F11)
• In addition to custom fonts, you can now change the font size too
• More hidden keyboard shortcuts. Ctrl+Shift+T: Typewriter Scrolling, Ctrl+Shift+W: Write Good. Full-Screen F11, Type-Writer Scrolling Ctrl+Shift+T, Editor View Ctrl+1, and then Focus Ctrl+Shift+R all without leaving the comfort of your keyboard
• YAML Frontmatter now syntax highlighted as a comment
• CSV to Markdown Table on Drag and Drop

Export Themes and Paper options are here! Customize the Preview CSS, ePub CSS, and PDF CSS.

Whether you need dark mode preview, are looking to match your site, or need that special touch for your ePub, ThiefMD has you covered.

ThiefMD can now even import your (or someone else's) existing work! Just drag and drop a file into a folder in the Library. If it's compatible, ThiefMD will convert it to Markdown. Results may vary, and they may even be very cool.

• Change the CSS Applied to your ePub
• Pick a different Preview CSS
• New Export Window with more options and more accurate rendering
• Change PDF CSS
• Change PDF Paper Size
• Import ePUB, DocX, HTML, and more. It's Pandoc under the hoods with a little thievery sprinkled on top
• Editor Search Ctrl+F and Library Search Ctrl+Shift+F
• Writing Statistics Ctrl+Shift+S or Right-Click on a Library Item

We've launch a themes site, themes editor, and started work on sharing our components.

What's new?

• Better Dark vs Light theme detection. A theme package can contain 2 light or 2 dark themes. ThiefMD will use the luminance to determine if it's a light or dark theme
• Improved dynamic CSS, more elements colored hopefully preventing usability issues
• Improve handling of Ultheme files
• UI Incognito mode. Remove ThiefMD branding from main window
• Fixed typos in various menus
• Ubuntu PPA now available

Identifying Passive Voice, hard to read sentences, and more, write-good is now available.

• Find passive voice, long sentence, repeat words, and more

We understand some users use Accessible GTK themes. By default, ThiefMD will now use the user's GTK theme, and have "Match UI to Editor Theme" toggle the Window Decoration coloring.

• Improve accessibility by allowing toggle of usage of user's GTK Theme
• In ePub YAML front-matter, ThiefMD can now find the full path to your cover-image during publishing
• Working on some support for other static site generators
• Squashing more bugs