hushvault release notes

hushvault never phones home — not even to check for updates — so this page is where new versions are announced. Your current version is in the app's About window; downloads are on Gumroad, and your original purchase link always gets the newest files.

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0.9.6 — your e-books join the library (4 August 2026)

• EPUBs open in hushvault. A book shows as chapters — with the book's own table of contents — in the app's typography, following your palette, page tint, typeface and text-size settings. Links inside the book work; links to the open web open in your browser, never inside hushvault. The Open in default reader button is always there for the reading app you already use.
• Every chapter is searchable. Search inside e-books exactly as you do inside PDFs — a hit tells you which chapter, and kind:epub narrows a search to books. Your AI sees them the same way through Connect your AI.
• Nothing in a book can phone home. E-books can contain scripts, tracking images and remote fonts; hushvault strips all of it before a chapter is shown. Only what's packed inside the book's own file is displayed — the no-network promise holds for books too.
• Kindle files are listed, honestly. .mobi and .azw are Amazon's formats and usually copy-protected, so hushvault doesn't read them — but they appear in your library instead of vanishing, and their tab explains the way out (convert to EPUB; Calibre does this well). A copy-protected EPUB gets the same honesty: named as DRM, not a broken page.
• Your library re-reads itself once. This version knows a new kind of file, so the search index is rebuilt the first time you open a library after updating. A large library takes a moment longer that one time, and nothing you own is touched: the rebuild reads your files, and text already recognized from scanned PDFs is kept.

0.9.5 — writes are now all-or-nothing (4 August 2026)

• The bug this fixes. On a library that lives on a network share (\\server\…), saving a file shorter than it was before could leave the tail of the old contents behind — the file ended up part new text, part old. We found it in our own Windows testing the day after 0.9.4 shipped. It needs a network share and a save that shrinks the file, which is why it went unseen for so long; libraries in a local folder were never affected.
• The fix. hushvault no longer overwrites any file in place. Every save writes a temporary file next to the target and swaps it in — one all-or-nothing step, so a file on disk is always entirely the old version or entirely the new one. This covers notes, PDF highlights, tag edits, and the plain-text copies from 0.9.4.
• If you saved notes into a network library before this fix: only notes that shrank when saved could be affected, and the damage is visible, not hidden — the note shows leftover text from its previous version at the end. Deleting the leftover and saving again fully heals the file.
• Also: the "plain-text copies" setting no longer mirrors your notes — they are already plain text. It covers what a folder search can't read on its own: PDFs and Word documents.

0.9.4 — search that answers exactly what you asked (4 August 2026)

• Find by the file itself, not just its words. name:budget matches filenames, name:*.pdf matches an extension, after:2026-01-01 and before: bracket a date, and size:>1mb finds the heavy ones. They combine with everything else, and they cost nothing — no document is opened to answer them.
• Regular expressions, for the searches an index cannot do. re:/…/ runs a real regex over the text hushvault has already extracted — so it finds TODO(, a stray tab, a partial word inside a longer one, an invoice-number shape. Ordinary search tokenizes words and structurally cannot match those. It reads the index, never re-opening your PDFs, and on a 250 MB library the slowest possible search takes about a sixth of a second. Case-insensitive like the rest of the box; (?-i) if you want it strict.
• Your AI gets the same search you do. Until now the AI bridge understood plain words only — kind:pdf budget searched for the literal text "kind:pdf". Every operator now works from an assistant, regular expressions included.
• New: plain-text copies, if you want them. In Connect your AI, "also keep plain-text copies in the vault" mirrors the text of your PDFs and Word documents into a .hushvault/text folder — so any tool that reads the folder, including one with no setup at all, can search inside them. Off unless you turn it on, your own files are never touched, and the folder is safe to delete at any time.
• Extracting text from a PDF is easier to aim. Turning on "trim margins" no longer shoves the other choices out of view: the page and its four margin boxes sit together under the toggle, the guides have handles you can see, you can page through the document to check them against every page — margins apply to all of them — and the dialog itself can be resized when you want a closer look.

0.9.3 — the guided welcome, new reading looks (3 August 2026)

• The sample library teaches itself. Its Welcome note is now a five-step tour: tick a box, find something, follow a link, read a document, meet your AI if you want one — ticking the boxes is itself the first lesson. If you skip the sample and open your own folder, a single quiet line under the titlebar points the way instead, and one click dismisses it for good.
• Help… is now the full manual — and it prints. Seven short sections in both languages: open a library, find anything, write a note, read documents, make it comfortable, connect your AI, and what to check when something looks wrong.
• New reading looks. LCD joins the palettes — quiet "digital" letters on pocket-console green by day, moss-black with pale sage at night. Headings now carry each palette's accent. And a typeface choice for reading — Default, Serif or Mono — sits beside palette and page tint in the Appearance menu.
• ⌘ + / ⌘ − / ⌘ 0 zoom your text. Note text scales in 10% steps and the setting is remembered; on a PDF tab the same keys keep zooming the page, as before.
• The librarian. The figure in the app icon traded its dark shades for half-moon reading glasses — same hat, same silhouette, so nothing about finding the app changes. It always was a librarian.
• Tool dialogs fit small windows. Extracting text from a PDF with margin trimming on could push the Run button clean off a smaller screen (thank you to the tester who reported it) — every tool dialog now scrolls its middle while the buttons stay pinned. The note toolbar likewise wraps and sheds detail in narrow panes instead of painting over itself.
• A deep reliability pass, ahead of 1.0. The foundations got a full audit — about thirty fixes. Among them: your edits can no longer be lost when saves queue up or you switch libraries mid-edit; library scans skip unreadable folders, retry what failed and can be cancelled; wikilink healing understands #section links and parentheses in names; big file trees render noticeably faster; and the remaining untranslated corners now speak both languages.

0.9.2 — the AI bridge fixed, calmer right-clicks (30 July 2026)

• "Connect your AI" works again. 0.9.1's bridge was built one version behind its own search index, so every request from your AI was refused with advice that couldn't help. Fixed — and the build now refuses to package a mismatched pair, so this kind of drift can't ship again.
• Rebuilding a network library's index no longer freezes the app. On a library that lives on a network share, "Rebuild index…" — or switching to another library — could hang hushvault until you force-quit it.
• Right-clicks behave the way you expect. Right-clicking a file shows the menu for that file; right-clicking inside a multi-selection acts on the whole selection. Pick-order numbers no longer pile up from plain right-clicks — they appear only once two or more files are selected, where the order actually means something.
• Long menus stay on screen. A tall right-click menu could slide its top edge out of the window.
• Open in new tab. The right-click menu can now open a file as a tab that stays put; a plain click still browses in place, reusing one tab.

0.9.1 — Word fixes, and the app introduces itself (30 July 2026)

• Word previews respect your line breaks. Word stores a manual line break in two different ways, and hushvault only understood one of them — so in some documents the lines ran together into one long line, which stretched the page sideways and made the text tiny. Both are understood now. (Search was never affected: it always read those documents correctly.)
• The preview's "open in Word" bar stays put. It used to slide behind the page as you scrolled down a document.
• Old .doc files no longer go missing. Word files from before 2007 now appear in your library, take tags, and open in a tab that says plainly what it can and cannot do: there is no preview and their text isn't searchable, because the old format can't be read here — open one in Word, save it as .docx, and it behaves like every other document.
• Open in Word is easier to find. For a Word file the exact document is in Word, so that button now looks like the main action it is.
• Help…, in the vault menu. A short guide that opens right in the app, offline, in your language: how to find anything, the handful of marks for writing a note, how documents and highlights work, connecting your AI, and what to do when something looks out of date.
• About hushvault…, also in the vault menu — on Windows as well as macOS. It tells you which version you are running and links to this page, which is how you find out what's new in an app that never phones home.
• The vault menu is shorter. Recent libraries, appearance and language now open as submenus, and the menu can no longer run past the bottom of a small window — some items used to be genuinely out of reach.
• Your library re-reads itself once. This version knows a new kind of file, so the search index is rebuilt the first time you open a vault after updating. A large vault takes a moment longer that one time, and nothing you own is touched: the rebuild reads your files, and text already recognized from scanned PDFs is kept.

0.9.0 — Word pages, network folders, and your AI (29 July 2026)

• Word documents open as pages. A .docx now shows as a page-shaped preview — fonts, bold, tables, margins — instead of plain text. It is an approximate preview by design: Word stays one click away for the exact document, and hushvault still never edits your files. And when a PDF with the same name sits beside the document — common where the filed PDF lives next to its source — hushvault offers it, because the PDF is the exact layout.
• Libraries on network drives. A vault on \\server\… or a mapped drive now behaves properly. Network folders don't announce changes reliably, so hushvault re-checks the library when you return to the app — the sidebar says so quietly. And because network folders have no Recycle Bin, deleting now asks before removing permanently (once for a whole batch), instead of silently doing nothing.
• Connect your AI. New in the vault menu: connect Claude Code, Claude Desktop, or any MCP-compatible tool to your library with a copy-paste setup. Your assistant can then search and read everything hushvault has indexed — including inside PDFs, scans and Word documents, accents optional. Read-only by construction, on this machine only, and hushvault itself still never touches the network. Your AI gets a library card, not a pen.

0.8.0 — Word documents, and Português (29 July 2026)

• Word documents join the library. .docx files now show up in the tree, and their text is indexed: search finds words inside them, and they take tags and [[wikilinks]] like any note. Opening one shows its text for reading and quoting; formatting and layout stay in Word, which is one click away. hushvault never edits or rewrites a .docx — your files remain exactly what Word made them. (The older .doc format is not supported.)
• The app speaks Portuguese. It follows your system language, and you can switch any time from the vault menu → Language (System / English / Português). The sample library is written in Portuguese too, not just the labels.
• Folders, from the sidebar. Create, rename, move and delete folders without leaving the app. Drag a folder onto another to move it — links pointing into it are updated for you — and deleting sends it to the system Trash, so it is always recoverable. Deleting a folder with files in it asks first, and says how many.
• Open files straight from Finder or Explorer. Right-click a note or PDF → Open With → hushvault. If the file lives somewhere hushvault doesn't know yet, it offers to open that folder as a library, and tells you what is in it first. hushvault does not take over as your default app for any file type.
• It says what it is. The opening screen now reads "a folder of notes and PDFs" — the app has been a document library for a long time, and the wording had not caught up.
• Fixed: the sample library spoke macOS to Windows users. Its PDF still told you to press Cmd-Shift-H. It now matches the keyboard in front of you.
• Your library re-reads itself once. This version knows a new kind of file, so the search index is rebuilt the first time you open a vault after updating. A large vault takes a moment longer that one time, and nothing you own is touched: the rebuild reads your files, and text already recognized from scanned PDFs is kept.
• Under the hood: the app now runs under a strict content-security policy — no change you can see, one less way anything could ever reach out.

0.7.4 — you can see where you're dropping (27 July 2026)

• Drag-and-drop tells you where the file is going. Dragging a file (or a selection) onto a folder now outlines that folder, so the destination is obvious at a glance rather than something you infer from where the cursor happens to be. Dropping into the top level of the vault is marked too — it used to be the one destination with no feedback at all. Nothing about the move itself changed; you can just see it now.

0.7.3 — appearance, and the robustness track (27 July 2026)

• Appearance. Four colour palettes (the classic blue, Paper, Solarized, High contrast with a true-black OLED dark mode), each with light and dark — the toggle you know keeps working inside any of them. A separate PDF page tint (Normal / Warm / Dim) takes the glare off white pages without touching your highlights. Code blocks and diagrams follow the palette. Find it all under the vault menu → Appearance.
• Library. Extract pages pulls a page range out of a PDF into a new file, original untouched. Merge notes combines a selection into one document — each note becomes a section, headings nest correctly, tags merge into one frontmatter block, and the originals stay put. Moving is click-based now: a folder picker in the move dialogs, and drag a file (or a multi-selection) onto any folder — wikilinks heal either way. Ctrl-click selection now includes the file you're reading, and every picked file shows its order badge.
• Trust. A failed multi-file move now puts everything back and says "nothing was moved" instead of leaving a half-move. Rebuild index in the vault menu rescans everything from your files — they are never touched. The sidebar shows indexing progress and finishes with a receipt. Opening a 10,000-note vault: about 8 seconds cold, instant after that (this was minutes of background CPU before; measured, not estimated).
• Small delights: >wander in the palette opens something random from the stacks; Copy as wikilink in the file menu; theme switches bloom from wherever you clicked.
• Fixed on Windows: Ctrl+K now opens the command palette. The webview was swallowing it — along with the other browser shortcuts — before the app ever saw it, so the key simply did nothing.
• Fixed on Windows: the sample library speaks your platform. It was telling you to press ⌘K and open Finder — Mac keys on a Windows keyboard, on the first screen you see.

0.7.2 was built and tested but never published — a Windows run caught the two fixes above first, so 0.7.3 is the one to download.

0.7.1 — opens like a normal app now (24 July 2026)

• No more right-click → Open on macOS. This build is signed and notarized by Apple, so it opens with a double-click like anything else you install. (Windows still shows a SmartScreen warning on first run — click More info → Run anyway, once.)
• See it working in one click. The opening screen — and the vault menu in the title bar — now offer Create a sample library: a small, real vault with linked and tagged notes, a PDF that already carries highlights, a watched inbox/, and a saved search, so every part of the app has something to show. It's an ordinary folder like any other vault; delete it whenever you like.
• Open any file in its default app. Right-click a file in the tree → Open in default app, next to Reveal in Finder — for when you want Preview, Acrobat, or another editor. Your files are ordinary files.
• Fixed: typing in the search box could come out capitalized — tag: became Tag: — because macOS text substitution reached fields it shouldn't. The same fix covers renaming, folder paths, tag entry, and the PDF tool options, where an unwanted capital actually mattered.
• Fixed: saving a search (⌘S) pre-filled the name with your query but didn't select it, so typing a name appended to it instead of replacing it.

0.7.0 — the library deepens (23 July 2026)

Search grew real muscles, PDFs remember your highlights, and getting things into the vault stopped requiring ceremony.

• Search that narrows. The ⌘K box now understands tag:law, in:legal/, kind:pdf, -draft, and "exact phrase" — combine them freely, and chips under the box show exactly how your query was read. A mistyped filter simply searches as plain text; the box never errors.
• Saved searches. Any search — filters, tags, all of it — can be saved by name (⌘S in the palette). It lives in a Searches section in the sidebar and re-runs live on click; rename or delete by right-click.
• Your tags, everywhere. A Tags section in the sidebar lists every tag with its count — click one to browse it. And wherever you type a tag — searching with # or tag:, adding to a note, batch-tagging — suggestions appear as you type: Return accepts the highlighted one, arrows move, Esc dismisses (so a brand-new tag is still one Esc away).
• Highlight your PDFs. Select text, press ⌘⇧H (or right-click → Highlight selection). Highlights survive restarts, zoom, renames and moves — they live in a small .hl.json file right next to the PDF, so they travel with it and are yours like everything else. A quiet rail of ticks in the corner expands on hover to list them, jump to them, or remove them.
• Find in the page. ⌘F now works everywhere it should: a proper find/replace panel in the editor (live "3 of 12" match count, case / whole-word / regex toggles) and a matching find bar when reading a note, highlighting matches in place.
• Paste an image, get an embed. ⌘V a screenshot into a note and the image lands beside it, named after the note, with ![[…]] inserted at the cursor.
• A watched inbox. Make an inbox/ folder and anything you drop in it — from Finder, a scanner, an email save-as — shows up in a pinned sidebar section with a live count until you file it.
• Find duplicates. > duplicates in the palette lists files with identical content, biggest first, with reveal and Trash per copy. Nothing is ever deleted automatically.
• Reveal in Finder (or Explorer) from any file's right-click menu.

0.6.0 — the library release (23 July 2026)

Your PDFs and plain-text files are now first-class citizens, and the file tree learned to work in bulk.

• Select text in PDFs. Drag across any PDF with a text layer and copy it with ⌘C — line breaks preserved. Scanned pages simply don't offer a selection; nothing breaks.
• Zoom PDFs. ⌘+ / ⌘− / ⌘0, or pinch on the trackpad. Pages re-render sharp at the new size, and a quiet "12 / 42" indicator (with zoom %) appears while you scroll.
• Plain .txt files join the library. They show in the tree with a txt badge, open in a clean text editor, autosave, and are fully searchable — so the PDF → Text tool's output lands right where you can see it. On first launch after updating, the search index rebuilds itself; a big vault's first open takes a moment longer, once.
• Select many, act once. Finder-style selection now covers notes too: shift-click a range, ⌘-click to toggle. Right-click for the new batch verbs — Add tags (notes get frontmatter tags, documents get sidecar tags), Move to a folder (wikilinks heal automatically; existing files are skipped, never overwritten), and Move to Trash (asks first, lists the names). PDF tools keep working on the PDFs of a mixed selection and say what they're ignoring.
• Small comforts. Drag the sidebar edge to resize it (double-click resets). A hairline under the toolbar fills as you read. Switching between read and edit keeps your place in the note. And the tree now updates itself when files appear or disappear in Finder.

0.5.0 — reorganize fearlessly, write calmly (20 July 2026)

The two biggest releases of hushvault so far, in one update: your vault is now safe to reorganize, and the editor is a nicer place to write.

• Rename and move without breaking anything. Right-click any note, file, or folder in the tree: rename it, move it (edit the folders in its path — new ones are created), or send it to the system Trash. If other notes link to it, hushvault shows "N links in M notes point at this file" and updates every one of them — wikilinks, aliases, page anchors, and relative links included. Folder renames carry all of this along.
• Two notes side by side. The preview button now opens the rendered view next to the editor. Drag any tab to the right edge of the window to split; drag tabs between the panes; drag the divider to taste. Your layout is remembered.
• Jump to any note by name. ⌘K now puts filename matches at the top — type a few letters, Enter, you're there. Full-text results still follow underneath, and PDFs and images are findable by name too.
• A note for today, one key away. ⌘D opens today's journal note, creating it from your templates/daily.md if you have one. A templates folder also adds a picker to the new-note box.
• Lists that type themselves. Enter continues a list (numbered lists renumber as you go), Enter on an empty item ends it, Tab and Shift-Tab nest and un-nest. Checkboxes are clickable in the editor, and finished tasks grey out.
• Focus mode (⌘⇧F). Everything but the paragraph you're writing fades back, the line you're typing stays vertically centered, and the interface quiets down until you hover it. Switch to sentence-level focus in the command palette. Line numbers can be hidden for good, too.
• Go back the way you came. ⌘[ and ⌘] step through the notes you've visited, per pane, with chevrons in the toolbar. ⌘⌥←/→ hops between panes, ⌘1–9 picks a tab, and ⌘B tucks the file tree away.
• Live word count in the toolbar — and it counts your selection when you make one.
• Fixed: selected text in the dark-theme editor was nearly unreadable.
• Fixed: typing ( before a word no longer swallows the word in brackets.

0.4.1 — quieter editing (18 July 2026)

• Your notes save themselves. Stop typing and the note is written a moment later. ⌘S still works if you like pressing it.
• Link to a note without remembering its name. Type [[ and hushvault suggests notes from your vault, matching on filename or title, with the folder shown so two notes called "Notes" are never confused.
• Browsing no longer buries you in tabs. Clicking through the file tree reuses one tab. The moment you edit a note, drag its tab, or double-click it, that tab is yours to keep and the next click opens a new one.
• Click an image to see it properly — it opens over the note, and Escape or a click outside puts you back exactly where you were.
• Export the way you want it: as a self-contained HTML file, as a PDF, or straight to the printer — with a choice of page width, an optional contents list, and an optional outline sidebar in HTML exports.
• Fixed: tags and backlinks were incomplete. An index built by an older version never picked up tags or links, so tag search could come up empty on notes that plainly had tags. This release rebuilds the index once on first launch and both work properly. Large vaults will take a moment that first time; your OCR results are kept.
• Images embedded as ![[picture.png]] now render in the note and in exports.
• Code blocks highlight every language, not a fixed list.
• Fixed on Windows: a scrollbar beside the heading outline when a note had many headings.

0.3.1 — the PDF toolbench (18 July 2026)

Your vault now does the PDF work too. Select one file or fifty in the file tree, right-click, and run:

• Combine and cut — merge, split, delete pages, organize pages in a visual thumbnail grid with drag-to-reorder
• Fix and mark — rotate, add page numbers, watermark
• Convert — extract text to a Markdown note or .txt, export pages as images, combine images into a PDF
• Secure and shrink — password-protect (AES-256), remove a password, compress

Everything runs in batches, and nothing is ever overwritten: each tool writes new files next to the originals, so a bad run costs you nothing. Moving the originals to the Trash afterwards is an explicit opt-in. It all happens on your machine, offline, like the rest of the app.

• A heading outline in the top-left of any note you're reading — hover it for the section titles, click to jump
• Inline images: ![[screenshot.png]] embeds from your vault now render in the note, and in exported HTML/PDF
• Code blocks highlight every language Shiki supports, not a fixed list
• The app icon no longer shows white corners in the dock

Versions before 0.3.1 predate these notes. On macOS, keyboard shortcuts use ⌘; on Windows, read Ctrl for ⌘ throughout.