RemNote
Changelog

Remnote 1.8 - Plugins, Darkmode, and Shared Knowledge Bases

TLDR

✨ New Features

🔌 Plugins: We’ve built one of the web’s most powerful plugin systems to help you customize all of your thinking and learning needs. We’re kick-starting our plugin community with core plugins built by the RemNote team. These will be available when RemNote 1.8 is released next week. Plug your Discord username into this form, to get added to our private dev channel and get access to build alpha plugins. We’ll start inviting devs once RemNote 1.8 is released next week!

🤹‍♂️ Multiple Knowledge Bases: Create multiple Knowledge Bases from a single account.

👥 Shared Knowledge Bases (Alpha): Thinking and learning don’t happen in isolation. Create a Knowledge Base and share it with friends.

🎩 First-Class Dark Mode: Our previous dark-mode was somewhat limited. We’ve built a beautiful dark mode from scratch.

🧪 Labs: 1) Omnibar Preview, 2) Natural language search for dates in the Omnibar, 3) Omnibar Search Categories

New Editor ✍️

🌐 Natively International: Full non-Latin alphabet (including full right-to-left languages) support.

📲 New Mobile UI: Fully-fledged editor experience on mobile, redesigned interface, and improved user experience.

Polished Features ✨

🔥 Multiple Panes Shortcuts: Panes can now be moved, resized, swapped and opened in desired ways without leaving the keyboard

🍞 Improved Breadcrumbs: Breadcrumbs on the top now get neatly tucked away when too long and expand on click.

📝 Fast Loading Clipper: The clipper should now load much faster and feel snappier than ever before.

Upgrades and Stability ⏫

🚗 Complete Data Portability

⌨️ Improved Shortcodes for the Command Omnibar

🖥 New Desktop App

🏗 High-Fidelity Imports from other apps

📢 Intercom Based Support for Everyone!

🐛 Tons of Bug-Fixes

Read below for the detailed, long version 👇

New Features

💾 Alpha Plugins (Pro labs feature)

  • (Note - Plugins will be available once RemNote 1.8 is fully released).

  • Plugins will help you fine-tune RemNote for all of your thinking and learning needs.

  • Calling all Developers! - Our Plugin framework is powerful, secure, and easy-to-use. We think it’s one of the most powerful systems on the web and can’t wait to see what you build.

    • Features: 

      • Secure-by-default, with restricted plugin scopes at the Rem, Document, and Powerup level.

      • Sandboxed plugins that run from iFrames, while still providing rich integrations with our editor and the rest of RemNote.

      • Deeply visually integrated, letting you inject “widgets” almost anywhere in RemNote.

      • React first, along with pre-built components that let you include parts of RemNote (the editor, rendering a Rem, etc.) in your plugin itself.

      • Completely customizable, with API coverage hooks for almost everything in RemNote. 

      • ... and we’re just getting started with its API and features. We’ll continue to add more features as requested by our developers

    • Join the Alpha - Plug your Discord username into this form, and get added to our private dev channel and get access to build alpha plugins. We’ll start inviting devs once RemNote 1.8 is released next week!

Custom Themes and CSS

  • We’ve added stable “Custom CSS” hooks throughout the app that we’ll be maintaining permanently. Rapidly customize the entire app with global hooks (ex. .rn-clr-background-primary for all backgrounds) or target individual components (ex. .rn-rem-icon-bullet). Full documentation will be released alongside the plugin system.

Core Plugins

  • We’re kick-starting our plugin community with core plugins built by the RemNote team. Go to Settings > Plugins to install! 

Tabs

  • This allows us to create Workspaces that saves custom layouts of the Panes. You can now immediately jump into saved workspaces and resume your thought process/ reading flow in an instant. Switching between different workspaces is also instantaneous.

  • Each workspace can contain a different layout of Documents, Rems or PDFs and are automatically saved based on the last state.

Right-Sidebar History

  • This plugin records the history of all Rems you have visited, in the right sidebar, along with a timestamp. 

  • These Rems are expandable and you can edit children directly without leaving context.

Autocomplete

  • This plugin goes through words in your current document and auto-suggests words that match what you are currently typing. It shows a list of possible words that you can navigate using Up/Down arrow keys and insert using the Tab key.

Dictionary

  • Highlight words to automatically lookup the definition. Use this to add-quick definitions to your knowledgebase for words you don’t yet know - no more googling for definitions.

Puppy Reinforcement

  • Shows motivational puppy popups in the flashcard queue after completing a certain number of cards 🐶

  • Customize the interval between puppy popups in the plugin settings  

Wikipedia Popup

  • Right click on Wikipedia links to show a summary of the article.

  • Works for Wikipedia articles in any language.

Advanced Window Manager

  • Absolute pane focusing mode - use hotkeys to focus a pane by its pane number, which is displayed in the pane header.

  • Pane zoom mode (aka Monocle Mode) - toggle between a single fullscreen pane and multiple panes.

Knowledge Base Upgrades (Pro feature)

🤹 Additional synced Knowledge-Bases! 

  • Pro users and Life Long Learners can now create multiple Synced Knowledge bases in addition to multiple Local Knowledge bases.

👯 Shared Knowledge Bases (Alpha version - Pro Feature)

  • Work and learn together! You can now add additional users to any RemNote Knowledge Base. Shared Knowledge Bases are still at an early stage, but we’re working hard to make this a full featured option so you can share knowledge with your friends, family, colleagues, study buddies, & more.

  • To add someone to your Knowledge base, open Settings -> Choose the Knowledge Base you want to add Members to and then send them email invites.

  • Upcoming features include real-time collaboration, comments and other collaboration-specific tools to help you share knowledge quicker, better, and more efficiently. 

  • We’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback here.

🎩 First-Class Dark Mode 

  • Enjoy late-night studying? We’ve completely rebuilt dark mode and fine-tuned each pixel for an optimal experience.

  • Developers can now easily access a completely new design system with stable CSS tokens. Easily  write custom CSS and re-theme your app as you wish! We’ll be stability maintaining these hooks going forward.

  • Our new system permanently fixes a number of prior issues with dark-mode images and PDFs.

🧪 Labs

🔍 Omnibar Preview

  • We have added a new preview feature to the Omnibar. If you are Pro user or Life-long learner you can activate this by going to the Labs setting and turning on “Omnibar Preview”.

  • This will now show a preview of the selected Search result and is also scrollable and you could also interact with the preview minimally (expand and close backlink sections).

  • We would like to get more feedback here to know if this is actually useful to your workflow and/or if you would like to see more features here.

            

 📆 NLP for Dates in the Omnibar

  • Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the Omnibar now recognises dates and helps retrieve the correct Daily Document. If you are Pro user or Life-long learner you can activate this by going to the Labs setting and turning on “Omnibar NLP Date Search”.

  • For more good news,  you can now create daily documents for a specific day (any day, even if the document doesn’t yet exist) on the fly. Suppose you have an important task due a week from now, you can easily access the omnibar, create the document, and add a Rem, without referencing the specific date.

  • If you have any feedback for how we can improve this feature, feel free to leave us some comments here.

🔍 Search Omnibar Categories & more icons

  • We have introduced categories in the Omnibar, now you can find best matches on the top, followed by results that are categorized based on if it was a document, folder, concept, descriptor, power-up, a normal text in a document etc.,

  • Concepts, Descriptors and Slots also have their own icons now on the omnibar

Completely Revamped

✍️ New Editor

We’ve built a brand new editor from the ground up with mobile support, internationalization support, and many many performance improvements and bug fixes

🌐 Natively International 

  • Full non-Latin alphabet (including full right-to-left languages) support. No more search issues, bugs, or other idiosyncrasies. You’re welcome, пожалуйста, 不客氣, لا شكر على واجب, どういたしまして, and de nada!


📱 Full-Featured Mobile Editor

  • Like capturing ideas on the go? Our new mobile editor supports our full desktop rich-text editing experience:

    • Linking: Rem References, tags, and portals.

    • Flashcards: Creating basic cards, concept/descriptor cards, and cloze cards.

    • Formatting: Bold, italic, highlights, and more.

    • Rich Text: Math blocks, code blocks, dates, emojis and more. 

    • Fast selection, search, and more!

  • This replaces our prior markdown-only mobile editor for a significantly more polished experience.

  • This new editor is accompanied by a complete overhaul of our mobile UI and experience. Updated apps (iOS and Android) are coming veeery soon ;)

You can see a sneak peak here or just open RemNote on your phone (browser).

📲 Mobile Friendly UI design

We’ve completely rebuilt our mobile UI & UX so that the mobile apps feel natural to your devices. This is still an ongoing project but we are releasing some of the new designs along with this update and you can expect a fully revamped version along with the iOS app soon.

Some exciting enhancements for the mobile:

  • Mobile rich text editing toolbar that sticks to the top of the keyboard

  • New clean "All Notes" page 

  • A cleaner looking sidebar

  • All the Menus are now optimized for mobile

  • Search UI is new and fully optimized for mobile

  • Apps should open faster thanks to the new backend architecture

  • Mobile-optimized Daily Note picker 

  • A new Sticky Top bar that gives you better context of the document you are in

  • An Auto-shifting editor that makes way for your text as you go deeper in hierarchy

  • …. lot’s more to come



Stay tuned for our Full Mobile Release! 

Polished Features

🍞 Smart Breadcrumbs

  • Breadcrumbs can now collapse if there is not enough space





🔥 Multiple Panes on Steroids

  • Check out James’s video for cool tips on navigating your Knowledge Base using only RemNote’s keyboard:

📝 Fast-Loading Clipper

  • We have made some upgrades to the Clipper which should now load much faster and feel snappier than ever before.

  • Stay tuned for some exciting upgrades coming to the Clipper in the coming weeks!

Upgrades and Stability

New Architecture

⚡️ Faster, Consistent Syncing

  • We have rebuilt our backend database architecture to support faster syncing and real-time collaboration (coming real-soon™️)

  • Changes made across different tabs on the web-app/ across multiple devices should now reflect close to real-time and be protected against merge-conflicts. 

  • Syncing is now easier and more effective in the backend. This will enhance the collaboration experience when there are multiple users on Shared Knowledgebases. 

🔒 Total Data Ownership

  • The desktop app now saves all your data in a single local file that you can easily access, copy, delete or move.

  • Easily back-up your local file and sync across devices through third-party cloud services. However, keep in mind that this syncing will not be as effective as RemNote’s own syncing mechanism.

⏩ Faster Desktop App

  • Enjoy a faster, snappier Desktop App. Loading documents, editing, syncing, backups, and more all got a significant performance boost. We won’t stop until everything feels instant. 

🏗 High-Fidelity Imports

  • We have created full-fidelity import support for Workflowy, Dynalist, and Obsidian. We have also significantly improved Roam imports, and are working to make Anki imports more cleaner (coming soon!). 

  • If you are interested in learning more about this you can read this help article

  • We would love to get feedback on how well our imports are working and if you would like to see better support for other tools. Please share feedback and suggestions here.

📢 Better Integrated Support for Everyone!

  • We’ve updated our support communications system. Now, when you click the “?” icon in the bottom right of the app, you can communicate with the team directly (no more need for email). 

                                                  


📖 Refreshed Tutorials

  • We’ve also refreshed our Tutorials to help you be on top of the latest tips and tricks for making your RemNote workflow smoother and more efficient. 

  • You can now access them directly from the “Help & Tutorials” section of the ‘?’ menu.

       

💰 New Payment options

  • We now accept Alipay and WeChat payments via Stripe. We’re still testing these options, so please let us know if they work (and more importantly if it doesn’t! 😬)

🐛 Tons of Fixed Bugs

  • Too many to list! 😛

  • Tweak search ranking (hierarchy, prefix matches).

  • Fix daily document's date header content indicator getting oval when zooming.

  • Polish hidden children search popup.

  • New hover tooltips!

    • They are aligned with their reference element at all times, no more dark mode glitches.

    • Better display of keyboard shortcuts.

  • Simplify search portal toolbar buttons.

  • Fixed an issue where search did not immediately pick up new rem.

  • Backup names sort more sensibly. The new format is RemNoteBackup_USERNAME_FORMAT_YYYY-MM-DD.

  • Normalize file names in backup zips so fixing an extraction issue on Windows.

  • Polish selected text menu.

  • All Notes: Add exact document modification time as tooltip.

  • Fix crash in json import when given a malformed zip.

  • Polish Quick Add dialog buttons.

  • Add Trash and Import to account menu.

  • Add View Trash Omnibar command.

  • PDF Viewer: Fix PDF highlight toolbar being above the PDF.

  • Move "What's New?" from account menu to ? menu.

  • PDF Viewer: Polish highlight toolbar.

  • Improve performance of menus and dropdown, e.g. code language selector.

  • Editor: Polish code node buttons.

  • Popup: Prevent code language selector and right side rem info overflowing screen.

  • Hide "Show Tags" and "Add Sources" buttons on powerup rem.

  • Removed last instances of old icon set.

  • Add Omnibar commands to reveal and hide super private rem.

  • Noncomprehensive list of editor improvements

    • Close inline search popups with Esc.

    • Allow formatting of quotes. They don't split up anymore.

    • Better caret navigation and visibility around non-text elements like images, code blocks and rem references.

    • Close slash menu when cursor moves before the /.

    • Show ‒ as delimiter for disabled multi line cards.

    • Clear the concepts/descriptors when the delimiters are deleted or rem is emptied.

  • Improve keyboard support for inline link menu.

  • Fix too large button font weight.

  • Polish spacing of "Slots to Fill Out" popup menu.

  • Relayout Knowledge Graph settings.

  • Fix Omnibar showing gray on empty rem.

  • Export: Use correct image links when exporting Shared KBs from the Desktop App.

  • Keep window's document title in sync with the currently focused pane.

  • Import: Support importing a single markdown file.

  • Improve wording of settings descriptions.

  • Fix importing shared documents.

  • If breadcrumb items exceed 4, they collapse into a popup which can be opened by clicking the ellipsis.

  • Various homepage tweaks (e.g. listing more team members).

  • PDF Viewer: Fix "Upload to RemNote and Open" PDF upload not loading the PDF immediately.

  • Support reporting bugs via UserSnap while in Flashcards.

  • Omnibar: Shorter shortcodes.

  • Omnibar: Polish move/merge mode.

  • Add indicator to show long running background jobs.

  • Sidebar: Prevent image menu from showing.

  • Sidebar: Prevent rem references from being clicked.

  • Sidebar: Polish document buttons.

  • Sidebar: Polish document status section toggles icon and animation.

  • PDF Viewer: Fix double scroll bars.

  • Fix various instances where long text was not truncated properly.

  • Add "Copy URL" option for URL references/inline links.

  • Flashcards: Press any key to continue through checkpoints.

  • New "Forgot Password" UI.

  • Fixed some minor metadata losses when exporting and reimporting JSON backups.

  • Sidebar: Add "Open in Another Pane" to context menu.

  • Document Header: Correctly show all card delimiters.

  • Fix line wrapping of various rich text input fields, like Ctrl + F.

  • Flashcards: Include image occlusion cards from rem references, e.g. from PDF highlights, in the document queue.

  • All Notes: Fix layout shifts caused by opened sidebar.

  • Flashcards: When Type Answer is enabled, a successful review will focus the "Recalled with Effort" button instead of the "Immediately" button.

For this update 14 engineers authored 4989 commits in 501 Pull Requests (and counting). We likely forgot a few fixes and enhancements in the list above :P 

Happy Learning Everyone!

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