This update focuses on the core design of the app and changes the navigation layout. The New 3-column layout will fill familiar if you used Notes, Ulysses and Mail. The older version showed files and folders in a single sidebar. The new version separates folders from files. It makes a difference if you have many folders and notes, finding what you need is much easier.

What you might notice as well is performance. Everything is faster now, and the editor no longer recreated when switching between modes. In the past, it caused a loss of the cursor position. Files will load faster, and the preview is now instant, while in the past it had a 1-second update interval.

This update requires macOS 13. It was a good opportunity to try all SwiftUI improvements from this year. It’s still a long journey for SwiftUI on the Mac to have feature parity with AppKit, but many things I had to rely on AppKit or couldn’t do at all, are now available in SwiftUI. I especially like new window management changes which allow me to set the default location and size for windows. In addition, I finally can disable the zoom button for some of my windows. Previously, I had to rely on a hack and hide those buttons after the window appear and you sometimes could see the glitch. Finally, just to open a new window is now 1 line of code in SwiftUI which replaces almost 30 lines of the AppKit code.

Foundation is a big focus of this version. I wanted to make sure it’s solid, clean and has as few bugs as possible. Unit tests were rewritten. No longer I need to make changes in the code to make the test pass, and unit tests are no longer modifying the file system, and potentially deleting my metadata files.

Known issues

  • Creating a new file will add it to the root folder instead of the current folder. Workaround – click on the folder you are working on before adding a new file.

Download LinkEdit from the Mac App Store for free.