Version 2.8 RC 1

Release Notes

This is a release candidate of the next release version, and is intended for testing purposes. Please be careful when using this version on live writing projects, and make sure you take frequent backups.

Detailed Changelog

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug that would block the return key in the editor if French style space padding was enabled in Preferences. Issue #2586. PR #2587.
• Fixed an issue where dialog state was no longer saved properly when they were closed for many dialogs. This may be due to a change in the Qt framework, or a bug from a previous release. PR #2585.
• Fixed an issue where a confusing error would show up if the user cancelled the file dialog during example project creation. A new dialog now tells you what the actual issue was and sends you back to the welcome dialog. Issue #2590. PR #2592.

Features

• Vim mode has been added to the editor, and can now be enabled in Preferences. Contributed by @idealemu. Issue #2493. PRs #2499 and #2588.

Improvements

• Using format button from the editor toolbar will not apply the formatting on lines that cannot take formatting, like headings and meta data lines. Issue #2560. PR #2575.
• Added an option in Preferences that will try to centre the main app windows during startup. This effect is always triggered if the main window is scaled down at startup due to being opened on a smaller screen. Issue #2579. PRs #2580 and #2581.
• The example project has been updated and improved. Issue #2570. PRs #2572 and #2574.
• The spacing between icon and text in push buttons has been increased. PR #2582.
• The font selection dialog now remembers its previous size, and uses the new standard push buttons instead of the Qt defaults. PR #2584.
• It is now possible to override the manuscript language meta value for document formats that have this. The IETF BCP 47 language tag is used. Issue #2328. PR #2593.

Internationalisation

• Updated US English, Italian, Norwegian, and Japanese translations. PR #2589.

Version 2.8 Beta 1

Release Notes

This is a beta release of the next release version, and is intended for testing purposes. Please be careful when using this version on live writing projects, and make sure you take frequent backups.

Detailed Changelog

Bugfixes

• The editor now properly supports 4 byte Unicode characters without breaking the syntax highlighting and spell checker. Issue #2449. PR #2451.
• Fixed a bug in the font matching code where the style name property for the font was set, preventing Qt from picking a proper styled font. Issue #2502. PR #2503.
• Spell check dictionaries in the main menu are now updated when new dictionaries are installed using the add dictionaries tool. Contributed by @Reproog. Issue #2558. PR #2562.
• Fixed an issue where the Novel Tree panel heading would be greyed out if there was only one Novel root folder. Issue #2482. PR #2556.

Features

• Current line highlighting has been added and can be enabled in Preferences. Issue #1321. PR #2405.
• The Status and Importance labels can now use theme colours in addition to a user defined custom colour. The settings for these labels have also been made clearer. Issues #2357, #2366 and #2452. PRs #2400 and #2461.
• Markdown style highlighting tags are now supported in the editor. Issue #1894. PR #2412.
• Synopsis/short comments, story comments, and story notes can now be used multiple times under a heading. The text is just appended as a new paragraph each time the annotated comment type is encountered. Issue #2483. PR #2543.

Improvements

• You can now press Ctrl+T and Ctrl+Shift+T when in Focus Mode to exit the Focus Mode automatically and switch to the Project Tree or Outline View. Issue #1294. PR #2479.
• When creating a new document from a template, the first title of the template document is replaced with the label text set for the new document. Issue #2238. PR #2477.
• When the app is performing a potentially bulky and time consuming task, a small progress bar will appear at the top of the status bar to show the progress of the task. It is currently used when the index is rebuilt and when processing multiple documents in the Project Tree. Issue #2243. PR #2478.
• The auto-replace feature in the editor is now better at detecting opening and closing quotes when used in relation to markdown style markup. Issue #2488. PR #2489.
• The application window is now blocked from resizing itself to a size larger than the screen when opened on a smaller screen than it was previously opened on. Like for instance when it was connected to an external screen from a laptop. Issue #2354. PR #2369.
• Improved the CSS styling of HTML manuscript documents. Issue #2358. PR #2404.
• Trailing spaces are no longer highlighted in the editor with an error underline. Multiple spaces between words still are. Issue #2501. PR #2505.
• The rebuild index dialog is no longer showed if the index is rebuilt due to index structure changes when a project is opened for the first time in a newer version of novelWriter. This was confusing to some users who thought the dialog indicated an error. Issue #2513. PR #2537.
• A switch on the Manuscript Build Settings dialog now allows for automatic preview of the build when Apply or Save is clicked. Issue #2486. PR #2553.
• Formatting and handling of Story Comments and Story Notes have been improved, and they can be filtered separately in the viewer panel. PR #2421.

User Interface

• The GUI and syntax themes have been merged into a single theme, which means there are no longer separate settings for the general GUI and the document colour theme. Issue #2335. PR #2373.
• There are now two GUI theme settings in Preferences, one for light and one for dark mode. A new button on the sidebar allows you to switch between them, or it can be set to auto mode that follows the operating system's light/dark mode. Issues #1173 and #2487. PRs #2373 and #2545.
• More themeable settings have been added. The document active flag, the theme base colour, and the new GUI accent colour (if Qt version is high enough) is now available. Issue #2382. PR #2384.
• The highlighting colour for special white spaces, like non-breaking spaces, can now be set in the theme. Previously it used the emphasis colour. Issue #2547. PR #2548.
• The Welcome dialog background now follows the theme colours. Issue #2379. PR #2380.
• The dialog buttons now use icons from the selected theme, not from the host OS. Issues #2498, #2551 and #2561. PRs #2544, #2546, #2553, #2557 and #2563.
• Added semantic categories for icon colours which can be defined in the colour theme. PR #2549.
• Primer Dark and Primer Light themes added by @HeyMyian. Issue #2376. PRs #2377 and #2419.
• Horizon, Otium, Paragon, Selenium, Sepia, Sultana, Vivid, Warpgate, and Waterlily themes added by @HeyMyian. Issue #2407. PR #2495.
• Aura, B2T Garden, B2T Suburb, B4T Classic-O, B4T Modern-C, Everforest, New Moon, Full Moon, Nord, Nordlicht, Castle, Chernozem, Chalky Soil, Floral, Ruby themes added by @HeyMyian. PR #2450.
• Blue Streak themes added. PR #2388.
• LCARS theme added. PR #2399.
• Espresso and Noctis themes added. PR #2422.
• Various improvements to existing and new themes by @vkbo. PRs #2396, #2418, #2475 and #2481.
• Various improvements to existing and new themes by @HeyMyian. PRs #2506 and #2494.

Packaging

• The license info for novelWriter has been updated to include GPL-3.0-or-later, Apache-2.0, and CC-BY-4.0. Issue #2444. PR #2446.
• Updated Debian package build and added Qt6 plugin for WebP images as a dependency. PR #2401.

Documentation

• Added some info on how to get around the line heigh issue in the editor in the Tips & Tricks section of the documentation. Issue #2559. PR #2564.
• Fixed some typos in the documentation. PR #2542.

Code Maintenance

• Improved linting and added more mapped Qt constants. PR #2536.
• Added test coverage of the theme files to ensure they are up to date. PR #2378.
• Updated credits and license information of icon themes. PR #2474.
• Some fields have been dropped from icon and colour themes. PRs #2466 and #2423.
• Changed a few default settings in config, added automatic rebuild of the index in new projects, and fixed tests. PR #2395.
• Added test coverage and support for Python 3.14. PR #2538.
• Improved logging formatting by stripping HTML content. PR #2402.
• Cleaned up and improved pkgutils CLI tool. PR #2541.
• The project now uses UV as the primary dependency handling tool for development. PR #2540.
• Fixed the run_tests helper script for HighDPI monitors. PR #2496.

Version 2.7.5

Release Notes

This is a patch release that fixes an issue related to crashes when using the completer menu under certain conditions, and improves positioning of the input box for CJK languages.

Detailed Changelog

Bugfixes

• Fixes an issue where the app would crash of deleting the @ character with the completer menu visible and the text margins of the editor set to "justified". This is likely crashing due to some unhandled corner case in the Qt library, but the implementation of the completer menu in novelWriter uses a small hack to bypass some intended behaviour of the menu. Extra steps have been added to the implementation that seems to avoid the crash. Issue #2510. PR #2511.
• Fixes an issue where the input box that shows up when typing CJK languages were covering the text due to an incorrect offset of the box location. The incorrect offset is caused by the text margins not being taken into account. Fix by @Euophrys based on solution by @Jack-name. Issues #2267 and #2517. PR #2518.

Version 2.7.4

Release Notes

This is a patch release that updates the Czech and French translations, and makes some changes to the available Material Symbols icon themes. Additional icon themes are no longer automatically included in all release packages due to license constraints.

Detailed Changelog

Internationalisation

• The Czech and French translations are now complete. PR #2469.

Packaging

• Only the Material Symbols icons are included by default in packages. Other icon themes are included depending on licensing restrictions for free and non-free requirements. The Material Symbols Bold themes have been dropped, and a Sharp theme added. Issue #2462. PR #2467.

Version 2.7.3

Release Notes

This is a patch release that fixes a bug in, and makes a few improvement to, Preferences.

Detailed Changelog

Bugfixes

• Fixes an issue where novelWriter would crash if a % was added to any of the free text settings fields in Preferences. Issue #2455. PR #2456.

Improvements

• The "Dialogue line symbols" setting in Preferences now has an "Add" button with a dropdown menu for all the symbols allowed in this field. Since virtually none of them are available on a regular keyboard, this makes it easier to add them and more transparent which symbols are allowed in the box. Issue #2453. PR #2457.
• The switch for the "Allow open-ended dialogue" setting in Preferences has been moved up one line so it is clearer that it only applies to quoted dialogue, and not to the alternative dialogue settings. Issue #2454. PR #2457.

Packaging

• Package license information has been updated to also list the licenses for the new icon themes. Issue #2434. PRs #2435 and #2458.

Version 2.7.2

Release Notes

This is a patch release that fixes several issues related to DocX and PDF manuscript documents, improves how line breaks, alignment and indentation is processed, and fixes some issues with displaying tags for novel documents on the user interface.

Detailed Changelog

Bugfixes

• Fixed an issue where escaped markup characters were not replaced properly in DocX and PDF documents, and in previews. Issue #2410. PR #2411.
• Fixed an issue where titles with line breaks in them would have page breaks applied to both lines for preview and PDF documents. Issue #2415. PR #2416.
• Fixed an issue where the justified text setting would not be properly applied to a paragraph in a manuscript document if there was a line break in the paragraph, but single line breaks were set to be ignored. Issue #2426. PR #2427.
• Fixed an issue where the "Tag" field of the Outline View details panel remained blank even if a tag was set for the novel document. Issue #2428. PR #2429.

Improvements

• When comments are enabled in the viewer, story comments should also be visible. A separate filter button will be added for this in 2.8. PR #2420.
• When a paragraph has line breaks in it, the alignment tag will now override first line indentation even if the alignment tag is not on the first line. This is more consistent with the alignment behaviour for multi-line paragraphs in general. Issue #2425. PR #2427.
• Tags will now be shown in the Novel View tooltip pop-out under the triangle button, together with all the other meta data collected about a document or heading. PR #2429.

Documentation

• The documentation on how alignment and first line indentation works in conjunction with in-paragraph line breaks, the setting to keep or ignore such line breaks, and the forced line break shortcode, has been improved. Issue #2425. PR #2427.

Update

AppImage updated on 2025-06-28 with one built on Ubuntu 22.04

Version 2.7.1

Release Notes

This is a patch release that fixes some issues with tags and references, and issue with the auto-complete menu on Windows, and issues with the AppImage on Linux. The Czech translation for 2.7 has been completed.

Detailed Changelog

Bugfixes

• Fix a bug where tags would be listed in the auto-complete menu for mentions even if the file defining it had been moved to Archive or Trash. Issue #2387. PR #2389.
• Fixed a bug that seems to only have occurred on Windows where the auto-complete menu would hold on to the return and arrow keys even when it was hidden. Issue #2386. PR #2389.

Improvements

• The auto-complete menu in the editor no longer shows any suggestions when defining the tag. This never made sense anyway. PR #2389.

Internationalisation

• Updated the Czech. PR #2393.

Packaging

• Fixed an issue with the AppImage release where on some platforms libxcb-cursor0 was missing. The library is now included in the AppImage. Issue #2374. PR #2392.

Version 2.7

Release Notes

The 2.7 release updates the 2.7 RC 1 release and makes an improvement to the build settings tool. It also updates most translations and updates the French version of the documentation.

See the website for complete Release Notes.

Detailed Changelog

Improvement

• The Manuscript Build Settings dialog now works on a copy of the settings so that if the dialog box is closed without saving, all changes are discarded. It should also now detect any change made to properly raise a confirmation prompt when closing without saving. Issue #2350. PR #2351.

Documentation

• The user documentation has been restructured, and the Getting Started section has been made less technical. The install instructions have been moved out and into the main website. The technical and in-depth parts of the documentation have been kept, but moved further back so that the documentation can be read from the start and to the point where the user has enough information. The larger sections have also been split up so that it should be easier to find the wanted information directly from the menu. Issue #2345. PR #2355.

Internationalisation

• Updated US English, Japanese, Norwegian. German, Italian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese and Chinese translation files. PR #2353.
• French documentation updated by @Karduin. Issue #2360. PR #2361.

Version 2.7 RC 1

Release Notes

This is a release candidate of the next release version, and is intended for testing purposes. Please be careful when using this version on live writing projects, and make sure you take frequent backups.

Detailed Changelog

New Features

• It is now possible to set character count as the main statistics displayed on the GUI instead of word count. The setting is available under the "Appearance" section in Preferences. Issue #1657. PR #2323.
• Comments can now be marked as "Manuscript Notes" with the %Note.term: syntax. The term is a free form value that is displayed alongside the note when exported to the manuscript. Each term is also added as a column in exports from the Outline View. Issue #1133. PR #2346.
• A completer drop down menu has been added to comments as well in the editor. It is triggered when a new line starts with %. It will show the options of Synopsis, Short, Story and Note, and when a period is added after the latter two, show a list of previously used Story and Note keys. Issue #1784. PR #2290.

Improvements

• The dialogue colour of the Snazzy Light syntax theme has changed from yellow to blue, which should make it easier to read. PR #2336.
• The Snazzy Light theme has also been added as a GUI theme. PR #2334.
• The auto-generated title page for new projects should now make a little more sense in terms of default values filled in for the author. PR #2333.
• The new project form on the Welcome dialog now remembers the previous author name filled in, so there should be no need to type it again every time. PR #2333.
• Project name and author name values are now also used for new example projects. PR #2333.
• The narrator break symbol settings for dialogue have been changed from a free text field to a dropdown list of dashes. This helps to avoid misunderstandings where the field was populated with other symbols, like quote symbols (see #2320). Issue #2324. PR #2327.
• A splash screen is now shown at startup, providing some information about the initialisation steps the startup script is running before the GUI is launched. Since loading system fonts can be quote heavy, this at least gives some user feedback to users running on systems where there is a significant delay. In particular, there is a long delay when loading fonts with poor Unicode support, in which case the Qt library will look for replacement glyphs when the symbols are first encountered. Previously, the delay happened when the Welcome dialog was being drawn, since this is the first time a non-Ascii Unicode character is used. Now these Unicode characters are probed when the config is loaded, with progress output on the splash screen. Issue #2315. PR #2316.

Bugfixes

• Moving a note between root folders of a different type will now update the class the tags defined within the note are associated with. This association is used to populate the tag auto-completion in the editor. Issue #2330. PR #2343.
• The story structure comments now appear under the correct column when exported to CSV from the Outline View. Issue #2313. PR #2343.
• A new unique ID is now assigned to new example projects. Creating multiple example projects would previously retain the original ID, causing the Welcome dialog to override them rather than list them as unique projects. PR #2333.
• In Qt6, or probably in PyQt6, the datetime type from Python was truncated to a date variable when localising it. This has been fixed by explicitly converting the Python datetime to a QDateTime before passing it to the PyQt wrapper. This is probably a bug in PyQt6. Issue #2325. PR #2326.
• A missing Remix icon for project copy has been added. Issue #2314. PR #2317.

Accessibility

• Trees and lists on the GUI have been assigned names so that screen readers can more easily identify them. Switches on the GUI have also been associated with their labels so the screen reader can pick up the label text. Icons on the project tree also have an accessibility label. Issues #2106 and #2107. PR #2337.
• Switches should now show a highlighted border when they have focus, and the toggle animation also now works properly when a switch is toggled using the keyboard. This should improve keyboard navigation. PR #2337.
• The default status and importance labels for new projects now use shapes for icons, to make the defaults more accessible for people with reduced colour vision. Issue #2332. PR #2333.

Code Improvements

• New tests have been added for the custom data models, using the Qt model tester framework that ensures the models have all the virtual methods implemented. PR #2331.

Version 2.7 Beta 1

Release Notes

This is a beta release of the next release version, and is intended for testing purposes. Please be careful when using this version on live writing projects, and make sure you take frequent backups.

Detailed Changelog

New Features

• The TypIcons icon set has been dropped and all individual icon files removed. Instead, three new icon themes have been added in a total of nine different variations. These icon themes are kept in single files and generated from official sources. They are also colourised at runtime using the GUI theme colours for consistency. Issue #2159. PRs #2171, #2174, #2177, #2178 and #2203.
• Support for Story Structure comments have been added. These are special in-text comments that can be used for analysing the story structure using various writing techniques. The comments are indexed by novelWriter and can be included in manuscripts as well as exported to CSV files from the Outline View for use with spread sheet software. Idea and documentation by Alan Langford (@instancezero). Issues #1784, #2288, #2289 and #2296. PRs #2255, #2284, #2293, #2295 and #2298.

Improvements

• The thickness of the editor cursor can now be set in Preferences. Issue #2219. PR #2230.
• The Novel View has been rewritten from scratch using a model/view framework. Several minor issues were resolved in the process. Issues #942 and #2253. PR #2272.
• The logic of where new documents are added in the project tree has been rewritten and improved. The algorithm should now avoid adding chapters within chapters when a scene inside a chapter is selected. Otherwise the behaviour should be similar to before, but it will now also apply the same logic when new documents are created from templates. Issue #2260. PR #2302.
• Dialogue highlighting should now work a little better for single quoted dialogue when it encounters apostrophes in the same text. Issue #2271. PR #2300.
• Quoted text is no longer highlighted as dialogue in the editor when the document is a project note. This is consistent with how the viewer and manuscript tool work. Issue #2297. PR #2299.

Documentation

• Internationalisation for the documentation is now properly supported in the code base, and new contributions are possible. Discussion #1834. PRs #2224 and #2227.

Internationalisation

• French translation files for the documentation were added by @Karduin. PR #2226.

Packaging and Installation

• The move to Qt6 is complete, and the new minimum requirement is Qt 6.4. Issues #864, #1142, #2192, #2193, #2194 and #2195. PRs #2184, #2187, #2190, #2191, #2196, #2204, #2301 and #2306.
• Support for Python 3.9 has been dropped. Due to the Qt6 change, older distros are no longer supported. The oldest Ubuntu release still supported is 24.04. PR #2182.
• The Windows release now uses a custom novelWriter.exe launcher rather than calling the Python exe directly with novelWriter.pyw as an argument. This means novelWriter can also be launched from its install folder, and desktop shortcuts created directly. It also simplifies the registry entries. PRs #2197, #2198 and #2199.
• The Appdata XML files used with AppImage releases has been updated and broken links fixed. PR #2229.
• RPM packages are now available for the 2.6.3 release on Fedora 41 and 42. Several minor adjustments to the code base has been made to make the packaging process easier for the 2.7 release. The Fedora releases are maintained by Benson Muite (@bkmgit). Issues #907, #2276 and #2303. PRs #2305 and #2307.
• The shebang from the launch script on Windows has been removed. Issue #1284. PR #2280.

Code Improvements

• The log output now obeys the NO_COLOR and FORCE_COLOR environment variables. PR #2228.
• The CI/CD pipeline now runs type checking on the code base using Pyright. PR #2279.
• The CI/CD pipeline now uses Ruff to check code style and format. PRs #2281, #2282 and #2287.
• The code base has been updated to conform to new linting rules. PR #2201.