Task Indicator | Custom CSS Improvements | Bug fixes and performance improvements

This update primarily brings two new features to the table: A visual task indicator for long-running tasks, and great improvements in the experience for Custom CSS users.

First, our new long-running task indicator gives you a better overview and insight into any task that you perform in Zettlr that can take long, such as exporting projects to PDF. Now, whenever you start a task that might take a while, Zettlr will show an indicator in the toolbar. It encodes several pieces of information, such as how many tasks are running, how many have failed, and how many were successful. Click the indicator to see more details for each task, including an explicit run time. Once you "clear" the tasks, the icon will disappear again until you start new tasks. If you have hardware acceleration disabled, Zettlr will only show an icon, but if you keep it enabled, you will see an animation.

Second, we have cleaned up the editor CSS. More specifically, the editor themes now make use of CSS variables to style most of their content. This can greatly reduce the complexity for those of you who want to use custom CSS. However, this also means that some custom CSS may break during this update, so make sure you adjust any CSS after updating.

Besides this, this update fixes a few additional bugs, most visibly/notably missing icons in the status bar. See the changelog below for all changes.

Do you enjoy Zettlr? With the recent spikes in SSD and RAM costs, our server costs have skyrocketed. Consider donating to help us pay for the development costs. You can donate monthly on Patreon or once via PayPal. Additionally, you can directly sponsor Hendrik Erz on GitHub or send a tip on Ko-Fi. Thanks for your support!

Changelog

GUI and Functionality

• Feature: Long-running background tasks are now visually indicated with a toolbar icon. This allows users to check on longer-running tasks such as project exports or the re-indexing of new workspaces and observe the progress as it happens.
• Add HCL/Terraform fenced code block support (#6302).
• Fixed Mermaid Chart labels not showing up (#6313).
• Fixed icons in the statusbar not working.
• Update Spanish (es-ES) translations (#6320).

Under the Hood

• Updated Electron to v41.3.0.
• Update vue-virtual-scroller to v3.0.0.
• Fixed an issue where the config provider would not emit the old version correctly (context: [#6311]).
• Breaking: Refactored the editor themes (#6229). Now styling the app with Custom CSS is easier and should work more straight forward, since there are many CSS variables that you can peruse to adjust groups of elements at once. Note that this change might break your Custom CSS. Make sure to check anything after setup, and adjust it according to your liking.
• Centralized DOMPurify functionality and default configuration in a new utility function, that also allows icons using cds-icon.
• Switch from ts-node to tsx for running unit tests.
• Explicitly declare Zettlr as a CommonJS project.
• Change the Object.create(null) contraption to hold BibTeX attachments to a regular object to simplify the structure and unit tests.

New Contributors

• @a-goodarzi made their first contribution in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/6302
• @lridalc made their first contribution in https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/pull/6320

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/compare/v4.4.0...v4.5.0