ReText 5.3 released

by Dmitry Shachnev
in Planet

tagged ReText

On Sunday I have released ReText 5.3, and here finally comes the official announcement.

Highlights in this release are:

  • A code refactoring has been performed — a new “Tab” class has been added, and all methods that affect only one tab (not the whole window) have been moved there.

    From the user’s point of view this means two things:

    • The tabs are now draggable and reorderable (this was a feature requested long time ago).

    • Some operations are now faster and more efficient. For example, in the previous release turning the WebKit renderer on/off required removing all the tabs and then re-adding them back, this giant hack has been dropped now.

  • A new previewer feature was contributed by Jan Korte: now, if the document contains a local link like

    [click me](foo.mkd)

    and a file named foo.mkd exists, it is opened in a new ReText tab.

    It is also possible to specify names without the extension (just foo) or relative paths (../foo/bar.mkd).

  • The colors used in the editor are now fully configurable via the standard configuration mechanism. This is most useful for users of dark themes.

    For example, you can change the color of line numbers area, the cursor position box, and all colors used by the highlighter.

    The possible colors and the procedure to change them is described in the “Color scheme setting” section in the documentation.

  • The “Display right margin at column” feature now displays the line more precisely: in the previous version it was some pixels left to the cursor, now it is exactly on the same horizontal position as the cursor.

  • Some bug fixes have been made for users that install ReText using pip or setup.py install:

    • The desktop file no longer hardcodes the path to executable in the Exec field, it uses just retext now. This fix has been contributed by Buo-Ren Lin.

    • The setup.py script now installs the application logo into a location where ReText can find it. Note: this works only for installs into user’s home directory (with --user passed to pip or setup.py install), installing software globally this way is not recommended anyway.

  • The AppStream metadata included in the previous version was updated to fix some warnings from the appstream.debian.org metadata validator.

Also, a week before ReText 5.3 a new version of PyMarkups was released, bringing enhanced support for the Textile markup. You can now edit Textile files in ReText too, provided that python-textile module for Python 3 is installed.

As usual, you can get the latest release from PyPI or from the Debian/Ubuntu repositories.

Please report any bugs you find to our issue tracker.