ReText 7.0 released

by Dmitry Shachnev
in Release announcements

tagged ReText

Today my markup editor ReText got a new major version, 7.0.

It contains many new features and improvements, the most notable of which are:

  • Improved installation on Windows and macOS. All you need is Python 3.x and the pip install ReText command.

  • The highlighter was improved. It got support for reStructuredText links, field lists and for Markdown and reStructuredText code spans.

    reStructuredText highlighting example

  • Added the text replace feature. The search toolbar now has “Replace” and “Replace all” actions.

  • Added the experimental renderer based on Qt WebEngine, in addition to the existing Qt WebKit one. The main purpose of this renderer is to provide the ability to view rich web content (such as math formulas) to users of Windows and macOS, where there is no easy way to install Qt WebKit.

  • For those who use the Table editing mode, it is now possible to insert new table rows by pressing Return. Additionally, pressing Shift+Return will create a new row and a separator line (useful in reStructuredText grid tables and in Markdown for separating headers row from the body rows).

  • The WebKit and WebEngine previewers can now detect links to local HTML files and open the corresponding source files in new tab if those are found. If you have a file named foo.md, then clicking on a link pointing to foo.md, foo.html or just foo will open that file. (The QTextBrowser previewer had this feature since version 5.3.)

  • ReText can now automatically detect encoding of files using the chardet module when it is installed. The threshold for confidence is set to 0.9 so the false positives are very unlikely; however one can still disable this feature using the configuration file.

  • Several new configuration options were added. You can find the full list of them here.

I would like to thank everyone who has contributed to this release: Hong-She Liang for encoding auto-detection, initial work on replace option, and the option to automatically reopen previous documents; Atri Bhattacharya and Martin Pluskal for the appdata description; Jeremy Chen for Windows support improvements; JGoutin for macOS support improvements; Maurice van der Pot for his advice and help with preparing this release; and some my colleagues for testing and feedback.