SideNotes ships small and often. Every release, top to bottom, what landed, what got fixed, what got cut. The newest version is at the top.
v0.4.0
June 2026Latest
Talk to your notes with voice dictation, sketch ideas with built-in Excalidraw drawings, and back everything up to GitHub in one click with a rebuilt Source Control. Still fully local-first and private.
New
Voice dictation, hold a key and speak; your words are transcribed and dropped at the cursor. Pick a cloud model (OpenAI gpt-4o-transcribe, or Groq) for top accuracy, or run Whisper fully offline on your machine. Optional AI cleanup removes filler words and fixes punctuation
Excalidraw drawings, create freehand sketches and diagrams as .excalidraw files right in your vault, from the + menu, the command palette, or by right-clicking a folder. Fully offline, autosaves as you draw
Source Control, rebuilt, the panel updates live as you edit, surfaces the next action (a prominent Push to GitHub when you are ahead), shows an honest Up to date state, and Commit auto-stages your changes so you never have to think about staging
Test connection, verify your AI provider or voice model works from Settings before relying on it
The Assistant panel now shows at a glance whether it is set up and which model is active, with one-click setup when it is not
The version number now sits next to the SideNotes logo
Fixed
Notes with a blank line inside a fenced code block (multi-section Mermaid diagrams) no longer render corrupted; the editor parses Markdown cleanly so code blocks and diagrams stay intact, and a save can never overwrite a note with garbled content
Mermaid diagrams now follow your theme (node fills, borders, and text use the active palette instead of stock colors) and re-render instantly when you switch light or dark or change themes; labels are no longer clipped, and Enlarge opens a full-size, readable view you can pan and zoom
Source Control now keeps Pull and Push side by side and always one click away, plus a Check for updates that fetches the latest from GitHub so the ahead and behind counts stay accurate
Source Control no longer shows a stale ahead/behind count, first-time pushes set the upstream automatically, and git errors (auth, network, conflicts) are shown in plain English instead of raw stderr
Create and OK buttons in dialogs are now readable on every theme (were light-on-light in dark themes)
AI settings decluttered, the API key and model come first, with the endpoint Base URL tucked under Advanced
The top bar was trimmed from nine icons to six; less-used actions moved into the overflow menu
v0.3.0
May 2026
Mermaid diagrams, image + PDF viewer, todo notes with progress, virtual Year/Month grouping for daily notes, and a hard fix for an external-edit data-loss path.
New
Mermaid diagrams, flowcharts, sequence, gantt and more render live inside ```mermaid code blocks, themed to the active palette
Image + PDF viewer, click any .png/.jpg/.gif/.webp/.svg/.bmp/.avif/.pdf in the file tree to open it in a tab (PDFs use Chromium’s built-in viewer)
Todo notes, files under any /todos/ folder (or named todos.md) get a dedicated header with live task counts, progress bar, and an Add task affordance
Daily notes auto-group by Year / Month in the sidebar, purely visual, files stay flat on disk so iCloud, Dropbox, and git don’t see a thing
Markdown variants, .markdown, .mdx, .mdown, .mkd, .mkdn, .mdwn all index and open in the editor
Carbon · dark is now the default theme on fresh installs
Fixed
Critical data-loss path, editing a file outside SideNotes (iCloud, Dropbox, git checkout, another editor) no longer gets silently clobbered by the open tab’s stale buffer, the editor reloads on external change and preserves unsaved local edits on conflict
Rename, new note, new folder, new canvas, and link dialogs no longer crash on Electron’s disabled window.prompt, replaced with a themed in-app dialog
Native confirm() and alert() replaced with a styled confirmation modal and a non-blocking toast
Right-click rename now preserves the original extension instead of forcing .md (canvas, mdx, markdown renames work correctly)
Tab strip updates correctly after rename; stale tabs pointing at deleted files close themselves instead of looping read errors
Task checkbox color follows the active theme accent (was a hardcoded blue)
Daily-note and todo task counts no longer stuck at 0 on file load
vault:// image resolver now finds attachments at common publish-site paths (blog/<slug>/foo.png resolves to blogs/images/<slug>/foo.png)
Custom-styled checkboxes replace the heavy native OS chrome inside the task list
Removed
Placeholder "Add weather / Add meetings / Add reading" chips on daily notes, replaced with live Words / Tasks / Streak counters driven from the editor
v0.2.0
May 2026
Outline, smarter file-watching, and a cleaner editor, minor version, real polish.
New
Outline panel, live table of contents alongside every markdown note
Folder changes made outside SideNotes (addDir / unlinkDir) now sync to the sidebar instantly
Deleting a file externally now closes its tab and focuses the next one
Fixed
⌘N, daily note, and "new from template" now open a tab immediately
Canvas edge handles now render the correct colour (bg-link was being purged by Tailwind)
Daily note header no longer double-reads energy mood from localStorage on mount
Removed
Redundant BacklinksPanel (superseded by Connections panel)
Dead dirname / slugify utilities and unused fsWatch import