Quillfold 3.0: What Changed and What Did Not

Quillfold 3.0 is available today. It's a major version because one thing underneath changed, and when something underneath changes, a new number is the honest label.

The one big change

Notes are now plain markdown files in an ordinary folder. Before 3.0, Quillfold kept notes in its own database, and you reached them through the app or through an export. Now every note is a file, named after its title, sitting in a folder you choose. Open it in any other editor and it's just text.

We made this change for the reason people kept giving us in support email: they wanted to be able to leave. A notes app that holds your writing in a format only it can read is asking for a kind of trust we don't think it has earned. Linnea spent the summer on the migration, and the first-launch screen converts an existing notebook with a progress bar and a copy kept in the old format until you say it's safe to delete.

What else is new

• Read-only sharing. Any note can produce a link that shows a clean, read-only copy. You can switch the link off at any time, and it stops working immediately.

• Command palette. One shortcut opens a list of everything Quillfold can do, searchable by name. The quick switcher from 2.7 is now part of it.

• A calmer sidebar. Folders, tags and pinned notes are now three clearly separated areas, and each one can be collapsed on its own.

What did not change matters as much as the list above. Your tags are untouched. Your pinned order is untouched. The keyboard shortcuts you learned are the same, and the merge behaviour from 2.7 carries over exactly as shipped. We also did not add accounts, an AI assistant, or a subscription tier, and we have no plan to.

Version history

The five releases before this one, newest first.

• 2.7: offline edits merge line by line, quick switcher, pinned order preserved.

• 2.6: auto-tagging removed, tag suggestions come from tags you already have.

• 2.5: faster launch on large notebooks, a Copy as markdown command.

• 2.4: window state remembered per window, new sidebar width controls.

• 2.3: dark mode follows the system setting without a restart.

Specifications

Known issues and upgrading

Known issues. Converting a notebook with several thousand notes can take a few minutes, and the progress bar moves in bursts rather than smoothly. The collapsed state of the three sidebar areas is not yet remembered between launches.

Upgrading. Take a backup first. We say this on every major release, and we mean it more than usual this time. The converter has run against two thousand test notebooks, including several of ours that are years old. It's been careful every time. A backup is still a backup.

After conversion, the old database stays on disk in a folder called Quillfold Archive until you remove it. Ravi wrote the removal prompt, and it is deliberately boring: it tells you how much space you'll get back and asks once.

If you'd rather stay on 2.7, you can. We'll keep shipping security fixes for it through the end of next year.