Build 32: Zen Mode, Themed Previews, and a Preview You Can Work In

Build 32 is a big one. It’s three features I’ve wanted for a long time, plus the quiet plumbing that makes them feel like one app instead of three.

Distraction-Free — Zen Mode

Some days you want the outline, the affordances, the task counts — the whole workshop. Other days you just want the words.

Zen Mode (⌃⌘Z) strips the editor back to calm text: muted Markdown syntax, a faded interface, no toolbar, and an unobtrusive word count in the corner. What it doesn’t do is take anything away. Folding, hoisting, and drag-to-reorder all still work; the outline stays scannable. Serenity and structure.

It’s a per-window switch, so you can draft in Zen in one window while keeping a reference note open in full view beside it. Turn on Prefer Zen Mode and new windows open straight into it. And because “distraction-free” means different things to different people, there’s a Zen intensity — Low, Medium, or High — for how far the syntax fades, plus a Show bottom toolbar in Zen switch if you’d rather keep it.

Preview themes

The note preview has always been where a note becomes something you’d share. Now it can look the part. Build 32 adds built-in themes — GitHub, Swiss, and Editorial — each in light and dark, chosen from a Theme control in the preview toolbar.

The rule I care about most: what you preview is what you publish. Pick a theme, and an HTML export carries exactly that look. No surprises between the preview and the file you send.

A preview you can work in

A preview is usually a dead end — nice to look at, nothing to do. Not anymore.

Tick tasks right in the preview. Click a checkbox to cycle a task through to-do → in-progress → done → cancelled — even tasks tucked inside folded sections, and tasks on a note you’ve clicked through to. It all writes through the same engine as the Task Board, so your notes, the board, and the preview never drift out of step.

Follow your links. Click a [[wiki-link]] in the preview and that note opens in place, with Back and Forward to retrace your steps. You can read across a whole web of linked notes without leaving the preview.

FoldNotes used to have two overlapping ways to get a note out — a Share menu in the editor and the preview’s own export options. Build 32 collapses them into one. Everything now lives in the preview (the ▶ button): PDF, Markdown, Word, EPUB, Print, Email, and Copy HTML.

The new Content control decides what goes with it. Choose to leave out private comments, your organisational #tags, task metadata, or whole task lines — starting from your Settings defaults, overridable for a single export. Print and Email honour those choices now too, and Email finally composes a real formatted message. There’s also an Export for Blog… option that writes clean Markdown with a ready-made front-matter header — the kind you can drop straight into a static site.

And a safety net: restore a version as a copy

Version history can now bring an earlier version back as a new note, leaving your current one untouched. It’s the recovery I always wanted: get that paragraph back without gambling the version you have now.

The smaller stuff

Heading markers (the # characters) are smaller and tinted to match the heading, so they sit quietly at the start of the line.
A checkbox that only looks like a task — written with a * or + bullet, a number, or stray spacing — is no longer clickable in the preview and can’t be mistaken for a real one.
macOS Writing Tools are now fully disabled in the editor, where partial support could quietly corrupt task identities.

As always, FoldNotes stays plain Markdown with no lock-in — Zen Mode, themes, and the new preview are all just better ways to work with the same files that are already, and only, yours.