CodiMD 2.0.0 Urocissa caerulea - 2020/03/02

Urocissa caerulea

The Taiwan blue magpie (Urocissa caerulea), also called the Taiwan magpie, Formosan blue magpie, or the "long-tailed mountain lady", is a species of bird of the crow family. It is endemic to Taiwan.

- Wikipedia Taiwan blue magpie

In the past few months, we delivered not only a bunch of awesome features but also some critical bug fixes. Moreover, we refactored CodiMD's backend and started to write new tests.

To make it easier to maintain, we dropped legacy code, reorganize the repository, and add new documentation. For these reasons, we decided to make a huge leap toward version 2.0.0.

Here are the highlights coming from version 2.0.0:

• Multilanguage spellchecker
• Customize editor color schemes
• Export note with Pandoc
• Embed Geolocation data
• Version checking
• Meet the new CodiMD CLI
• Refreshed Documentation structure and new Markdown guides

It's our pleasure to announce CodiMD 2.0.0. Enjoy as always

.

For the latest updates, tricks and news, please follow @Codimd_Dev on Twitter!

Highlights

Editor

Multilanguage spellchecker

In this release, we added an initial multilanguage spellchecker support to CodiMD. Click the button on the status bar and choose the language you want to do spellcheck.

We rewrote CodeMirror spellcheck plugin to let it support multiple languages. It uses Typo.js and wooorm/dictionaries under the hood. For the complete details, please take a look at PR #1355.

We support four spellcheckers by far. Tell us about what to be added next!

• English (United States)
• German
• German (Austria)
• German (Switzerland)

Customize editor color schemes

CodiMD finally supports customizing color schemes! Let us show off a few of them.

One Dark (Current default)

Dracula

Tomorror Night Eighties

Click to reveal all available color schemes

• Light
• One Dark (Default)
• Monokai
• Solarized Dark
• Solarized Light
• Dracula
• Material
• Nord
• Panda
• Ayu Dark
• Ayu Mirage
• Tomorror Night Bright
• Tomorror Night Eighties

Swapping edit/view mode button

The edit button group is now in the new order, as same as CodiMD's editor layout ordering.

This proposal was originally from the PR #665. Although it lost activity for a while, we think this UX change really makes sense! Thank you @pirate for bringing this up!

Markdown

Support Pandoc export

CodiMD now supports exporting note with Pandoc!

You can try this feature in the download section of the menu.

Select output format and click Export

For the detail of implementation, please see PR #1273 and hackmdio/pandoc.js repository.

Click to reveal supported output formats

• AsciiDoc
• ConTeXt
• EPUB (.epub)
• EPUB v3 (.epub3)
• LaTeX
• OpenOffice (.odt)
• reStructuredText (.rst)
• Rich Text Format (.rtf)
• Textile
• World (.docx)

Embedding Geolocation data

You can now embed geolocation as map (Open Street Map) in CodiMD. This feature was originally requested in issue #592.

Click here to read the documentation and learn how to use it.

The syntax is very limited for now, please help us to make it better! Giving feedback in issue #592.

PlantUML syntax highlighting

CodiMD now supports PlantUML syntax highlighting in the editor. This was done in hackmdio/CodeMirror#5. The PlantUML CodeMirror grammer is originally implemented by kkeisuke/plantuml-editor, many thanks to @kkeisuke who've done this awesome work.

Auto version check for site admin

CodiMD now checks the running version is whether up-to-date upon the service starts. If your running version is outdated, CodiMD will log the latest version information to console(see the red box in the screenshot):

While this feature is on by default, we do collect the following information for letting us know the distribution of CodiMD installations:

• Running version of CodiMD
• Instance IP address (country/location)

Due to privacy concerns, you can always opt-out by setting environment variable CMD_AUTO_VERSION_CHECK to false or setting autoVersionCheck to false in config.json. See PR #1399 for the implementation detail.

Don't miss any new features!

Meet the new CodiMD CLI

The new CodiMD CLI is now available on hackmdio/codimd-cli!

You can manipulate your notes on CodiMD within your terminal. The new CodiMD CLI is built on top of the oclif framework and is written in TypeScript.

It's a new lineup of CodiMD. Please help making it better! Open an issue, submit a feature request, or engage in development on the codimd-cli GitHub repository.

Refreshed Documentation structure and new Markdown guides

During the release, we've updated several existing documentation, including Understanding your Editor, Manage Note Permission, Markdown Syntax guide and Extra Supported Syntax. We recommend every CodiMD user to read these pieces. If you find some parts confused you, welcome to open a pull request to make it better! The source of CodiMD hosted documentation now lives in a separate repository: hackmdio/codimd-docs.

Breaking Changes

Drop yarn the package manager

We only need one of the package managers, NPM is good enough to provide consistent command and stable lock file now.

Yeah, yeah we know that.

Drop old environment variables support

In 2.0.0, we dropped old environment variables that start with HMD.
For most cases, you can simply change the prefix from HMD to CMD.

Watch out for:

• DEBUG, now set NODE_ENV to development to enable it
• DATABASE_URL become CMD_DB_URL
• URL_PATH become CMD_URL_PATH
• PORT become CMD_PORT

Click to see full changeset of the environment variables.

Emphasize your privacy

The anonymous policy has been changed in 2.0.0 to provide better privacy defaults.

We changed CMD_ALLOW_ANONYMOUS to be false along with CMD_ALLOW_ANONYMOUS_EDITS and CMD_ALLOW_ANONYMOUS_VIEWS to be true.

Please check Anonymous (Guest) related config for detailed explanation.

Prevent unexpected HSTS behavior for subdomains

In previous default settings, it forced subdomain to use HSTS, but it might break the sites that hosted in the subdomain and didn’t configured with HTTPS protocol.

We changed this behavior in 2.0.0, in order to disable HSTS IncludeSubdomain feature by default. If you want to turn on this feature, please set CMD_HSTS_INCLUDE_SUBDOMAINS to true.

Enhancements

• Flip the view and edit buttons on the navbar #1398
• Refactor server architecture #1384
• Support emojify.css by CDN #1400
• Drop yarn the package manager #1410
• Upgrade mermaid to version 8.4.8 #1418
• Upgrade reveal.js to version 3.9.2 #1420
• Support highlight PlantUML language in editor #1428
• Upgrade markdown-it to version 10.0.0 #1429
• Support highlight Vega-Lite language in editor and use svg renderer #1422
• Support hostedName in Google OAuth provider #1426

Fixes

• Fix to catch viz.js render async error and recreate Viz instance #1419
• Fix server crash when download pdf multiple times #1421
• Fix server crash when use OAuth2 provider with non-existing email #1424
• Fix to use validator.isURL to validate URL to avoid regex catastrophic backtracking #1430
• Fix to allow Dropbox dropins in CSP directives (e2c31e4c)

Thank you

These pull requests came from CodiMD community, thank you guys for being here and making CodiMD awesome

• Add Bitbucket Support for OAuth #1381 @YusukeIwaki
• Upgrade PostgreSQL docker image from version 11.5 to 11.6-alpine #1389 @tunagohan