We’re working on a big design change that also brings a ton of customizations. It’s still very much in progress and there’s more work to do to finish it, but I thought I’d show a preview here and and ask your advice on where we should take it.

Design Change

We’ve added some new formatting features:

Multiple levels of headers, using the number of # in the prefix. So # Header is a big one and ### Header is a small one. And it automatically reduces the size if indented in.
Inline highlighting. See it on “play” in the second item of the example. So far it’s just a single (customizable) highlight color, but we may try to add full color selection too.

We’re fixing some ugly styling issues:

Vertical lines are aligned better
Collapsers are always padded out even if there’s not a prefix, for consistency

We’re working on a new pane header design:

It’s always just one line, with no scroll animations
The document and zoomed items are on the left and the buttons, view mode, and filter are on the right.
I’m concerned the view mode selection is not as obvious which may be bad, but shrinking it to just an icon saves a ton of space and seems easier to glance at.

And perhaps most noticeably, we’re changing colors and layouts. This is all experimental so may change, but currently:

The text has more line height and in dark mode is slightly grayer so it’s easier to read
Inline item links wrap in a faded [[ ]] instead of an icon with a background which is much easier to read
Dates have a red background instead of red text
Headers/Projects are bigger and have some top padding
Panes only have borders between each other, so they’re flush with the background otherwise
There are two basic layout themes. This is the “Comfortable” one where “Compact” reduces heights and paddings.

Customizations

We’ve made a css-like editor for changing all the theme values, and added a ton more customizable values (32 so far). You’ll be able to change colors and paddings, and really anything you can do in CSS. We envision having a theme library with user-submitted themes in the future, but for now we’re just starting with making it really easy and powerful to customize everything.

What do you think?

Do you like how the new dark theme looks so far? Do you like the new pane header layout? Any thoughts would be very valuable 😃. We will hopefully get this ready to test within a week or so (we’re mixing it in with generally fixing bugs), and then it will be easier to discuss it when you can really try it.