Editora 0.14.0: a chrome release

August 29, 2026 · 0.14.0

Editora 0.14.0 is out. It is a chrome release: the window gives rows back to the editor, the icons and bars that remain are consistent with each other, and the two focus modes now remove all the chrome they were meant to. Grab it from the releases page.

Chrome is the part of an editor you are not looking at, which makes it easy to add and easy to leave wrong. Every bar takes a row of pixels from the file you opened, and every icon is something the eye has to read. This release went through it row by row.

Turn on Merge the menu bar into the title bar under Settings → Interface and the window loses its system title bar; the menus, the window title and the system buttons share that one row, which gives back a full bar of vertical space.

What does not change is how the window behaves. Minimise, maximise, close, drag-to-move, double-click-to-maximise, edge resize and snapping all remain the platform’s own. Only where the menus sit is different. That is what makes it feasible: the alternative was an undecorated window, which means reimplementing every one of those by hand and getting them subtly wrong on three operating systems.

It is experimental, off by default, applies on restart, and is Linux and Windows only. macOS is excluded, though not for want of API. The menu belongs to the system bar at the top of the screen there, so drawing it inside the window would make the window worse rather than taller. The checkbox is disabled on macOS rather than hidden, so its note still explains why.

Three bars, reconsidered

The breadcrumb names the active file, and it lived in the bottom bar stack, spanning the whole window between the tool stripe and the status bar, where it read as a second status bar describing the window rather than a label for the file. It now hangs under the editor area itself: as wide as the editor, directly under the text it names. It also collapses your home directory to a single ~ crumb that still navigates there. Spelled out, every file under $HOME opened with two crumbs identical on every file you will ever have open, so the segments that distinguish this one began a third of the way along a bar that scrolls.

In the status bar, indent, line endings and encoding are now one segment, Tab 4 · LF · UTF-8. They are three facts about how the same file is written to disk, and they were three separately divided segments of an eleven-segment bar. They remain three click targets with three tooltips, because they run three different commands, and they now appear only when a file is open at all: the Welcome tab no longer reports a tab size and a charset describing nothing.

The echo line starts empty rather than on a standing “Ready”. A placeholder present on every frame that says nothing trains the eye to skip the one region real messages land in.

The toolbar loses cut, copy and paste from the default layout, since in a keyboard-driven editor nobody reaches for them with the mouse. It loses About and Quit entirely. Both of those are in the menus and the palette, neither is a mid-edit action, and Quit sat in the top-right corner directly beneath the window’s own close button. Cut, copy and paste remain catalog items, one drag away in Settings → Toolbar; a bar you have already customized is untouched.

The run-configuration group moved to the right end, beside the project switcher, the way an IDE pins its run widget. It is pinned there, and the next section explains why that matters.

A narrow window took the wrong things away

A toolbar overflows from its end, and the fixed group (project switcher, Recent, the build badges, Settings) was the last thing on the bar. So on a narrow window those went into the overflow chevron while fourteen icons stayed put. This happened at about 1250 logical pixels, so on an ordinary 1280-wide laptop the whole group collapsed to a ».

That is backwards. Every icon in the cluster is also in the menus and the palette; the project switcher and Settings are not. The tail is pinned now, and a window short of space takes the icons instead. It is also why the run controls are no longer draggable items, because the control that starts a run should not disappear when the window is narrow.

Icons that mean one thing

The debug icon was a sun: a circle with eight rays, and that is how it read in the toolbar’s run cluster, the Run menu and the test panel. In every case it sat beside a style class named for a bug, and the editor’s own right-click Debug item already showed one. It is a bug everywhere now.

The default toolbar is also one icon family again. Open, Open Folder and Save As were still filled glyphs in a row of outlines, the Open folder in particular being the single solid shape there. And New From Template had been borrowing the generic document icon, which is the New File glyph minus its little plus: two adjacent buttons, both meaning “new”, differing by one cross.

Main-menu items now carry icons too. Each is the same glyph you see for that action in a right-click menu, so Save looks like Save wherever you reach it from. It is partial on purpose: about ninety of the roughly 135 entries have one, and the rest are left blank rather than given an invented glyph. A picture that does not depict the thing beside it has to be read and then discounted, which is worse than an empty space. The File menu’s export block is the clearest case, where one tray-and-arrow would have meant “PDF”, “Word” and “HTML” equally, and so meant nothing.

Search Everywhere can replace the palette now

Search Everywhere shipped in 0.13.0 as one picker over commands, files and symbols, but two things made it a worse command palette than the command palette.

It had no chord in any bundled keymap. The only way to reach the picker that replaces the other pickers was to open the command palette and type its name. It is now M-S-x in Emacs, sitting beside M-x where the mnemonic explains itself, and Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+E in the CUA, Sublime, VS Code and IntelliJ keymaps.

And it omitted commands whose feature was switched off, where the palette lists them greyed with an explanation. Omitting is tidier in a short mixed list, which is why it was built that way, but it also means you never learn the command exists. Those rows are listed now, greyed, naming the setting that would enable them, sorted after everything you can run, with the cursor stepping over them.

Two more of the palette’s habits came along: the highlighted row’s description under the list, and C-h to open that command’s documentation. The hint line names them, along with C-n/C-p. It had been listing only three of the keys the picker accepts, and in a keyboard-first editor the hint line is where the rest get discovered.

An empty query now lists every command rather than showing a blank box, and a single-source query is no longer capped. A > search used to return at most eight commands. The cap exists so a large source cannot drown a small one; with one source in play there is nothing to drown.

With all of that true, you can now let it take over the palette’s shortcut under Settings → Interface → Pickers. It is off by default, because which picker a chord opens is muscle memory, and a release should not change that for you.

Focus modes that remove all the chrome

Zen and Expert mode left half the toolbar on screen. The bar is two containers on one row, and only the first was ever hidden. A focus mode that exists to remove the chrome stripped the icons and left the run controls, project switcher, Recent, badges and Settings in place, over a bar-height strip of reserved empty space. The row that holds both is what gets hidden now.

Simple UI mode keeps a menu bar, simplified rather than hidden: File, Edit, Find, View and Help. The menus that go are exactly the ones Simple mode switches off, which would otherwise have stood there entirely greyed out. The mode aimed at someone new to the editor is the one where a browsable menu helps most. Toggling Simple UI mode is kept in that reduced View menu, so anyone who entered the mode from there can leave it the same way. Its toolbar button also reads as engaged now, the same way the find, palette and split toggles do.

Faster

Toggling Simple UI mode blocked the interface for 230–550 ms; it is now 48–108 ms (median 233 → 55), over five open source files. None of the four causes was work that needed doing: collapsing every fold rewrote the fold shading on every region in the file, the 80-column ruler was re-measured for every open buffer including background tabs, the gutter was rebuilt twice per buffer, and applying the editor theme removed and re-added the same stylesheet. All four are guarded now, which helps every settings apply, such as a theme change or any checkbox, and not only this one.

The ruler had a second problem. It had been listening for viewport changes, which fire on every vertical scroll and every edit, neither of which can move a ruler whose position depends only on glyph width, gutter width and horizontal scroll. Every keystroke was paying for a measurement it could never need, so this fix also speeds up typing.

Search Everywhere did a corpus-sized sort on every keystroke. Both of its big sources scored every candidate, sorted all the matches, then threw away everything past the fortieth. A one-character query matches most of a corpus, so that sort ran over nearly everything, on the UI thread, between one keypress and the next. Each source now keeps a bounded heap of the best forty as it scans. At roughly this project’s size 7.2 ms → 2.0 ms; at ten times it, 102 ms → 23 ms; at the index’s cap, 316 ms → 59 ms. A frame is 16.7 ms, so the first of those was about 40% of a frame per keystroke and is now nearer 12%. Results are unchanged, with the same rows in the same order, pinned by tests that compare against the previous algorithm directly.

Typing in it also rebuilt the entire keymap once per matching command, which for a one-character query against six hundred commands meant building the same map hundreds of times before a single row was drawn. It is built once per query now, as the palette had always done.

Also fixed

Dragging the minimap moved the document in whole-line steps. It scrolled to a paragraph, and a paragraph is the smallest thing it could land on, so on a long file the document lurched a line at a time with stalls between: consecutive pixels of travel gave deltas of 16, 0, 16, 16, 0, … where the mapping wanted about two-thirds of a line per pixel. It scrolls in document pixels now, and the same travel gives 10, 9, 10, 9, …. Pressing the viewport box also used to put its top under the cursor, throwing the document most of a viewport before it began tracking; it takes hold of the box now. And the mouse wheel over the minimap did nothing at all, because the column is a sibling of the scroll area rather than a child, so the event reached nothing scrollable.
Opening the quick-fix or completion list leaked a timer, permanently. Both anchored to the caret by asking for the bounds of an empty range, and for an empty range the editor allocates a throwaway caret to measure with, whose 500 ms blink timer nothing ever stops. That was one per open, for the life of the process, so a session that leans on completion accumulated them all day.
SVG files preview as vector art instead of a fixed 2×-resolution bitmap, so zooming past 200% no longer goes soft on the one preview whose entire content is vector. Transparent files get a checkerboard behind them. Markdown badges and every export path still rasterize exactly as before.
The Git Log tool window was missing from the VCS menu, which offered Show File History but never the whole-repository log.
The first Search Everywhere of a session opened with no row selected, and every later one had scrolled the group header out of sight, so an open was only correct if you had typed something the time before.
Status messages write your home directory as ~, matching the breadcrumb and window title that had always done so.

There was also a dependency sweep (Jackson, Lucene, PDFBox, POI, commonmark and JSVG), and the full list is in the changelog. There is also a 0.14.0 blog post on the bugs found along the way.