The list is public and dated — the only honest proof that a product is alive. Below are the releases so far; anything not built yet lives on the roadmap.
1.5.0
current1 November 2026
macOS 14.4 Sonoma or later is now required, up from macOS 13 Ventura. On macOS 13 through 14.3, version 1.4.3 does not offer this update, and Check for Updates names the macOS version it needs. Earlier versions cannot tell and may offer it: on those Macs, install 1.4.3 instead
The editor now runs on Qt 6.12
Windows requirements are unchanged: Windows 10 or 11, x64
1.4.3
1 November 2026
Search matches in the PDF viewer are highlighted as one clean band per line, with the frame clear of the letters at any zoom — no more bars through individual characters
An update that needs a newer version of Windows or macOS than yours is no longer offered: the background check stays silent, and Check for Updates names the system version it requires
The Last checked line in Settings names the system version a skipped update needs
macOS: the download is 17 MB instead of 43 MB on Apple silicon and 19 MB instead of 43 MB on Intel, and the app takes less space once installed: each image now carries only its own architecture, compressed with LZMA
1.4.2
31 October 2026
macOS: F1 opens the help (the article on the part of the window in focus), and the Help menu shows F1 next to The Help. ⌘? stays the system's own key for searching the Help menu; on a Mac keyboard press Fn F1 unless the function keys work as standard function keys
macOS: the app bundle no longer carries two Qt plugins it never used (network information and the OpenSSL TLS backend); update checks keep using the system's secure connection
Windows: the installer is 22 MB instead of 35 MB, and the installed app takes 57 MB instead of 95 MB: components the app never loads (software OpenGL, the Direct3D shader compilers, the touch input and network information plugins) are no longer shipped
1.4.1
30 October 2026
macOS: the help window has its own menu bar, so ⌘C copies the selected help text and ⌘V, ⌘A, ⌘F no longer act on the editor behind it
Return opens the selected article in the help contents and in the search results
The first search in the help window no longer shows result rows much taller than their text
1.4.0
30 October 2026
Built-in help: a help window with articles in the app's language and search across them, opened from the Help menu or with F1
F1 opens the help article for the part of the window in focus
“Learn more” links in the recovery, large-file and file-changed-on-disk banners lead to the matching help article
Input methods for Chinese, Japanese, Korean and other languages type straight into the editor, with the text being composed drawn in place
“Line ending markers”: a new setting shows CR, LF and CRLF at the end of each line
The “Show whitespace characters” setting now works: spaces and tabs are drawn in the selection or everywhere
Mermaid diagrams in the Markdown preview open faster
1.3.0
27 October 2026
Unsaved changes and Untitled documents survive any exit, crash, reboot or forced close and come back on the next start; quitting and closing a project no longer ask whether to save
If a file changed on disk while its unsaved text was away, the restored text opens with a banner about the conflict, and a document whose file is gone asks before the text is applied
RTF documents are protected the same way
Autosave on a chosen interval from 5 to 600 seconds, off by default
Per-project settings for keeping unsaved changes and for autosave, set in the project's `.theproject` file for the whole team
No more lock files made beside every document you open
Plugin interface version 19: all plugins must be rebuilt, which matters to authors of third-party plugins
Searching and building the content index no longer write measurement files into `.the/`, and the app no longer runs a PowerShell probe of installed antivirus products at startup
Project → Copy Content Index Report is gone, together with those measurement files
1.2.0
25 October 2026
Find in Files searches a project through a content index that each project folder builds in the background: only the files that can hold the text are opened
Search speed on Windows: a project of 994,000 files is searched for `UCLASS` in 0.8 s (72,990 files, 177,815 matches; 4.6 s at the start of this release's work), and a project of 4,975,000 files in 3.3 s instead of 8.6 s
Search speed on macOS (Apple Silicon): a Documents folder with 6 large files (648 MiB) is searched for `class` in 0.31 s instead of 2.0 s (4,554 files, 335,470 matches)
Index size and build time on Windows: 994,000 files with 9.8 GB of text are indexed in about 3 minutes into 970 MB, with 1.6 GB of memory at the peak; later sessions read only what changed
The text of PDF, DOCX, RTF and EPUB documents is kept in the index, so a search no longer extracts every document again: 57 documents take 2.5 MB of the index
Text files larger than 4 MiB are indexed and searched in parts: 198 such files, 4.1 GB, in the Windows project above
Faster search inside one large file: on Windows a 382 MB file is searched in 0.39 s instead of 0.86 s and a 110 MiB UTF-16 file in 0.10 s instead of 0.20 s; on Apple Silicon the text scan is 6–10 times faster than before (12–15 ms for 382 MB) and UTF-16 decoding 2.5 times faster
File tables follow the disk through folder watchers, so a search right after a change already sees it, and a change not yet in the index is still found
Folder rules for Find in Files: global rule files, a project's `.the/search.json`, editable file sets, and the panel says when a project limits the files
Search history in the field's menu, kept between sessions while the setting is on
Filter tokens and a file-set menu in the search field; the search scope switches automatically with the active project
A fragment mode in the search panel shows the matched lines of the selected result in a read-only editor
The results list holds every result and scrolls hundreds of thousands of rows smoothly, with a sticky file header and Collapse all
Turning on Match case or Whole word searches only the files already found
A one-line search summary with a stop button, and a folders segment in the status bar while tables are scanned
Windows: Exclude from Microsoft Defender for a folder or a whole project — searching right after a restart becomes several times faster
Every search writes `.the/search-report.txt` and every index build `.the/index-report.txt`, for measuring a slow search
Opening a document is no longer held up by documents being indexed in the background, and stopping a search no longer waits for every document in line
The cache of the free folders' file tables can be cleared from Settings
Change: a case-insensitive search compares by Unicode letter, so a stray non-UTF-8 byte (in a damaged file) no longer matches its other-case byte
Fix: on macOS a folder watch of `/` reports its changes instead of losing them
Fix: the Find in Files field starts empty, with the history only in its menu
Fix: picking a filter no longer starts a search, and the Filter list scrolls
1.1.0
9 October 2026
Projects: a folder can hold a named project — its list of folders and its own tabs; open, switch and close projects, and each one brings back the tabs it had
Several projects open side by side: the Folders panel gets a Projects group with a header per project, and the open projects survive a restart
A Project menu with New Project, Recent Projects, Close Project, Close Other Projects and Close All Projects
Folders move in and out of a project by dragging, and a project with unsaved changes to its file is marked next to its name
A `.theproject` file opens its project from Explorer and has its own icon there
Find in Files has one scope switch with three positions: active folder, project, all folders
Themes from plugins: Paper · Gradients is the first, listed in Settings and in the Appearance menu beside Slate and Graphite
Updates install straight from Settings: the check button becomes Update when a release is found, and the app relaunches once the installer finishes
The active folder is remembered between launches
The style variant in Settings is a dropdown instead of a row of buttons
Graphite light: a new teal accent, darkened to a readable contrast
Web preview plugins are listed in the Plugins panel, marked as core
Fix: an update keeps the folder the app was installed in
Fix: Save As onto a file that is open in another tab is refused, with a message to close that tab or choose another name
Fix: tabs opened while a session was being restored are no longer missing from the next session
Fix: a file opened by name during a session restore is asked about rather than skipped, and stays in front
Fix: the "not opened" strip goes away once that file is open, and a quarantined file opened on request stays in the session
Fix: a new window starts without the first window's folders
Fix: clangd follows the active folder instead of the one it started on, and diagnostics from a stopped server no longer linger
Fix: one folder reached under two spellings of its path is a single entry in the Folders panel
Fix: a path that is neither a file nor a folder gets a message saying so
Fix: a plugin switch flipped in the Plugins panel keeps its position when the theme changes
Fix: Settings and the Plugins panel no longer flicker when the theme changes
Plugin API moves to ABI v18: a plugin can carry a theme — third-party plugins need rebuilding against the new SDK
1.0.0
24 September 2026
Text encodings: opening a file auto-detects UTF-8, UTF-8 with BOM, UTF-16 LE/BE, Windows-1251, CP866 or Windows-1252, and saving keeps the file's own encoding
A status-bar indicator shows the current encoding; click it, or use `Edit → Encoding`, to reopen the file in a different encoding or convert it to another one
`Settings → Files` gets an encoding for new documents, and a character the file's encoding can't represent now stops the save and asks: save as UTF-8, go to the character, or cancel — text is never silently mangled
Interface language: English, Russian or Spanish, chosen in `Settings → Appearance`; takes effect after a restart
HTML files get syntax highlighting (tags, attributes, values, entities, comments, doctype) and folding
`View → Preview` (`Ctrl+Shift+M`) now also renders HTML: a read-only preview that ignores the page's own scripts and styles, loads nothing from the network, and shows local images and media from the document's folder; the menu item is renamed from "Markdown Preview" to "Preview"
Fix: an external change to a file open in preview no longer closes the preview, for HTML and Markdown alike
Fix: web-based preview plugins now load on a clean machine — the installer installs the WebView2 Runtime it needs
Fix: opening a file with invalid UTF-8 no longer crashes on first paint
Fix: large files with CRLF line endings (4 MiB and up) no longer get doubled `\r` characters
Plugin API moves to ABI v17: format reader/writer plugins now exchange text as UTF-8, with the host owning encoding conversion — third-party plugins need rebuilding against the new SDK
0.11.0
21 September 2026
Images open in a viewer tab instead of the text editor — fit to window, 1:1, wheel zoom, pan, and a checkerboard under transparency
Image size in the status bar on every picture, with the original alongside when the frame was scaled down on decode
Quarantine for files that crash or freeze the app — the next start skips the file instead of repeating the crash, and a one-time bar names it
Opening a quarantined file by hand asks first, and a file changed since the crash gets a fresh attempt on its own
Binary files no longer open silently as text — the editor asks first, and session restore skips them
Markdown highlighting rebuilt on tree-sitter and CommonMark — setext headings, `~~~` fences, fences inside lists and quotes, indented code, and inline markup
Code inside a fenced block is highlighted in the fence's language — c, cpp, python, go, javascript and their aliases
Column grid for wide characters, on by default — CJK and emoji take a whole number of columns, so lines stay aligned (Settings → Редактор)
File type icons in place of the coloured dot — project tree, tabs, diff, search results, the Source Control panel and the recent files menu
Bundled symbol font as a fallback — Powerline and file type glyphs no longer render as empty boxes
Matching bracket highlighted at the caret, with Go to Matching Bracket on Ctrl+M
Semantic selection on Shift+Alt+Right and Shift+Alt+Left, and Select Line now has an Edit menu entry
Folding follows the syntax tree — multi-line C and C++ initialisers fold, and a fold survives an edit above its header
Text brought on screen by a collapsed block is highlighted without scrolling to it, and occurrences of the word at the caret are found there
Large files: a scroll that changes nothing no longer triggers a re-parse, and an edit re-highlights only the ranges it touched
Markdown preview loads the diagram engine only when the source mentions a diagram
Plugin API version 16: plugins built for 0.10.1 need rebuilding against the new SDK, otherwise the editor refuses to load them
0.10.1
2 September 2026
Startup on a clean Windows: the Microsoft C++ runtime now ships inside the installer, so the app no longer fails to launch with "MSVCP140.dll was not found"
0.10.0
28 August 2026
**Double-click a block in the Markdown preview to edit it.** The block turns into a text field holding its actual Markdown source — heading marks, list dashes, table pipes and all — and the caret lands in the word you clicked. `Ctrl+Enter` commits; so does clicking anywhere else. `Esc` throws the edit away and puts the block back. A committed edit is a single undo step in the same history as typing in the editor, so `Ctrl+Z` afterwards takes it back whole.
A block here means a whole top-level element: a list, a table or a quote is edited as one unit, not line by line. Fenced code blocks and Mermaid diagrams are editable the same way — double-click the diagram to get at the code behind it.
**Clearing a block deletes it, and takes its blank separator line with it.** Emptying the middle paragraph of three leaves two paragraphs correctly spaced, not a stray empty line between them.
**While the block editor is open, `Ctrl+Z` undoes your typing in the field**, not the document. Edit ▸ Undo and Edit ▸ Redo are greyed out for as long as the field is open, which is what frees the shortcut up.
**Export to PDF is unavailable while a block is being edited** — the menu item is greyed. Export drives the same preview panel, so it cannot run with an unfinished edit on screen. Close the editor and it comes back.
**Copying from the preview now pastes as plain text.** Previously the preview handed over formatted HTML, so pasting into Word or an email carried across fonts and colours nobody asked for. You now get the rendered text — a heading pastes as its words, list items without their dashes. Selecting an image or a diagram still copies the picture itself.
**An edit that cannot be applied says so and does not silently corrupt anything.** On a very large file whose index is still being built, on a block whose position went stale, or if you leave the preview with an editor still open, the status bar explains what happened and the preview snaps back to what the document really contains.
If the file changes underneath you while a block editor is open — a revert, a change on disk — the preview redraws and the unfinished edit is dropped. That is deliberate: the line numbers it was holding are no longer valid, and applying them would damage the document.
Changing theme or font while editing a block takes effect when you close the editor rather than interrupting you mid-word.
0.9.2
25 August 2026
The Markdown preview works in the installed app again. In 0.9.1 it opened as an empty panel: the preview kept its working data in a folder beside the program itself, under `Program Files`, which Windows does not let an ordinary account write to. It gave up there without a word. That data now lives with the app's other per-user files, where it belongs.
If you installed 0.9.1 and the preview came up blank, this is that. Only the installed app was affected, which is why it got past us — run from a build folder, which is writable, it worked every time.
When the WebView2 component Windows uses to draw the preview is missing entirely, the preview now falls back to plain text instead of showing an empty panel. No diagrams in that mode, but the document is readable.
A failure to start the preview engine is now written to the log with its error code. Previously it was indistinguishable from a preview that had simply been closed, which is the reason the blank panel shipped.
0.9.1
25 August 2026
Mermaid diagrams in the Markdown preview draw again. The installed app was quietly falling back to a plain renderer with no diagram support, so the text of a document showed up and every diagram in it came out as the raw code block it was written as.
`File → Export to PDF` from an open Markdown preview works again. The same fallback made it answer "Markdown preview is not available" and export nothing.
Both only ever happened in the installed app — the preview renderer and its assets were being put somewhere the app does not look for them. A build run straight from the source tree was never affected, which is why this got past us.
0.9.0
18 August 2026
The files you had open come back when you start the app again, with the same tab active as when you left. This is on by default; it can be turned off under `Settings → Files → Session`.
Documents you never saved to disk are not restored — there is no file to reopen. Save them before quitting.
Files that were deleted or moved since last time are skipped quietly. They used to be worth an error dialog each, so a handful of them meant dismissing a stack of them before you could start working.
A file on a network share or a removable drive that has not been mounted yet is skipped for that launch only. It stays in the record and opens again on the next start once the drive is back — being offline at logon does not lose it from the session.
Only the main window remembers the session, so opening a second window no longer overwrites what the first one had open.
0.8.0
17 August 2026
Wrapped lines stay where they are while you type. Every keystroke used to redo the layout of the whole document, so any line long enough to wrap would briefly collapse onto a single row and spring back — with the text below it jumping up and down as you worked. Pressing Enter did the same to every wrapped line above the cursor.
Typing in a large file is lighter. Working out which lines can be folded meant reading every line of the document on every keystroke; it is now worked out only for the lines on screen. On a two-megabyte file that is about six milliseconds of work removed from each keypress.
Double-click the empty part of the tab strip to open a new document — the same as `File → New`.
The tab strip stays in place after the last document is closed, so that double-click still works there. It used to collapse to nothing exactly when a new document is most useful.
0.7.0
16 August 2026
The application updates itself now. `Help → Check for Updates…` looks for a newer release, and a notice in the status bar says when one has been found — no more watching the download page by hand.
Updates arrive quietly: the download runs in the background with no window in the way, and the file is checked against the published SHA-256 before anything is installed. A download that does not match is thrown away instead of run — including one left over from a previous session.
On macOS the update installs and the application comes back on its own, already the new version. A replacement is accepted only when it is signed by the same developer as the copy being replaced and notarised by Apple; anything else is refused and the installed version is left alone.
On Windows the install runs unattended behind a single confirmation prompt, with no installer windows to click through. The application closes when it hands over — start it again to work in the new version.
Open documents are never lost to an update: every window is asked to save before the install begins, and declining that prompt cancels the install rather than pressing on.
New **Updates** section in Settings. Automatic checking can be switched off, and the interval set to a day, a week or a month. Downloading is automatic; installing always waits for an explicit click.
Settings rows are separated by a single line again — every row on every page had been drawing two or three of them, stacked a few pixels apart.
0.6.0
13 August 2026
New application icon, shipped in two brand colours — a light plate for a light desktop, a dark one for a dark desktop. The running application picks the one matching the system colour scheme and switches over the moment the theme changes, with no restart.
The whole icon set was renewed alongside it: the window and Dock icon, the document icon, the disk image and the installer all carry the new artwork.
A plugin that fails to load no longer stops the application on Windows: a damaged or wrong-architecture plugin used to raise a system error dialog that blocked startup until it was dismissed. The failure is now reported in the log and the application carries on.
0.5.2
4 August 2026
Paths with non-Latin characters no longer break on Windows: files and folders with Cyrillic names open, save and appear in recent files as they should
0.5.1
31 July 2026
The application runs on current macOS versions again: the minimum is macOS 13 Ventura instead of macOS 26 Tahoe, and Ventura, Sonoma, Sequoia and Tahoe are all supported
0.5.0
30 July 2026
Licence, privacy policy, third-party notices and LGPL compliance notice ship inside the installation, in English and Russian
A licenses folder with the full licence text of every component The is built from
The About window opens the notices and the LGPL document, and links the sources of the Qt version actually installed
A written offer of source code for the LGPL components, valid for at least three years
The same four documents published on the site, readable before downloading and without a cookie gate
Windows: the installer shows the licence agreement, and the program appears as The rather than The.exe
Rights-holder details filled in across the agreement, the licence and the privacy policy
0.4.3
17 July 2026
Per-hunk staging of changes in the Source Control panel
Inline peek at the HEAD version of a line, right in the editor
Side-by-side diff for working-copy files
0.4.2
16 July 2026
HugeSlice mode for files from 1 GiB, with explicit limits
Large line numbers and a pinned header in CSV/TSV table mode
Project-wide search with results grouped by file
0.4.1
16 July 2026
Rich-text export to PDF and saving to EPUB, FB2, RTF
Markdown preview with Mermaid diagrams
One zoom control at 50–400% for documents and PDF
0.4.0
16 July 2026
Plugin API in plain C ABI, SDK and plugin template
C/C++ diagnostics over LSP via clangd, Unreal Engine project support
Two design directions for appearance: Slate and Graphite
earlier lines, 0.3.x and below, were never released publicly