Changelog — Scratch

0.1.0 — initial release

Unreleased — private alpha

The first release of Scratch. macOS, Apple silicon.

Three-step setup on first launch: appearance, summon shortcut, dock visibility. Skip at any step and the walkthrough buffers still seed.
Five pre-loaded walkthrough buffers appear after setup: welcome, keyboard shortcuts, Markdown and slash commands, capture text (with a plain-language buffer about the screen-recording permission), and a pointer to settings. They behave like any other buffer.

Single global hotkey (⌥Space by default) summons and dismisses the window from anywhere on macOS.
Always-on Markdown editor (CodeMirror 6) with live preview, slash commands, and GFM.
Cross-buffer search (⌘⇧F) over every buffer, plus in-buffer find (⌘F).
Local-only by design: buffers live as plain Markdown files in your application data folder. No account, no sync service, no server-side copy.
Choose where buffers are stored (Settings → General → Buffer location) — point it at iCloud Drive or Dropbox to sync across machines, with an optional copy of your existing buffers. Changes made by a sync client or another machine reflect live; only genuinely different content on disk counts as a change, so a byte-for-byte sync echo never raises a false alarm. If the open buffer changes on disk while you have unsaved edits, a banner lets you keep yours or take the other version.

Configurable font size, line height, tab size, line numbers, spell check, and cursor style.
Five built-in themes (Bone, Slate, Tungsten, Edge, Midnight) plus custom themes saved from any appearance state.
Density preset (compact, cozy, comfortable) and accent color (four presets or any hex).
Callouts render live: > [!note] shows a colored left bar and a type label when the cursor is outside the block. Types are note, tip, important, warning, and danger, with aliases; insert one with /callout.
Blockquotes show a continuous left bar down the full height of the quote, one bar per nesting level. Multi-line quotes no longer leave a stray > on continuation lines.

Lines that look like math get a live result at the end of the line — arithmetic, percentages, named variables scoped to a block, and x-as-multiplication between numbers.
Variables are italicized inline and autocomplete suggests them as you type. The constants pi and e resolve in expressions too.
Unit conversion covers everything mathjs knows about (length, mass, time, area, volume, temperature, data). Use to or in between an expression and the target unit.
A faint dashed preview pill shows the result on the line you’re composing. Press Tab (or ⌘=) to bake the value into the buffer as plain text.
Local only. No network calls — currency conversion is intentionally out of scope.
The whole feature can be turned off in Settings → Editor → Inline calculations.

On-device rephrase via Apple Foundation Models. Off by default; enable in Settings → Intelligence. Requires macOS 26 on Apple silicon.
A rephrase button in the buffer’s footer (or ⌘K) opens a menu of rephrase templates. Rephrase the selection, or the whole buffer when nothing is selected; the rewrite lands in a single edit so ⌘Z reverts it.
Everything is a template. Four editable defaults ship out of the box — Concise, Professional, Grammar, and Markdown format — alongside your own. Keep up to twelve; each instruction is sent verbatim to the local model and nothing leaves the device.
Manage templates in a two-pane editor under Settings → Intelligence, with “Restore defaults” to bring back any built-in you’ve deleted.
One-off custom rewrites via the menu’s “Custom…” entry — type a prompt, press Enter, and the rewrite lands in place. The instruction is discarded after use.

Pin (always-on-top), opacity, and remember-bounds toggles.
Auto-hide on blur, quit on close, launch at login, start hidden, dock visibility, and menu-bar visibility.
Customizable shortcuts for summon, settings, new buffer, next/previous buffer, and delete buffer. Conflict detection in the shortcuts panel.
Menu-bar tray with quick access to summon, settings, and quit.
macOS trackpad swipe gestures move between buffers.

Copy the current buffer’s raw Markdown to the clipboard from the footer — a one-click alternative to the format-specific export actions.
Export the current buffer as Markdown — with a save dialog, or straight into a folder you set once in settings.
Send the current buffer to Obsidian or Apple Notes.
Capture text from any region of the screen — Scratch reads the selection and drops the recognized text into the buffer.
Reveal buffers folder from the File menu or settings.

A headless scratch CLI reads and writes the same buffers as the app. Nine commands (new, list, read, write, append, title, search, path, help), atomic writes, frontmatter preserved.
Honors the same buffer-location setting as the app, with SCRATCH_BUFFERS_DIR as an override. Works whether the app is running or not.

Auto-update from downloads.bladeinstruments.com, with manual check from Help → Check for updates.

Settings → About lists every third-party open-source project bundled with Scratch, with its version, SPDX license, and full license text. Generated at build time from the production dependency tree.

No off-machine telemetry. Scratch collects no analytics and no usage data.
Diagnostics are local rotating logs under your application data folder, kept for the number of days set in Settings → Privacy → Log retention (default 7). Home paths and email addresses are redacted; buffer content is never logged.
Nothing about how Scratch is running is sent anywhere. Diagnostic logs stay on disk; to report a problem, email hello@austinblade.com and attach a log yourself if it helps.
Buffer content is never transmitted.