What’s New

Each version of Grasmere, and what it added. The guides describe the current version; where a feature arrived after 1.0, its section says New in 1.1 (and so on). Your version is under Grasmere ▸ About Grasmere in the app.

Don’t have Grasmere yet? Get it on the Mac App Store: a free 7-day trial, then a single purchase.

1.3 · 26 October 2026

  • The clipboard, when you ask. The card that offered to save what you’d just copied is gone. Instead the File menu has New Document from Clipboard (⇧⌘K), for copied text or a web page; New Insight from Clipboard, for a passage from Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini; and Paste Link with Title. Grasmere reads the clipboard only when you choose one, and the setting that turned the card off has gone with it. See Quick Capture and Sharing.

  • Save web pages as documents. File ▸ Save Web Page takes an address and saves the page’s article in your project’s research folder: clean Markdown, without the menus, adverts and cookie notices, with its title, address, author, site, publication date and the day you saved it at the top. A copied web address (New Document from Clipboard), a page shared from Safari and the new Save Web Page action in Shortcuts all save the same way, and a page saved before is never saved twice. Settings ▸ General ▸ Research names the folder. See Research.

  • Citations. Cite a book, a paper or a saved web page by typing [@ (or Edit ▸ Cite Source, ⌥⌘K) and choosing it by author, title or year: Grasmere writes an ordinary link to the source, which follows renames and shows in Linked From. When you export to PDF, Word or a website, citations become APA 7, Harvard, Chicago author-date or MLA 9, with page numbers kept and a reference list of the sources you cited at the end. File ▸ New Source looks a book up by its ISBN (Open Library) or a paper by its DOI (doi.org), or makes a blank one to fill in, and research.md in the research folder keeps a table of your sources and how often each is cited. See Citations.

  • The Manuscript view. Open a folder as a manuscript (right-click it in the contents, or View ▸ Open Project as Manuscript, which opens the folder highlighted in the contents instead when there is one) to see a book written in many documents as one: the running order on the left, with each chapter’s words and a synopsis from its front matter, and the whole piece read straight through beside it. Drag chapters, or press ⌥⌘↑ and ⌥⌘↓, to reorder them (the order stays in the folder’s index.md, as the contents keep it); double-click a passage to edit it. Export publishes it to PDF or, new, as one Word document with every chapter in order. See The Manuscript View.

  • Send it out for review, bring the comments back. Export a document as Word and send it: reviewers can comment and suggest changes in Word, Pages or Google Docs. File ▸ Import Review reads their copy back, and every comment and change appears in the margin beside its passage, to accept, reject or resolve one at a time; edits made without Track Changes are found too, and formatting changes are ignored. Your Markdown stays clean: nothing goes in until you accept it, and Undo takes it back. See Review.

  • Review a whole book. The Manuscript view’s Export as Word goes out for review too. Import Review sends each comment and change to its own chapter’s margin (following a passage you’ve moved to another chapter), the running order shows each chapter’s open items, and comments on the title page, part titles or references go to a Review notes document you can tick off. See Review.

  • Accepting survives your edits. Accept a change in a paragraph you’ve rewritten since, and it goes into your new version, unless you both changed the same words: then the item shows what you sent, their suggestion and what you have now, with the changed words marked.

  • Restore to Before the Review. Each import keeps a copy of the documents it covers first. File ▸ Restore to Before the Review… puts back everything that’s changed since, all at once for a book, and can itself be reversed.

  • A Markdown check, if you want one. Settings ▸ General ▸ Check the Markdown as you write adds a Problems section to the margin’s Page tab: a code fence left open, a link to a document that isn’t there, a picture with no alt text, a table row short of a cell, a task box that won’t tick, and more, each with its line and what to do; click one to go to it. Off by default; nothing is changed for you. See The Margin.

  • Front matter in the margin. The Page tab has a Front Matter section: the fields at the top of a document as rows you can edit in place, remove, or add to, each change undoable with ⌘Z and written into the text as you would have typed it. Lists come back in the form they had; a value is quoted only when YAML needs it. See The Margin.

  • Colour in code blocks. Name a code block’s language after its opening fence (```swift, ```python, ```sh, and so on) and its keywords, strings, comments, numbers and types take quiet colours from the theme, on the page, in exported PDFs and on websites you build. Nothing else about the block changes, and a block with no language looks as it did. See Writing and Formatting.

  • Diagrams. A code block whose language is mermaid is drawn beneath itself on the page, in the theme’s colours, and goes into PDFs, Word documents and websites you build. The text stays yours to edit; the drawing follows as you type. Everything is drawn on your Mac. See Pictures and Tables.

  • Brainstorm. File ▸ New Document with Questions is now called Brainstorm, in the menu and on its sheet. It works as before. See Ask Your Documents and AI.

  • Shortcuts actions, and so a command line. The Shortcuts app has Grasmere actions for the everyday work: Open Document, Open Project, New Document, Append to Today’s Entry, Append to Document, Get Document Text, Search Documents, List Documents, Today’s Entry Path, Check Markdown, Check Links, Export PDF, Export Word Document, Compile Folder to PDF and Publish Website, each returning a plain value to chain or print. They work on the front window’s project, or on any project you’ve opened before by its path; ten are in Spotlight. A one-step shortcut makes each a command in Terminal: echo "a thought" | shortcuts run "Append to Today's Entry" -i - -o -. See Shortcuts and the Command Line.

1.2 · 22 October 2026

  • Documents, not notes. Grasmere now calls what you write documents: in its menus, settings, messages and Shortcuts actions, on this site and in the Feature Tour. Daily notes are the journal (Settings ▸ General ▸ Journal), Go ▸ Today opens today’s entry, and Ask Your Notes is Ask Your Documents. Nothing on disk changes: your files, folders and settings are as they were.
  • Reopening takes you back to where you were. Grasmere opens at the document you were on, scrolled as you left it; and opening Grasmere again after closing its window brings the project back, not the start screen.
  • A runbook from New Document with Questions. The kind picker now has Runbook: for a procedure (a deploy, an alarm, an onboarding) the questions are the ones a runbook must answer, in order, with a checklist under what must be true first and numbered steps under the steps.
  • Easier to read. The Markdown marks, link addresses and small labels are a shade firmer in every theme, focus mode fades the other paragraphs less, buttons on the dark themes have readable labels, the keyboard's place shows in the Index and the contents, and the interface follows your Mac's Text Size setting (System Settings ▸ Accessibility ▸ Display). Increase Contrast firms everything up further.
  • Faster. Typing restyles only the paragraph you’re in, so a long document, or one with a Writing Replay record, keeps up with you. The contents scroll smoothly on a project of thousands of documents, and a folder of hundreds opens in half the time.
  • Also. The Index’s caption no longer lets the cards behind it show through; Go ▸ Today finds today’s entry wherever you’ve moved it instead of making a second one; and the margin’s first tab is Page.
  • The free trial starts by itself. Nothing to buy or sign into first: your seven days begin the day you get Grasmere, and the window just tells you so. (A trial started in 1.0 or 1.1 carries on as it was.)

1.1 · 20 October 2026

  • Convert Wiki-Links. Project ▸ Convert Wiki-Links rewrites every [[wiki-link]] in a project as a standard Markdown link, for documents brought from Obsidian: aliases, headings and embedded pictures are kept, links to documents that aren’t there can point to new documents made when followed, and the whole conversion can be undone. See Links and Backlinks and Support.
  • Writing Replay (experimental). A record of how a document is written, played back and exportable as a web page, with trusted timestamps. Off until turned on in Settings ▸ General. See Writing Replay.
  • New Document with Questions. File ▸ New Document with Questions has the AI model write Socratic questions about a subject you give, as the headings of a new document for you to answer in your own words. See Ask Your Documents and AI.
  • Ask a Follow-up Question. Edit ▸ Ask a Follow-up Question (⌥⌘/) has the model read the passage you’re writing and ask one question back, in the margin; add it as a heading or dismiss it.
  • Links to documents that don’t exist yet make them when followed, titled from the name, as wiki-links do.
  • Export as Word Document (⇧⌘E): the open document as a .docx with Word’s own styles, pictures embedded and links that work.
  • Markdown files on your Mac: Quick Look (Space in Finder) shows them in Grasmere’s style, and Grasmere can be the app that opens them (Settings ▸ General ▸ Markdown files), opening each document in its project, or on its own in a window of its own, with its links working.
  • Shortcuts as other writing apps have them: ⌘O opens a document by name (⌥⌘O for a file), ⌘P exports the page as a PDF, ⌥⌘1–3 make a heading and ⌥⌘Q a blockquote (several lines pasted into a quote are all quoted).
  • Standard buttons on the sheets, in the theme’s colours, and no trailing ellipses on menu items. The margin’s History section is called Git History. Lines are set at each font’s own height, with no spacing added by the app, so an empty line is as tall as a typed one and typing on it no longer moves the page.

1.0 · October 2026

The first release: documents as plain Markdown files, links that stay correct when documents are renamed or moved, the margin of backlinks and mentions, the Index, tasks and due dates, journal entries and quick capture, word targets, focus mode and split view, publishing to PDF, a website or Anki, and Ask Your Documents with Apple’s on-device model. A free 7-day trial, then a single purchase.