Every release,
in order.

Meeting recording on Windows and Linux, and whole folders brought into your vault.

• Meeting recording now works on Windows. Capture a conversation in the room or both sides of a call, transcribe it on your own device, and turn it into a note with the same summaries, decisions, and action items as on Mac. Optional screen sampling can also read text from shared slides and dashboards. Transcription runs on the CPU, with the smaller speech model selected by default.
• Linux gains audio-only meeting recording through PulseAudio or PipeWire’s PulseAudio compatibility service. It captures your microphone and the audio playing on your computer, then transcribes locally on the CPU. Screen sampling is not available on Linux. The temporary audio cache is not encrypted there; Settings → Meetings now says so and lets you manage retention and delete recordings.
• Import a whole folder into your vault, including its nested folders, notes, images, and other files. Drop it onto the sidebar or use the import dialog. Folder structure and relative links stay intact, the original stays where it was, and a name collision creates a separate copy instead of overwriting an existing item.
• Fixed Windows local models and CLI AI providers failing after launch because their background processes were missing required Windows environment settings.
• Zen and immersive modes now keep the window draggable when the title bar is hidden, with more consistent page spacing and corners. Entering Zen no longer switches on focus-line dimming and leaves it enabled after you leave.
• Shortcut listings on Linux Wayland now hide global shortcuts that the desktop session cannot deliver. Device and file-manager labels across the app also use the right wording for your platform.

Record a meeting and get a note. Transcribed on your own Mac.

• Ampersand can now record a meeting — in person or on a call — and turn it into a note with a summary, the decisions, the action items as real checkboxes, and the full transcript folded into a toggle underneath. Type /record in the note you are already writing and the recorder appears where your cursor is, or start one from the menu bar or ⌥⌘R when there is no window in front of you.
• The speech is transcribed on your own Mac. A Whisper model runs locally on the GPU — downloaded once, around 570 MB, or 140 MB for a faster and rougher option — and the audio is never uploaded to us or to anyone else. It is kept outside your vault so nothing syncs it, encrypted at rest with a key belonging to that machine, and deleted as soon as the transcript exists unless you choose otherwise. Settings → Meetings lists every recording still on your Mac, with its size, and lets you delete any of them.
• No bot joins your call. Nothing appears in the participant list and nobody has to approve anything — Ampersand captures the audio your Mac is playing, so it works with Zoom, Meet, Teams, FaceTime and anything else that makes noise, and it works for a conversation in a room, which no meeting bot can do. On a call your microphone and the far end are separate tracks, so the transcript can say who spoke without guessing. In a room everyone shares one microphone; rather than guess badly, the transcript is left unlabeled and the note says so.
• The one part that can leave your Mac is the transcript, and only if you have pointed the AI summary at a cloud provider — the same bring-your-own-key setup as every other AI feature. Settings names that provider in plain text whenever the one you have chosen is off-device, and says nothing when it is local. Choose Apple Intelligence or a local model through Ollama and nothing leaves the machine at any point.
• The summary streams into the note as the model writes it, so stopping a recording is followed by words appearing rather than a minute of nothing. One undo removes the whole thing if you want to start over.
• A wrong language guess used to be silent and expensive: speech recognition does not fail on a language it misreads, it translates, so a Serbian conversation came back as fluent English. Detection now runs once per recording against the longest stretch of speech it has, and Settings → Meetings has an explicit language picker for when it still gets it wrong.
• Optionally, on calls, Ampersand can sample occasional still frames of the shared screen, read the text on them on your device, and put them in the note — useful when someone walks through a dashboard. It is off by default and a separate choice from the audio, because a screenshot of somebody else’s screen often carries more than the conversation does.
• Recording a meeting is part of Pro. Reading a meeting note never is — it is an ordinary markdown file in your own folder, and every note you record keeps opening whatever happens to your license.
• Whether you may record a conversation, and whether you have to tell the other people first, depends on where you and they are. Ampersand records the way a voice recorder on the desk would: you are the one operating it, and macOS shows its own orange microphone indicator the whole time.

• On Windows and Linux, closing the window now quits the app. It used to hide to the notification area, which reads as an app that will not close — nothing in the taskbar, no window, and a tray icon you may not have noticed still holding your vault. On a Mac closing still hides to the menu bar, because that is what an app is expected to do there. Either way your work is saved first.
• The menu-bar icon is free again. Showing an icon is chrome, not a capability, and gating it made the free app look broken rather than limited — worse on a Mac, where the menu bar is the way back to a window you closed. Quick capture itself is still part of Pro.

Ampersand opens again on Macs that are not running macOS 26.

• Fixed the app quitting the instant it was opened on Apple Silicon Macs running anything before macOS 26. A small support library for the optional Apple Intelligence features had been built to demand macOS 26 outright, so macOS refused to load the app at all rather than simply leaving that one feature switched off. Nothing of ours ever ran — the app could not log the failure, report it, or show an error, so it bounced in the Dock and disappeared. Every release from 0.2.22 on 20 July through 0.3.1 was affected. We found it from a single crash report a user took the trouble to send us, and we are sorry it took that.
• If this was happening to you, updating from inside the app was never going to reach you: the app could not start, so it could not check for anything. Download Ampersand again from this site and drop it over your existing copy. Your notes, vault, settings and license are untouched — the broken build never got far enough to write anything.
• The build itself now checks for this. Every release inspects the files it is about to ship and refuses to publish if any of them demands a newer macOS than the one we support. The reason this went out at all is that it was invisible on the machine that built it: our build machines run macOS 26, where the missing piece is present, so the app started perfectly there and every test passed. A defect that only appears on other people’s computers needs a check that looks at what we ship, not at what we can run.
• Ampersand now requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later. This site had been asking for macOS 13 while the app itself allowed macOS 12, and neither number was one we were building or testing against. macOS 14 is the oldest release Apple still ships security updates for, and it is an honest floor for what the interface actually needs. If you are on macOS 12 or 13, this version will not open on your Mac — every earlier release stays available on the releases page, and we would rather tell you that here than let it fail quietly on your machine.

Shared links that preview properly, and pastes that keep their structure.

• Published notes can now carry a link preview, chosen per link. The default is still the title alone; you can add a short excerpt from the note, or a picture of its first page, rendered as a sheet of paper. It is opt-in because a preview card is copied into chat histories and scraper caches that taking the link down cannot reach — the link itself was always readable by anyone holding it, but what a card leaves behind outlives the note.
• A published page now shows the Ampersand mark in the browser tab instead of a blank globe, and its title reads as the note, not the file. A note behind a password or an email gate never gets a page preview, since a preview would show the top of the document to anyone with the link while the gate still stood in front of it.
• A background update no longer pulls the app in front of what you were doing, and no longer reopens a window you had deliberately closed. The updated app now comes back the way you left it.
• A background update also no longer costs you the last second of typing. The app finishes saving before it hands over to the new version, so an update can no longer leave you with a recovery prompt for work that was never at risk.
• Pasting markdown as plain text now produces real structure. A numbered list copied out of a file, a terminal, or an AI chat used to arrive as three paragraphs whose numbers were just characters — it looked like a list and behaved like nothing, which is why "ordered lists don’t renumber" was both a real report and impossible to reproduce. Headings, quotes, fences, and tables come through the same way. Shift-paste still pastes the literal characters, and pasting inside a code block is untouched.
• Typing a numbered list directly above an existing one now continues that list rather than starting a second one flush against it. Markdown cannot express two adjacent lists, so the file already read them as one — the editor now agrees with what your own note means.
• Fixed image and column drag handles not responding to touch.

Ampersand is on Windows and Linux.

• Native builds for Windows 10 and 11 and for Debian, Ubuntu and beyond — x86_64 and ARM on both. Not a wrapper or a web version: the same Rust and Tauri app, compiled for each platform, with the window controls, keyboard shortcuts and file dialogs each system expects.
• Your vault is the same folder of markdown files everywhere, so a vault written on a Mac opens on a PC and the other way round, encrypted notes included.
• On Windows, Ampersand can remember your vault passphrase behind Windows Hello, the way Touch ID works on a Mac. It only appears where Hello is actually set up — on a machine with no fingerprint, face or PIN enrolled, nothing is offered and you keep typing the passphrase, because storing it with nothing guarding it would be worse than the small inconvenience.
• Windows installers are not yet certificate-signed, so Windows warns once on first run — choose More info, then Run anyway. That warning is about the certificate rather than the file, and the download page explains it. Linux packages come from signed apt and dnf repositories.
• Linux is community-supported: every release is built and signed, and reported issues get fixed, but the app is developed on macOS so Linux-specific problems can take longer.
• The vault now also locks when your machine sleeps, not only after an idle timeout — on every platform. Closing the lid is how most people leave a desk, and a long auto-lock interval used to sail straight through it.

Two bugs that only appeared in the packaged app — which is exactly why they lasted.

• Fixed styling breaking in the shipped app: the Source pane lost its theme and gutter, Mermaid diagrams rendered on black, and elements positioned with inline styles — popovers, dialogs, the split-pane divider, image sizing — silently lost them. A single inlined style tag in the app shell was tightening the security policy in a way that rejected every stylesheet applied at runtime. Reported by a customer before we caught it, and now covered by a check that runs against the real packaged policy.
• Fixed the app sometimes taking ten seconds to appear at launch, or appearing behind whatever you were already looking at. It was waiting for a frame that a hidden window can never draw.
• Smart blocks no longer jump around. A diagram or equation that failed to parse mid-edit used to collapse to an error line and expand again on the next keystroke, dragging the rest of the document with it; now the last good render stays put and the problem is reported by a small icon instead.

Notes can leave the sidebar, and files can come into it.

• Drag a note out of the sidebar and into Finder, Mail, or a terminal — it arrives as a real file, not a path-shaped piece of text.
• Drop files onto a folder in the sidebar to file them there. Dropping a note you own moves it; dropping something from outside copies it, so dragging a file out to Finder and back does not quietly become nothing.
• The drag handle is gone: the row itself is the drag source now. Two rounds of testing found nobody was discovering the handle, and every file manager already treats the item as the thing you grab.

Motion taken back out where it was getting in the way.

• Switching between Live, Source, and Split is instant again. Several animated versions were tried and every one was worse — the two views are the same sheet in the same place, so a transition depicts a change that isn’t happening.
• Fixed the save indicator getting stuck on the unsaved dot next to a “Saved” label.
• The unsaved dot is smaller, so it reads as a marker rather than a bullet.
• The download page now offers the Windows and Linux builds directly, with the SmartScreen prompt on unsigned Windows installers spelled out up front.

A shared motion system — the app now moves as one piece.

• A single motion system behind fifteen signature interactions, replacing per-component one-offs.
• Panes, style pills, and the page color now transition instead of snapping.
• The segmented-control thumb slides, from one shared component used everywhere.
• Staggered reveals removed — they read as slow rather than considered.
• Version history builds its file log and diff off the main thread, so opening history no longer stalls the window.
• Fixed the what’s-new note deleting itself when you hovered it.
• Signed apt and dnf repositories now published for Linux.

Export fidelity, and finer control over images and lists in the editor.

• Code themes and image sizing now match across PDF, Word, and HTML export.
• Editor zoom plus new list and image controls.
• Fixed multi-second slowness when opening the export window.
• Fixed image layout shift, lightbox panning, and lost scroll position.
• Restored select-all copy and the code-block selection highlight.

Windows joins the release matrix, alongside native arm64 Linux.

• Windows builds for x86_64 and arm64, shipped as installers on every release.
• Native arm64 Linux build added to the matrix.
• Windows: the Settings window shows its title band at the top.

A native Linux build, and the OS accent color everywhere.

• Linux bring-up: client-side decorations, a frameless rounded window, and in-app window controls.
• Ampersand now adopts your operating system’s accent color — on Linux, Windows, and macOS.
• The Settings sidebar gained an identity row with the logo and the running app version.
• A long list of Linux chrome fixes: sidebar and doc-panel alignment, modal overlays, rounded overlay backdrops, the Export and Quick Capture windows, tray icon contrast.
• Fixed a crash when opening the export window (an empty Radix Select value).
• Copy that assumed a Mac is now platform-aware on Windows and Linux.
• Tab tear-off is disabled on Linux — a Wayland cursor limitation, documented rather than half-working.

Published notes can now be gated — by password, or by email.

• Password-protect a published note from the publish flow.
• Email allowlist gate: only the addresses you name can open the page, verified by an access code.
• The access-code email is branded, comes from a named sender, and embeds the real mark.
• Editing a published note’s recipients is now discoverable, with Sharing settings in the Shared menu.
• Allowlist retention is bounded by the note’s expiry, and the privacy copy corrected to match.
• Replaced the last native selects in the app with the Radix Select used everywhere else.

Publish a note to a secret web link — plus an in-app inbox, and the first anonymous usage count.

• Publish any note to a secret, unguessable link on ampersand.page. Unpublishing only ever needs the link’s secret, never a valid license.
• Links expire after 90 days by default, and every published page is unconditionally noindex.
• A published-notes manager lists every live link, including orphans whose local file is gone.
• On-brand status pages, share images, and an apex redirect for the share domain.
• In-app notifications: a titlebar bell and inbox, fed by a hosted feed, so a notice can reach you without an app update.
• Anonymous usage telemetry — one daily ping with an install id, version, OS, tier, and a note count. No content, no paths, no keys; opt out in Settings.
• Groundwork for Windows: platform-aware path validation, shortcuts, and window chrome.
• The end-to-end test suite landed — browser-mode Playwright over a mocked Tauri IPC layer, plus a real-binary macOS smoke suite.

A way back into an encrypted vault, and search that reaches inside it.

• Passphrase recovery kit: a generated recovery code that can unlock the vault and force a passphrase reset if you forget yours.
• Vault search now looks inside encrypted notes while the vault is unlocked. Locked, they stay invisible.
• Table column widths survive a round-trip — un-resized tables still serialize as byte-identical markdown.
• Bookmark auto-unfurl, off by default, because each unfurl reveals a request to the pasted domain.
• Several bookmark-card image layout fixes.

The agent reads the web more reliably.

• The agent is re-prompted after fetching a URL, so it acts on what it read.
• Falls back to a site’s /llms.txt when a page is bot-walled.

• Text in the agent transcript can be selected and copied.

The agent can fetch a web page.

• New fetch_url tool — the agent can pull a page into context.
• Dragging the last tab out of a window now closes the window it came from.
• Fixed stray text selection in the editor while dragging a tab.

What happens when something goes wrong — logging, crash recovery, and a way to tell us.

• Structured local logging with daily rotation and crash markers. Nothing is transmitted; the logs stay on your machine.
• Frontend error capture and a per-window error boundary, so a render error shows a recoverable screen rather than a blank one.
• A redacted diagnostics bundle you preview in full before it is written — paths, keys, and secrets scrubbed.
• Crash-loop detection with a Safe Mode that defers session restore instead of discarding it.
• A "Report a problem" path that prefills the facts and never sends anything on its own.
• Internally: the 5,400-line App component was decomposed into 21 focused controller hooks, with no behavior change.
• Fixed a long-standing flaky test caused by a process-id reuse race.

Export layout and markdown round-trip fixes.

• PDF export keeps a lead-in heading or paragraph glued to the block it introduces.
• The markdown deserializer no longer duplicates equivalent nested marks.
• The export window reopens at the editor’s top edge.
• Fixed selection-toolbar timing, and added a highlight for the agent’s current selection.
• Default Claude model bumped to Sonnet 5, and provider error detail is no longer swallowed.

• CLI agent output preserves line breaks and blank lines.
• CLI presets use `codex exec` rather than the interactive TUI.

• Settings scroll position resets when you switch tabs.
• Fixed the document-actions inset with the sidebar collapsed.

A new smart block.

• Tufte-style ASCII chart smart block, with export support.
• Smart blocks share one resize and align shell.

• Build-pipeline release. No user-facing changes.

• Dragging titlebar tabs no longer selects text behind them.

• The About screen reads the running app version at runtime.

Ask AI to write, inline — and tables that behave.

• An inline "Ask AI to write" slash command that streams into the document.
• Table formula results are styled, and Enter moves down a row instead of splitting the cell.
• Tables get rounded corners with clean single-width borders.
• Smart blocks and table formulas deselect when you click away.
• CLI agent tools now work when Ampersand is launched from the Dock, by recovering the login shell PATH.

• Color and layout consistency fixes across the light theme and the marketing site.

A proper first launch.

• First-run onboarding dialog.
• A small celebration when a license activates.

• Shared download button across the site; disk-image window sizing fix.

• Disk-image installer background and download options.

• Custom disk-image background, with the layout preserved across updates.

• Release-pipeline fix. No user-facing changes.

• Release-pipeline fix. No user-facing changes.

• Search panel error handling and state cleanup; release-pipeline fixes.

• Toolchain and lint modernization across the codebase. No user-facing changes.

The first public build — the whole editor, shipped.

• A native macOS block editor built on Rust, Tauri, and TipTap, over plain .md files with optional YAML frontmatter.
• Smart blocks: diagrams, charts, math, and live calculation, all round-tripping to markdown.
• Tables with spreadsheet formulas, wiki-links and backlinks, tags, and templates.
• Bring-your-own-key AI across Claude, OpenAI, Apple Intelligence, local models via Ollama, and CLI agents — plus agent mode with file attachments.
• Export to PDF, Word, HTML, and Markdown.
• Per-vault version history with restore, and per-note encryption unlockable with Touch ID.
• Vault-wide search, a command palette, quick capture, a menu-bar tray, and customizable shortcuts.
• Import from Obsidian, Notion, Word, and any folder of markdown.
• Signed, notarized builds with a silent background auto-updater.