Legend has always been rooted in outlining, but we wanted to bring you the power of an outliner even in normal documents. So today we have an experimental new feature that gives you all the power of an outliner without needing to indent.

You can now use Heading size to create a hierarchy. So items below an H1 will be considered its children, and an H2 creates another level of hierarchy.

You can see in this demo video that all of the normal outlining features like collapsing, zooming, and filtering work as expected, but by using Heading size instead of indentation.

The goal of this feature is to:

1. Look more aesthetically pleasing as normal documents
2. Reduce some downsides of deeply nested hierarchy where indentation reduces usable space for text, especially in small panes
3. Appeal to people who are more familiar with regular documents than outliners

We are already using this extensively ourselves for some smaller documents where we don't need a lot of hierarchy, so segmenting by Heading is a clean way to visualize our projects.

Enabling

This feature is still a bit experimental, so it's not yet enabled by default. You can try it by enabling "Infer hierarchy from heading size" in the General section of the Settings.

Feedback

We would love your feedback on this feature. Please post in the forum thread or email us if you find any issues or have any suggestions.

Updated Homepage

We also updated our homepage with new videos and animations that are more descriptive about how Legend works. We hope you like it!

This month was spent mainly on improving the Help and creating content to help you get started.

• The Help page has a new Workflow Examples section with some advanced workflows.
• We have a new Medium Publication where we're posting workflow examples. So far we have some great posts by some of our users, Stephen Zeoli and Tim Lutero, and we will continue to add more there.
• We have a new YouTube Channel where we've posted two videos so far. We're starting with the basics to help you get started, and we will make more videos with more advanced topics.
• We've become more active on our Twitter Account. We will post updates there so follow us to get notified.

And of course we got in some good features and bug fixes too:

Improved Calendar Sync

In addition to a few bug fixes, we focused on making sure that Legend's sync to Google Calendar is very safe. It now prevents edits which would mess up events, and we added prompts to make sure you don't accidentally remove events.

A new feature, a per-calendar Editable setting in the Calendar section of the settings, lets you lock calendars so that Legend cannot modify them, or prompts before making changes.

This was a great idea and a highly requested feature on our forum which makes it much safer to sync work calendars with Legend.

Tag Coloring by Prefix

Another highly requested feature: there's a new page in the Display Settings where you can change the colors of tags. It works by prefix so you can create a colored tag hierarchy. For example you could set #home_ to be orange, so that all tags starting with #home_ like #home_chores would be orange. Some of our beta testers like to set a background color on the more urgent tags, with a text color for normal tags.

Inferred Hierarchy Experiment

We're working on a new concept where Legend can infer an outline hierarchy based on Heading size. It gives you all the power of collapsing, filtering, and zooming without even needing to indent. It's still a beta-only experiment, but it's almost done so you will see it released soon! If you'd like to try it now and help give us feedback, go here to join the beta.

For this past month we were focused on fixing bugs and improving performance (we'll get to that), but first is a new feature we're excited about!

Open the Command Palette by pressing + P to see all of the various commands available in Legend. You can use this to quickly find actions you don't remember the hotkey for, or just explore all of the options. Additionally we've added some new commands that don't currently have hotkeys. You can customize the hotkeys in the Hotkeys section of the settings, and please let us know in the forum if you have suggestions for what the default hotkeys should be.

New Commands

• Go back
• Set view mode in pane
• Collapse by level

Additional Features

• Images are cached so they load immediately and are available offline
• YouTube videos can (optionally) be embedded directly
• The / menu has an input to filter for quicker usage

Notable bug fixes

• Outlook email works much better
• Project and Heading views more accurately show mirror items
• Inline images work much better, with fixes to menus and drag/dropping
• Typing in Asian languages works much better
• Responsiveness of editing and adding items, especially with multiple panes open, is much improved

Feedback

If you have any thoughts or suggestions about this update, please let us know in the forum thread.

This update brings a new item type: the Heading.

It works the same was as the Projects you're used to and comes with its own Pane view mode, filter, and theme selectors. Additionally, Headings have a new set of icons which adjust as the size decreases, and a new display setting to only show them when hovered.

This was highly requested so that people could use Headings for more control over formatting and structure, while Projects could be used for specific items for visual differentiation, and for another dimension to group and filter by. But as with most things in Legend, you're free to find your own interesting ways to use this, and we'd love to hear your ideas!

You can create Headings by starting items with the # prefix and Projects by starting with ^, or by selecting them from the menus.

Before this update, Projects used the # prefix so those will now be Headings, and any Panes you had using Project views or filters will be migrated to the Heading equivalent. Then you can convert any other items to Projects by pressing + Shift + P to change them to Projects.

Feedback

If you have any thoughts or suggestions about this update, please let us know in the forum thread.

Continuing our trend of improving filtering, we've been working with our beta testers for the past month on a new filtering system that we're really excited about!

It has a lot more ways to filter, by every item type or by the contents of items, so you can be much more deliberate about how you filter your panes.

Advanced mode takes away the icons and adds a ton of extra functionality for when you want to get more specific. In advanced mode you can mix filters together with text, group filters together with parentheses, and OR them together, to filter exactly how you want.

And More

• Added a new General setting "Collapse matches of filters” which will collapse matches that have no matching children
• Revamped the system that locks items into place while editing. They now show a dashed outline for 1.5 seconds and show a more accurate message about the number of items hidden.
• Fixed some issues editing text around links and with multiple links

Feedback

If you have any thoughts or suggestions about this update, please let us know in the forum thread.