Changelog.

Composer presets

• Save a favorite chat setup (mode, persona, scope, web, thinking, research, and more)
• Apply the same presets from Welcome, Canto Chat, and Document Chat
• Set one default preset so new chats start the way you like

Focused selection edits (beta)

• Highlight part of a note and ask for a small rewrite without reworking the whole document
• See a clear focused-edit result in chat
• Optionally prefer a lighter local model for these short edits

Web research control

• Block domains you don’t want Canto to search or read
• Block a site directly from a web source, with easy undo
• Get suggestions when a domain keeps failing (or auto-block with undo)
• If a search provider isn’t set up, Canto softens or skips those tools instead of failing mid-reply

Send Diagnostics

• Review the exact support report before anything is sent
• Optionally attach a screenshot, save a local copy, or copy the report
• Separate from telemetry, and designed not to freeze the app while collecting

Sync

• More of your vault travels with iCloud Drive Sync — including chats, canvases, projects, presets, and agents
• Clearer sync health, conflict awareness, and repair tools when a Mac falls out of step

Polish

• Connected outside tools respect your chat recall privacy settings
• Smoother handoffs between Canto Chat and Document Chat
• More reliable chat-to-note capture
• Richer research starter prompts across more topics and languages
• Steadier page reading during web research

Canto Print

• Preview the exact PDF pages before you save, not an approximate sketch
• Choose paper size and content scale, then save when you’re happy
• A plain-language checklist flags issues like missing captions or tall blocks that may span pages
• Printed documents stay light and readable while carrying accents from your active theme
• Citation links in exported PDFs can reopen the matching place in Canto

Smoother note editing from chat

• When a note is open beside chat, Canto can update it in place
• Charts, callouts, and tables land as real note blocks instead of leftover markup
• When Document Chat is the better home, the handoff carries a clear, tailored brief

Safer citations

• Automatic citations stay in prose, callouts, and tables
• They no longer land inside diagrams, code, charts, or math

Roomier research follow-ups

• Quick web follow-ups can dig further without stopping early
• Results stay compact so long sessions remain usable, while citations and links stay intact

Smaller polish

• Created-note notices sit inline in the chat with a clear link and timing
• Notebooks, Canvas, research notes, and your library work more smoothly with connected apps and automations
• HTML and PDF exports pick up your theme’s accent without flipping the whole document dark

Let multiple chats keep moving

• Start a new chat without cancelling work already underway in another one.
• Each chat keeps its own research progress, questions, approvals, saved work, and Stop button.
• See which chats are replying, researching, waiting for you, saving, or waiting their turn.
• Keep an answer consistent while it is being written, even if you change your preferred AI settings elsewhere.
• When your Mac needs to handle one demanding task at a time, Canto queues the rest clearly instead of letting work collide.

Resume long research instead of starting over

• Build chapter-by-chapter research as a progressive draft.
• Open completed sections while the rest of the project is still underway.
• Resume an interrupted or oversized project from where it stopped.
• Keep completed chapters when a task reaches its limit instead of losing the work.
• See clearer progress that identifies the current chapter or section.
• Preview the likely size and shape of a large research project before starting.

More focused document research

• Choose the main document when working with several attachments.
• Research a specific chapter or section with tighter focus.
• Match citations more easily to the printed page numbers in your document.
• Continue a research thread in a fresh, lighter chat while keeping the relevant sources and focus.
• Save successful research setups as reusable shortcuts.
• Use new guided shortcuts:
  • /chapter-study
  • /source-critique
  • /literature-follow-up
• Start relevant research shortcuts from the welcome screen as well as existing chats.

Clearer, more dependable sessions

• Wait for attachments and their references to be ready before research begins.
• Keep progress, source guidance, and recovery choices attached to the correct chat.
• Avoid confusing recovery messages after a successful answer.
• Better recognize naturally finished answers in Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and other languages.
• Explain more clearly whether a task was interrupted, too large to finish in one response, or needs fewer sources.
• Make research dialogs easier to use with a keyboard, including Escape to close them.
• Keep active chats smoother and more stable when your Mac is also handling voice, images, indexing, or Memory Links.

🗺️ Big Documents, Actually Understood

• Canto can now map a long PDF's chapters and sections (from its bookmarks or printed table of contents) and knows exactly which pages each one spans.
• Asking about a specific chapter or section now jumps straight to the right pages instead of searching the whole document piece by piece.
• Very large files (hundreds of pages, tens of megabytes) are read in careful, sized chunks so a single oversized request can no longer overwhelm the conversation.
• A live progress card shows reading progress for long, multi-part reads instead of a silent wait.
• If Canto starts repeating the same question about a document, it now corrects itself with a helpful nudge instead of giving up entirely.
• Documents that are still being indexed in the background can still be read by chapter and page range right away.

🧾 See What a Run Will Use, Before It Runs

• The research plan now shows a clear ✓ / ✗ checklist of exactly which sources (attached file, Library, Notes, Web, Past chats) a run will use, including your lock.
• Sources from the same file are now grouped together ("3 files · 46 passages") instead of listing every passage separately.
• Sources that turn out to come from a file you never attached are quietly flagged as "outside scope."

🧯 When a Run Gets Too Big, You Get Options

• If a research run gathers strong sources but the final answer becomes too large to finish writing, a new recovery card lets you:
  • Get a shorter answer using just the best sources ("compact synthesis")
  • Save everything it gathered as a reference list, even without a written answer
  • Retry with a smaller, lighter source set
  • Add what it found as a new section on an existing note
• The error message you see now explains what actually happened, instead of a generic failure.
• Quick follow-up questions after a research note now run with a lighter, tighter source budget by default, so they finish more reliably.

🎨 A Friendlier "Save as Note" Dialog

• Choosing a note format (Note, Brief, Matrix, Notebook) is now four simple icon tiles with a smooth animated highlight, instead of a cramped row of text.
• Advanced tuning options (fidelity, tone, etc.) are now tucked behind a single expandable section, so the dialog feels simpler at a glance.
• The dialog has a softer, frosted-glass look that matches Canto's light and dark themes.

🛠️ Smaller Fixes & Refinements

• Reading an attached file now correctly shows "Reading your attachment…" instead of the confusing "Reading your library…" message.
• Short, simple documents that used to trip up the repeated-question loop now read through cleanly.

Four Ways to Read a Research Note

Research notes now have a floating view switcher:

• Human — the clean, readable write-up.
• Audit — a claim-by-claim look at what's asserted and how well each point is supported.
• Trace — the step-by-step record of what was searched, read, and gathered.
• Diff — a "what changed" summary of what was preserved, added, or reframed from the original answer.
• Each note also carries a lineage panel showing where it came from, notes derived from it, and open questions still worth chasing.

Claims You Can Trust at a Glance

All on by default, and adjustable in Settings → Research Fidelity:

• Low-confidence claims are gently qualified instead of being stated as hard fact.
• Sources are graded by how directly they support each point.
• Key ideas are preserved — important concepts are pinned and any drift during rewriting is flagged.
• Sensitive topics are framed responsibly — clinical and psychological subjects are presented as conceptual exploration, not diagnosis.

Follow-Ups That Actually Go Somewhere

• Typed follow-up tasks with an Act picker send each next step down the right workflow with a click.
• Guided sessions walk you through a few quick questions, then use your answers to do the work — and you can pause and resume later.
• A "what now?" chooser offers clear action chips after a research run, with Save as note front and center.
• Notes remember their origin — a note created from a task links back to its source, and the source learns which notes grew out of it.

Answer in Your Language

• A new response-language control in every composer (welcome, Canto Chat, and per-document chat).
• Leave it on Auto to match your question, or pin a language so every reply, note title, and follow-up sticks to it.
• Reliable with non-Latin scripts like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Smooth on Modest Macs

• No more out-of-memory crashes — sync, web search, and Memory Links now watch available memory and back off gracefully.
• Smarter under pressure — Canto releases the heaviest things first (like hidden web-search pages) and checks in more often when memory runs low.
• Problem notes step aside — if a single note repeatedly fails to index, it's quarantined so the rest of your library stays searchable.
• Read entire books — full-length PDFs, EPUBs, and Word documents now index cover to cover, not just the opening chapters.

Clearer Errors, Never a Blank Turn

• Empty replies explain themselves — when a local or external model returns no visible text, Canto tells you what likely happened and what to try.
• Errors stay contained — a hiccup rendering one chat can no longer take down the whole conversation.
• Note-creation deep links — when the assistant makes a note, the chat timeline shows a direct Open note ↗ link.

Fix Diagrams With One Click

• A broken Mermaid diagram now has a Fix with AI button.
• Canto first tries fast, deterministic clean-ups for common mistakes, and only calls on the model if the diagram is still broken.
• The corrected diagram is written straight back into your note.

A Calmer Composer

• Compact icon controls — persona, response-language, and scope pills collapse into tidy icons so the toolbar stays on one line.
• Still obvious when it matters — a control set to something other than its default gently tints and spells out the choice in its tooltip.
• A resizable docked chat — the chat panel beside a note can be dragged to the width you like, and remembers it.

Reliability Round-Up

• Web search stays inside Canto — the hidden browser used to read pages no longer occasionally pops links open in Safari.
• Citations survive skill-made notes — notes created by a skill keep their sources as clickable links.
• Related Notes never gets stuck — the spinner no longer hangs during vault indexing and refreshes on its own once it finishes.
• Task-driven note saves just work — saving from an explicit action no longer leaves a chat stuck mid-stream.
• Saved research matches the live run — process traces and source counts line up with what you saw, and restored chat tabs keep their real titles instead of reverting to "New chat".
• Steadier vault import — imports handle stray folder references gracefully, and Vault Mode transcripts read in the right order.
• Better folder moves — the Move-to-folder dialog can create a new subfolder under the folder you picked and drops your item right into it.
• Cleaner action menus — the post-research and task pickers were refreshed with consistent icons and tighter layout.

🔬 Deep Research That Recovers

• Graceful timeouts — deep-research runs now have sensible, well-separated time budgets and quietly retry brief hiccups instead of spinning forever.
• A real fallback — if a deep-research run times out without gathering anything, Canto automatically falls back to a normal web search so your question still gets answered.
• Honest reporting — when something does take too long, Canto can tell you where it stalled rather than showing a generic failure.

📡 Connect Canto From Your Other Devices

• Opt-in local-network mode — turn it on and AI apps on your phone, tablet, or another computer on the same network can reach Canto (off by default).
• Always protected — local-network access only turns on with a required access key in place, so nothing can connect without it.
• Clear addresses — when enabled, Canto lists the exact network addresses other devices should use.
• A bigger setup menu — a new searchable client picker in Settings → MCP Server covers 20+ popular AI clients (Claude Desktop, ChatGPT, Cursor, VS Code, Cline, Continue, Windsurf, Zed, Goose, and more), generating a ready-made connection snippet for your app, OS, and connection type.
• Smoother reconnects — clients holding a stale session from an older Canto version no longer hit "session not found" errors.

🌐 Self-Hosted Search On Your Network

• SearXNG on your LAN — point Canto at a SearXNG search server running on your home network or your own machine.
• Careful by design — private/LAN addresses are allowed for this one setting while risky internal targets stay blocked.
• Clearer setup help — the settings now note that private/LAN addresses are supported, remind you to enable JSON output on your instance, and give sharper errors from the "Test" button when something's misconfigured.

🖇️ Steadier Attachments & Images

• "File unavailable," calmly — in the Asset Library, an attachment whose original can't be found is flagged with a quiet pill instead of a broken thumbnail or crash, with more efficient availability checks.
• Images tell you what they need — dropping an image into chat now checks up front whether your current model can see it, and clearly prompts you to download a vision model when one is required.
• Kinder to iCloud files — files that haven't downloaded yet are recognized as present-but-offline rather than mistaken for missing.

🔌 More Reliable External AI Endpoints

• No more mid-thought timeouts — connections to local endpoints (Ollama, LM Studio, oMLX, and similar) now watch for activity instead of cutting off after a fixed time, giving a working model the time it needs.
• Long tool calls survive — when an endpoint streams a large or slightly malformed tool request, Canto repairs and completes it instead of dropping the whole turn.

🛠️ Smaller Fixes & Refinements

• Honest source counts — the chat timeline now shows how many sources were actually new after removing duplicates, and fetch/read steps no longer mislabel results as "0 sources".
• Relative timestamps in chat — the Canto Chat sidebar shows friendly relative times ("2h ago") based on when you last opened or used each conversation.
• Fusion respects your choice — turning on result fusion with a single search engine now uses that engine instead of quietly falling back to another.
• Consistent web-tool summaries — Canto Chat and per-document chat now describe web searches and page reads in the same clear language.

🔓 Everything unlocked

• All product features are now free — Workspace, Memory Links, Research Mode, the Canvas, web search, personas, and more.
• A license now buys unlimited on-device AI usage rather than unlocking features.
• Memory Links works out of the box for everyone, and deactivating no longer wipes it.
• One clear, consistent free-query meter across chat, research, and inbox actions.

🌐 Web search, your way

• Choose providers for three jobs: Find (locate pages), Read (extract text), Research (deep reports).
• New built-in browser renders real pages to read JS-only or blocked sites — no key, no permission, no setup.
• Bring your own provider: Tavily, Keiro (cheaper, AI-native), Serper, self-hosted SearXNG, an experimental DuckDuckGo finder, and an always-on key-free reader.
• Result fusion fans a query out to several engines and merges the best results — counts as one web step.
• Automatic reader fallback when a page won't open, plus provider tags on every source.
• Deep research now gathers up to 50 sources (bounded by your model's context).
• Note & Notebook chat get web search too, with clickable source badges.

🧠 Chat that remembers

• Canto can search and cite your past conversations, fully on-device.
• Pick how recall works: Keyword, Semantic, or Hybrid (recommended).
• Emerald [C#] citations open the cited chat and flash the exact turn.
• Proactive chips suggest related past chats as you type.
• The current conversation is always excluded; you can also exclude any chat.
• Canto Chat is now a tab you can keep, reopen, split, and restore after relaunch — with fast full-text history search.

🤖 Personas, commands & skills — one Agents library

• Personas, slash commands, and skills now live in a single Settings → Agents tab (browse, create, fork, import/export).
• Personas are one-click chat presets — built-ins include Companion, Critique, and Researcher — with their own prompt, tools, and model settings.
• Slash commands in chat — type / for commands & skills; new built-ins like /summarize-thread, /critique-last, /eli5, and /action-items.
• Run skills step by step from the composer, with approval for any step that writes.
• Personas are available in per-document chat too.

✍️ One composer, everywhere

• Welcome, Canto Chat, and document chat share the same composer.
• @ mentions render as clean inline pills (notes, attachments, past chats).
• Smarter placeholders, sticky scroll (with a "Jump to latest" pill), drop overlays that don't get stuck, and right-click spellcheck suggestions.

🔬 Sharper, deeper research

• Writes a tailored query for each source (vault, linked folders, web, past chats).
• Closes its own gaps — chases down thin results before writing the answer.
• Your past chats and linked folders can both be first-class research sources.

🖼️ Images that stay yours

• Online images are saved into your vault on insert, so they always render, sync, and export — no broken hotlinks. AI follows the same rule behind an approval step.

🧭 A real guided first run

• New vaults open with an accurate, hands-on tour plus a disposable Sample Project (notes, tags, a daily note, templates, a notebook, and a canvas) so everything feels alive immediately. Existing vaults are never touched.

💾 Portable, lossless files

• .canto, .cnb, and .cwsp files now carry everything faithfully — notes, tags, attachments, history, chats, agents, links, and settings.
• Attachments are deduplicated, secrets and downloaded models are left out, and backups use the same format.
• Very large vaults export reliably now, thanks to a new container format — older files stay compatible.

🔌 Connecting outside tools

• More reliable connections to external AI clients like Claude Desktop, with updated setup snippets and a legacy fallback.

🛠️ Fixes & refinements

• Workspace PDF previews render correctly instead of going blank.
• Linked folders keep re-indexing even when system file-change events go silent.
• Past-chat citations open in-app instead of as web links (including older notes).
• Theme-consistent right-click menus, cleaner Library vs. Workspace search, and a tidier welcome-screen window drag.

📚 Citations That Stay Dense Through the Save

• Automatic citation recovery — when saving a research chat, dropped source markers are automatically re-matched to the sentences they belong to, even when sentences were merged or reworded.
• Optional AI citation placement — a new switch in Settings → Notes runs an extra AI pass that attaches gathered-but-uncited sources to the claims they support. Every suggestion is verified against the source before it lands, and it's skipped on very small models.
• Fuller related notes — the "related notes" list at the bottom of a note is less likely to come up sparse.

🧮 Math That Renders the Way You Wrote It

• Equations stay intact — formulas now display correctly in chat instead of occasionally arriving as raw symbols.
• Multi-line formulas carry over — aligned equations and piecewise definitions move from chat into a saved note without breaking apart.
• Tricky labels just work — labels with underscores or special characters inside a formula now render reliably instead of throwing an error.

📐 Diagrams That Match Your Theme

• Themed to your vault — flow diagrams now follow your active Canto theme (light or dark) instead of clashing with the note around them.
• Self-repairing — common syntax slips are quietly fixed on a quick retry, so a small mistake no longer turns a diagram into a wall of raw code.
• Cleaner guidance — the AI is steered away from the patterns that caused diagram trouble, so they come out right more often to begin with.

💾 Steadier Research Saves

• Thinking models stay on task — reasoning-heavy local models (including Ollama and Ollama Cloud) no longer spend their whole budget thinking and hand back an empty draft.
• Drafts finish themselves — a save that gets cut off at the model's length limit now continues automatically instead of saving a truncated note.
• Watch the finish happen — the final pass (citations, roles, evidence ledger) shows a live, step-by-step indicator with a real progress bar, instead of a frozen "Almost ready…" pulse.
• Follow-ups dig deeper — research keeps its sources open after the first pass so a follow-up question can fill the gaps, with a sensible cap on extra web lookups per turn.

🛠️ Smaller Fixes & Refinements

• Shift+Enter line breaks stick — line breaks added in the chat composer are preserved exactly as typed instead of silently collapsing.
• The window is draggable again — the chat header bar and the update banner are reliable grab-and-move zones.
• Tool steps finish in order — when a model runs several tools at once, each result matches the right step, so earlier steps no longer get stuck on "running".
• Live reasoning scrolls neatly — a model's streaming thought card scrolls within its own panel instead of dragging the whole conversation along.
• Disabled sources stay quiet — a source you turn off shows as gently skipped rather than flagged as a failure.