Changelog.

Smarter AI That Understands What You Want

Canto now has an intelligent assistant that automatically figures out the best way to help with your notes. When you ask Canto to make changes, it intelligently chooses the right tools and methods to get the job done — no more guessing or trial-and-error.

Expanded AI Model Support

Now supports more AI models that run entirely on your device:

• Qwen 3.5 family (6 new variants from 2B to 122B parameters)
• Nemotron models from NVIDIA, including efficient and super-capable versions
• Improved support for connecting to external AI servers

Preserve Your Document Structure

When Canto edits your notes, it now respects your existing formatting:

• Checklists stay intact: Task list checkboxes with progress are preserved, not reset
• Code blocks protected: Code snippets, math equations, and diagrams are handled specially so they don't get corrupted
• Context awareness: Canto understands the structure of your document (headings, lists, etc.) when making edits

Under the Hood Improvements

• Better handling of AI startup failures
• Smoother animations and reduced flickering
• Improved compatibility with various AI providers
• Various bug fixes and performance improvements

🔌 MCP Server — Your Notes, in Every AI Tool

Canto now has a built-in MCP (Model Context Protocol) server. Turn it on in Settings → MCP Server and your favorite AI tools — Claude Desktop, Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, OpenClaw — can read and write your notes directly.

Ask Claude to find notes, create summaries, tag things, or reorganize your vault, all without copying and pasting anything. Your notes stay on your device the entire time.

What AI tools can do with your notes:

• Search your vault by topic, keyword, or meaning
• Read, create, update, and delete notes
• Manage folders and tags
• Find notes that are semantically related to each other
• Access your daily notes

Setup takes about 30 seconds. Open Settings → MCP Server, enable it, then copy the ready-made config snippet for whichever tool you use. Supported clients: Claude Desktop, Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, and OpenClaw.

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⚡ Changes Show Up Instantly

When an AI tool creates or edits a note through MCP, the sidebar and editor update immediately — no need to switch away and come back. New notes appear, edits land in any open tab, and deleted notes close their tab automatically.

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🔒 Privacy & Security

The MCP server is off by default and only accepts connections from your own machine (localhost). You can optionally generate a Bearer token to require authentication. The server shuts down automatically when you quit Canto.

🤖 AI Can Now Create Table of Contents

When you ask the AI to organize a note, it can now insert a live Table of Contents that automatically lists all your headings and updates as you write. Just ask something like "Add a table of contents to this note" and the AI will place one for you.

📦 AI Can Now Create Collapsible Blocks

The AI can now create collapsible toggle sections in your notes. Ask it to "wrap these tips in a toggle block" or "add a collapsible FAQ section", and it will generate properly structured collapsible blocks that expand and collapse just like ones you'd create yourself.

📜 Browse Previous Release Notes

The "What's New" tab now lets you browse release notes from older versions too. Version pills appear at the top of the page — click any version to read what changed. If you're coming from an older release, you can catch up on everything you missed without leaving the app.

✨ New Features

📑 Table of Contents Block

Add a live outline to any note! The Table of Contents block automatically lists all your headings and updates in real time as you write. Click any heading in the outline to jump straight to it.

• Insert via the slash menu: type /toc or search "Table of Contents"
• Supports Heading 1 through Heading 3
• Updates instantly as you add, remove, or rename headings

📦 Collapsible Blocks (Toggle Sections)

Keep long notes organized with expandable/collapsible sections. Click the arrow to show or hide content — perfect for FAQs, reference material, or tucking away detailed steps.

• Insert via the slash menu: type /toggle or search "Toggle Block"
• Can contain any content — paragraphs, lists, code blocks, images, tables, and even other collapsible blocks
• Keyboard shortcuts: Enter moves from the title into the body, ⌘+Enter toggles collapse

🔀 Wrap Selection into Collapsible Block

A new toolbar button lets you instantly wrap selected content into a collapsible block — no slash menu needed.

• Select one or more blocks, then click the new toggle icon in the toolbar
• The first block becomes the collapsible title; the rest become the body
• Click the icon again while inside a collapsible block to unwrap it

🔍 Slash Command Shortcuts

Find slash commands faster with short aliases. Instead of typing the full name, use quick keywords like:

• /h1, /h2, /h3 for headings
• /ul, /ol for lists
• /toc for Table of Contents
• /toggle for collapsible blocks
• /latex for math blocks

Read all the notes

🛠 Under the Hood

• "What's New" release notes tab — After updating, Canto now shows a one-time tab highlighting the latest features so you never miss what's new. Close or dismiss it at any time; it won't appear again.
• AI compatibility — The AI assistant fully understands collapsible blocks and Table of Contents blocks, so it can read, create, and edit them just like any other content in your notes.
• Dependency updates for improved stability

✨ AI Writing Improvements

Smarter AI Responses

• When you ask the AI to continue writing or add content, it now better understands that you want new content, not a rewrite of what you already have
• The AI is less likely to repeat content that's already in your note

Smoother AI Text Animation

• When the AI is writing content for you, the text now fades in smoothly with a subtle blur-to-clear effect
• The "thinking" overlay no longer dims your entire note, so you can continue reading while the AI works
• Better support for both light and dark modes in the thinking indicator

More Reliable AI Editing

• AI edits now use a safer system that prevents conflicts and data corruption

🗂️ File Organization Improvements

Smarter Drag & Drop

• Dragging a note or notebook to the folder it's already in no longer counts as an "edit" (no more unnecessary timestamp updates)
• Your notes will stay in their proper sort order when organizing files
• Moving items around in the sidebar is now more predictable

🖊️ Editor Fixes

Fixed Selection Toolbar

• The floating toolbar that appears when you select text now stays in the correct position when you scroll the note
• No more toolbar drifting or disappearing off-screen

⌨️ Shortcut Improvements

Better Keyboard Shortcuts

• Fixed conflicts between editor shortcuts and app-level shortcuts

Highlights

Canto 0.2.1 is a polish-heavy release focused on light mode quality, theme consistency, and a much more refined day-to-day editing experience.

🎨 New & Improved Theming

• Added a full theme preset system with Zen, Mist, Midnight, and Monokai.
• Reworked light mode so it feels intentional and cohesive (not just a dark mode fallback).
• Theme behavior is now more consistent across the app, including popups, modals, and notebook UI.
• Improved theme switching reliability (including quick toggle actions).

⚙️ Settings Experience Redesign

• Refreshed the Settings UI with a cleaner, unified look and spacing.
• Improved consistency across all major settings sections, including:

📓 Notebook & AI Workflow Improvements

• Notebook AI modal now matches the visual quality of the Notes AI modal (especially in light mode).
• Better readability for notebook AI prompts, actions, previews, and error states.
• Notebook code editor theme behavior improved so it follows app theme changes more reliably.

✨ Editor & Slash Menu Polish

• Slash command popup now properly follows the active theme (including light mode).

🧭 Interaction & UX Fixes

• Improved visual consistency in key surfaces across sidebar, editor panes, and modal components.
• Multiple small quality-of-life refinements to make the app feel faster and cleaner in daily use.

🛠 Stability & Quality

• Addressed several UI regressions introduced during the 0.2.0 cycle.
• General reliability and visual coherence improvements across the renderer experience.

What's New

Overhauled Settings

Every settings panel has been completely redesigned with a clean, consistent look. Toggles, inputs, and controls are now uniform across all 16 panels — no more mismatched styles or cramped layouts. Everything is easier to find, easier to read, and just feels more polished.

Notion-Style Table Controls

Working with tables got a serious upgrade. You can now hover over any row or column edge to reveal handles for inserting, duplicating, clearing, or deleting rows and columns. Drag-and-drop reordering lets you rearrange rows and columns without copy-pasting. Tables are also more compact by default, so they take up less space on the page.

Code Theme Picker for Notebooks

Notebook code cells now support swappable color themes. A built-in "Monokai Dark (Notes)" preset matches the look of regular note code blocks, and you can import any VS Code-compatible theme. Theme changes apply instantly across all open cells.

Copy Buttons in AI Chat

Code blocks in the AI assistant panel and Vault Chat now have a Copy button. Click it and the code goes straight to your clipboard — no selecting, no right-clicking.

Language Selector in the Status Bar

When your cursor is inside a code block in a note, the status bar now shows a language picker. Click it to change the language label on the fly.

Smarter AI Formatting

When the AI writes content into your notes, more markdown syntax is now properly converted to rich formatting — including math expressions, tables, and various list styles.

Notebook Stability Fixes

• Notebook titles now stay in sync across tabs and the sidebar when you rename them.
• Running !pip install inside a notebook then importing the package in the same session works correctly. No more multiarray failed to import or ABI mismatch errors.
• Notebook markdown cells render links correctly again.

Canto 0.2.0-beta.8

This update focuses on making notebooks feel more reliable and polished, especially for Markdown and Python workflows.

Notebook experience improvements

• Markdown in notebook cells now renders much more cleanly.
• Bullet/numbered lists display correctly again.
• Links in notebook Markdown are now clickable.
• Code blocks in notebook Markdown now match the cleaner styling used elsewhere.
• Notebook history previews now behave more consistently with live notebook rendering.

Better title syncing when renaming

• Renaming notes from the sidebar now updates open editors more reliably.
• Renaming notebooks from the sidebar now updates the notebook title in the open editor immediately.
• Overall title updates are now more consistent across tabs and views.

More stable Python notebook runs

• Improved how Python package installs are handled during notebook sessions.
• Reduced failures caused by package-version conflicts after installing/updating libraries in-notebook.
• This specifically improves reliability for common data/plotting workflows (for example NumPy + Matplotlib).

Agent reliability update

• Improved the AI agent’s write flow and retry behavior, which helps reduce failed or inconsistent edit attempts.