VaultSort 5.4.0-beta.16

What's New

• Look at a file in the Vault without taking it out. Images, plain text and PDFs now open in a viewer right on the Vault page. Nothing is written outside the Vault to make it happen — the file is decrypted in memory and handed straight to the viewer, so there is no temporary copy for anything else on your machine to find. Arrow through the other files in the folder, go fullscreen, and page through a PDF in place. Anything VaultSort cannot draw — a video, a huge scan — is refused up front with the size limit spelled out and a suggestion to export instead, rather than showing you a broken image. The moment the Vault locks, the viewer closes and its copy of the file is wiped.
• Move a Vault to another folder, including an external drive. The Vault's location could only ever be chosen, never changed — so putting one on an external drive meant deciding before you created it. Vault settings → Location → Move to another folder…, with the Vault locked. It copies, verifies every file (the header and the index byte for byte), switches over while both copies still exist, and only then removes the original. If the app is interrupted partway, the next launch works out which copy is the real one before it opens anything. A move that copies and verifies but cannot delete the original still succeeds — your Vault is at the new location either way — and tells you how much is still sitting on the old drive.
• Notes, files and folders can be moved between Vault folders. Select them and use Move…. Nothing is re-encrypted and nothing on disk moves; only where it is filed changes. A note written in the wrong folder was previously stuck there for good, which made "notes belong to a folder" a trap rather than a filing system.
• Search every note in the Vault, not just the folder you are standing in. Tick All folders and the pane lists every note you have with the folder it lives under; type to narrow it down, by title or by anything in the body. Each result shows the text around the match so you can tell at a glance which note it is. The searching happens inside the app's secure side and only the matching excerpt is handed to the screen, so a search across the whole Vault never puts all your notes' contents on the page.
• Find within a note — ⌘F (Ctrl+F on Windows). Search the note you are reading, jump between matches, replace. It works from the reading view too, without switching to the editor first.
• Drop a text file onto the notes pane to add it as an encrypted note. Markdown, .txt and other plain text land as notes in the folder you are in, with the filename as the title. Anything that is not text still goes through the normal file import.
• Note actions stay put when notes fill the page. Expanding notes to the full window used to take away the checkboxes, which took away rename, export and delete with them. The list keeps its checkboxes at every size, and the pane names the folder it is showing so a change of folder no longer reads as "my notes are gone".

Bug Fixes

• Deleting a folder no longer takes the notes inside it without telling you. This was the serious one. Deleting a folder deleted everything in it — including notes, which exist nowhere else — and the only warning was a single clause buried in a paragraph of grey text. The sheet now checks what is inside before it will delete anything, names the notes by title, and refuses to go ahead until you have said in so many words that they should go too. It also offers to move the contents out first, which relocates them (subfolders and all, exactly as they are) and leaves the folder empty and safe to delete.
• "All folders" now actually shows all folders. The toggle only widened the search box, so ticking it with nothing typed left you looking at the same folder you were already in. It is now the scope of the whole pane: on means the whole Vault, and the search box filters whatever is in scope.
• The notes header no longer crowds everything onto one row. The search box and the All-folders toggle moved to a row of their own, together, so the toggle reads as what it is — where the search box looks. The box also names the scope it is about to search.
• Touch ID and security-key prompts find the right browser. A registered Touch ID passkey could show a QR code instead of the fingerprint prompt, or fail to open a browser at all. VaultSort now locates the browser reliably, tells it which kind of key to expect so it stops offering a phone when you have a fingerprint reader, and — when a passkey lives in a different browser profile than the one that opens — explains exactly that, instead of leaving you with an unexplained QR code.
• VaultSort comes back to the front when a browser prompt finishes. After approving with Touch ID or a security key you were left staring at the browser, with VaultSort doing the work behind it. On both macOS and Windows the app now raises itself as soon as the prompt is done.
• The Vault's recovery code is clearly not the app's. The Vault issues its own recovery code, separate from the one used for encrypted files, and nothing said so — so being handed a second code looked like a bug. This is deliberate: keeping them separate means the Vault's code never has to be stored on your computer. The wording now says which code is which, and that the one you already have will not open the Vault.
• You are told when the Vault locks, and why. Locking gave no sign it had happened. There is now a brief notice naming the reason in one sentence — idle, sleep, screen lock — and nothing at all when you are simply quitting the app.
• Clicking anywhere in a note starts typing there, and clicking the rendered note switches to editing it. Previously you had to find the text itself, or press the eye button, with nothing to suggest either.
• Clear only clears what it is counting. With notes filling the page, Clear could silently drop items selected in a folder you could no longer see, next to a count that said fewer.
• Dropping files on the Vault behaves. The drop target no longer lights up for things it will not accept, a drop meant for the notes pane no longer also triggers the page's file import, and a file too large to be a note says so and how many, instead of failing quietly.
• The lock screen says "Unlock with" above the list of methods, which previously just began without introduction.