v2.3 — Semantic search, WYSIWYG live edit, Windows portable

Two major feature drops + two reported-bug rollups. The big one: Local RAG / semantic search ships with no model file download, no network call, off by default. Plus a Typora-style WYSIWYG live edit mode, a 10× Windows file-tree speedup, and a Windows portable .zip build for users who'd rather not run an installer.

🔍 Local RAG — search your notes by meaning

Press ⌘⇧F (or Ctrl+Shift+F). New panel. Type a natural-language query. Results rank by semantic similarity, not just keyword match. Search "deployment" and you can also surface paragraphs about "rolling out", "shipping", "release".

• 100% on-device. No model file download — we ship a deterministic hashed character-trigram embedder that runs entirely in our Rust process. The whole indexer is a few hundred lines.
• Off by default. Enable in Settings → Semantic search. Zero overhead when off; no scanning, no index file.
• Index lives at <workspace>/.solomd/embeddings.sqlite — a plain SQLite file you can sqlite3 .schema into. Auto- gitignored when AutoGit is on.
• Privacy summary: query text → local embedding fn → local SQLite scan → ranked results. The query text never touches a network socket. See the full writeup in /security § 5.

This is the biggest field-wide gap in note-taking apps right now — Obsidian, Tolaria, MarkText all lack semantic search. Built-in, not a plugin.

✍️ WYSIWYG live edit mode

Toolbar between Split and Preview, you'll see a new pen-on-paper icon. Click it (or cycle with Ctrl+Shift+P) to enter live edit mode — markdown formatting renders inline as you type:

• # Heading renders as a larger bold heading; the # is hidden until your cursor enters the line.
• **bold** renders as bold; the asterisks reappear when you click in.
• Italic, strikethrough, inline code, links, blockquotes, fenced code blocks — same caret-aware reveal.
• Same buffer, same file. Not a separate preview pane — formatting is in the editor itself.

It's the fourth view mode (edit / split / liveEdit / preview), so you can toggle in and out without losing state. Welcome doc updated with a live-edit demo to try every supported syntax.

⚡ Windows file-tree speedup (~10×)

Reported on Win11: opening a folder with a few thousand notes was painfully slow. Root cause: the per-entry e.metadata() call on Windows triggers a separate GetFileInformationByHandle syscall per entry. We were making thousands of stat syscalls when the directory scan already had the type info cached.

Switched to e.file_type(), which reuses the bulk FindFirstFile traversal's cached entry type — no per-entry stat. Effect on Windows: ~5–10× faster on large folders, especially with antivirus on-access scanning. Also added a "Loading…" spinner + truncation hint at 10,000 entries.

📦 Windows portable .zip

Requested by issue #27: a no-installer Windows build. Each release now produces SoloMD_<version>_x64-portable.zip alongside the existing .msi / .exe. Just unzip and run SoloMD.exe — no admin, no registry writes, runs from a USB stick.

Requires Microsoft Edge WebView2, which is preinstalled on Windows 10 and 11. The zip ships with a short README pointing at Microsoft's installer URL in case you need it.

🛠 Bug rollups

• Win11 file-tree crash on toggle (#25) — fixed in v2.2.1; root cause was a synchronous list_dir Tauri command blocking the main thread on slow filesystems (OneDrive placeholders, network drives, antivirus). Now async + spawn_blocking.
• Windows local images not displaying (#22) — fixed back in v2.0; mixed-slash paths now go through a normalizePath helper before reaching convertFileSrc.

🤖 Engineering: the dev-bridge

New internal piece — not user-facing — but worth flagging. Until v2.3, we had a solomd-dev-mcp internal MCP server that could drive everything behind the Tauri IPC layer (settings, workspace state, AutoGit, file IO). It couldn't drive the actual Vue UI — clicks, DOM reads, event dispatch — because Tauri's WKWebView on macOS doesn't natively expose Chrome DevTools Protocol.

v2.3 adds a tiny #[cfg(debug_assertions)]-gated localhost JSON-RPC bridge that runs only in the dev build. Bearer-token auth, 127.0.0.1 only, port + token written to ~/Library/Application Support/app.solomd/dev-bridge.{port,token}. dev-mcp gains 6 new tools: solomd_dev_eval / click / text / dispatch / url / wait_for. Verified zero footprint in release binaries (nm | grep dev_bridge returns 0 matches).

Closes the last gap in the global rule "every client project ships with CLI + MCP for self-test". Claude can now click your buttons, read your DOM, and dispatch keyboard events — same loop a real user would use, but driven from outside.

📥 Download

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What's next

v2.4: a real Notion-style narrative homepage section + GitHub Discussions integration is landing right after this post (separate layer on top of the v2.3 surfacing pass). Beyond that: Mac App Store resubmission, mobile sync via the same AutoGit pattern, and CRDT real-time sync on the v3 horizon.