Release Notes — June 9th 2023

Highlighter, locked shapes, and drag and drop images.

and

Jun 09, 2023

Hello! And welcome to this week’s release for tldraw. Today, we’re launching two of our most-requested features: a highlighter shape and support for locked shapes.

What’s new

Highlighter

It’s here! You can select the highlighter from the tools menu, or by pressing Shift + D.

Enjoy the new colors as well as the sandwich mode rendering of the highlighter style.

Locking

You can now lock shapes! To lock a shape, open the context menu and select Toggle locked.

You can’t move or select locked shapes. It’s useful for when you have shapes in the background that you don’t want to select.

And speaking of locking, there’s also

a neat trick

you can use to lock your tool.

Normally, you return to the select tool after making a shape. But turn on tool lock, and you’ll stay in your tool — letting you continue making shapes.

You can toggle this behavior in the toolbar or the preferences menu.

Improvements

You can now drag more things onto the tldraw canvas than ever before! Drag an image from another website—or drag a link to make a bookmark or embed shape.

You can also now choose the vertical alignment of your text in sticky notes.

We also added a reduce motion option to preferences. When enabled, our camera won’t animate when you zoom in or out or use the minimap.

We’ve also moved the actions bar to the bottom on medium-sized screens to make up more space at the top. Why would we need more space at the top of the screen? Tune in next week to find out.

Fixes

Fixed a rare crash that could happen when you try to curve an arrow with zero distance.
Fixed nudging with the shift-key held down.
Fixed a bug where exports would sometimes fail when they were too big for your browser. Now, they're scaled down to the max supported size.
Separately, we reduced the file size of exported files in general.
Fixed being able to undo viewport-following.
Mac: Fixed control-clicking not opening the context menu.
Safari: Fixed a bug where you couldn’t copy snapshot links.

That’s all this for week! We hope you enjoy trying out the new changes. If you have any ideas or feedback, swing by the Discord or @ us on Twitter or Mastodon. And if you’re a developer, come check out the GitHub repo. See you next time!

Here’s a teaser…