LinwoodButterfly Dreamy Duskywing (2.6.0-beta.3) released
🎨 Powerful, minimalistic, cross-platform, opensource note-taking app
The fourth beta of Butterfly Dreamy Duskywing is now available.
This update expands the editor with new creative tools and improves several existing workflows. Please test the beta carefully and report any bugs or unexpected behavior you find.
Highlights:
- 🔄 Rotate the canvas
- 🔀 More flexible element transformations
- 🔤 Custom fonts for labels
- 🗃️ Custom default file names
- 🐛 Workflow and reliability fixes
Rotate the canvas
The Butterfly canvas can now be rotated.
On touch devices, rotation can be used together with the existing two-finger zoom and movement gestures. This makes it easier to adjust the canvas to a comfortable drawing angle without rotating the document content itself.
A rotation lock is also available when you want to keep the current canvas orientation fixed.
Canvas rotation works independently from element rotation, so your document content keeps its original orientation and can still be edited normally.
More flexible element transformations
Elements now support a shear property, allowing content to be slanted without rotating the entire element.
Horizontal and vertical flip actions are also available for all elements. This provides a direct way to mirror selected content instead of relying on negative scaling.
Negative scaling itself has also been improved, and transformations of rotated elements now behave more predictably. Previously, resizing an element after rotating it could cause unexpected distortion or movement. Rotated content should now keep its intended orientation while being resized.
Together, these changes make it easier to mirror, skew, resize, and arrange drawings, images, shapes, text, and other elements.
Custom fonts for labels
Labels are no longer limited to Butterfly’s default fonts.
You can now choose from available system fonts and custom fonts when editing text and Markdown labels. Custom fonts can also be loaded from Butterfly packs, making it possible to reuse them across documents.
This gives labels much more visual flexibility, whether you are creating handwritten-style headings, technical documents, presentations, or layouts that require a specific typeface.
Since installed system fonts can differ between platforms, fonts bundled through packs are especially useful when a document should look consistent across devices.
Custom default file names
Butterfly now allows you to customize the default name used for new documents.
A global default file name pattern can be configured in the settings. Individual templates can override this pattern with their own file name.
Patterns can include the current date and time using placeholders such as:
{date}{time}{date:yyyy-MM-dd}{time:HH-mm}
This is useful for recurring documents such as daily notes, meeting notes, journals, or worksheets. For example, a template can automatically create documents named Daily 2026-07-27 instead of requiring the name to be entered manually each time.
The file name preview also no longer appears when renaming an existing document.
Workflow and reliability fixes
This beta fixes loading errors in embedded and web environments, broken navigation menus on mobile layouts, creating packs from selected elements, and moving collection elements to layers.
File previews no longer reset Butterfly to the system language. Keyboard shortcuts such as undo and redo also continue working after loading a toolbar.
Rendering is now more reliable when baking fails, reducing the chance of document content temporarily disappearing or failing to update.
Full changelog
- Add shear property for elements
- Add camera rotation support (#977)
- Add custom fonts to label (#1011)
- Add option to customize default file name globally and in template (#1041)
- Add flip horizontal and vertical to all elements (#1058)
- Improve negative scaling
- Improve rotated elements transformtion (#1099)
- Improve rendering reliability if baking fails
- Fix embed/web loading errors (#1167)
- Fix file previews resetting the language to the system locale
- Fix filename preview appearing when renaming existing documents
- Fix navigation menus broken on mobile layout (#1177)
- Fix creating packs from the selection menu (#1178)
- Fix moving collection elements to layers (#1176)
- Fix unreliable keyboard shortcuts after loading toolbars (#1186)