Quick Bar: UX
The quick bar is Sambee’s main navigation element. It sits in the top bar above the file list and is designed to be the single point of control for directory navigation, file list filtering, and command lookup and execution.
Previously, those three functions were not clearly distinguished. The three modes are now separated more distinctly, and the current mode is shown directly in the quick bar through a dedicated button. This makes the feature easier to discover and also allows users to switch modes with the mouse or by touch (in addition to the existing keyboard shortcuts).
In addition, several bugs were fixed to improve the overall experience.
Companion: More Secure Pairing & Communication Flows
This release makes Sambee Companion connections more secure, from the first pairing step through ongoing communication during local-drive access and desktop editing.
Pairing is now tracked per Sambee site instead of through one global paired state, pending approvals can be cancelled cleanly, and the browser now shows clearer states when Companion is unavailable, waiting for local approval, needs repair, or has lost its editing session.
Sambee also now trusts only the specific Sambee site you approved, limits what the local Companion service exposes, and uses narrower one-task-at-a-time edit credentials behind the scenes.
Native editing is also more resilient. Sambee now uses tighter, task-specific edit permissions, renews long-running edit sessions when needed, and returns you to the browser with a clearer next step if sign-in, lock ownership, or recovery fails, instead of leaving you stuck with a vague error.
File Opening: Speed & Flexibility
When opening files for previewing or editing, you want quick previews, but you also want the ability to choose which app a file is opened in. Both paths are now efficiently available:
Opening in Sambee’s viewers in the browser:
- Clicking a file or pressing Enter opens the file in Sambee’s associated viewer.
- If no associated viewer exists or if Shift + Enter is pressed, a viewer picker dialog is shown.
- This viewer picker allows choosing a Sambee browser viewer as well as a native app.
Opening in natively installed apps:
- To open a file in the associated native app, press Ctrl + Enter (or right-click and select open in native app).
- If no associated native app has been choosen yet or if Ctrl + Alt + Enter is pressed, an app picker dialog is shown.
Markdown Editor: UX & Table Features
The Markdown editor got a makeover to improve UX and align the styling with Sambee’s theme for all supported components, e.g., tables.
The fact that rich text mode uses independent sub-editors for table cells, for example, should not matter to users. Navigation within Markdown documents should feel natural. That is now the case: you can seamlessly move the cursor across element borders, i.e., between code blocks, tables, and, of course, paragraphs. You can also move between table cells with the arrow keys as you’ve come to expect it from many other apps.
Markdown’s historical limitations sometimes still shine through in unexpected places. One such thing is the inability of many Markdown tools to deal with newlines in table cells: they simply don’t provide any way to add line breaks and display breaks in existing MD files as literal HTML <br> tags. This was the case for Sambee’s Markdown editor component, MDXEditor, too. It took a surprisingly large effort to find and implement a way around the built-in limitation, but it was certainly worth it: you can now structure your table cells by adding newlines, simulating paragraphs in regular text copy outside tables.
PDF Viewer
Fixes:
- Intra-document links now work correctly, e.g. from a table-of-content.
Internals
Documentation System
Sambee has a best-in-class documentation system that deduplicates content, inheriting unchanged text copy through versions. This enables us to provide complete and accurate docs for each product version while minimizing maintenance effort.
This release adds a new docs reporting and visualization tool that creates an HTML report of all docs books, sections, and pages with their respectice properties (e.g., inherited, branched). The report also has a diff view that highlights changes between any two document versions.
Docs editor tool improvements:
- UI improvements (e.g., better help output)
- New commands to convert pages between inherited and independent:
page materializeandpage inherit - Test & validation suite that is also called in CI