Towards the future: a new source editor

Update: As of June 14 2023, the legacy editor has been retired for all users. See this blog post for more details.

Hey everybody! Overleaf now uses CodeMirror 6, a different underlying technology, to power its source editor. This modernises the editor, supporting our commitment to improve Overleaf and enhance our processes to bring you highly requested improvements and valuable new features even faster. Adopting a new source editor is a crucial step in unifying with our Rich Text editor, allowing us to improve both in parallel.

So what’s changing? You might not notice too much of a difference at first when using the new source editor, and that’s good — the less disruptive a change is, the better! But here are some changes you might notice:

• If you have the Grammarly browser extension installed, this can now provide suggestions in the source editor (learn more).

• Interactions on mobile devices or tablets are more natural and aligned with standard browser behaviours.

• Editing with non-Latin text should be more robust.

• Visual and user interface changes (e.g. the find & replace panel has moved).

• Autocomplete suggestions, and syntax highlighting may be different

• Some keyboard shortcuts have changed, so make sure to check our documentation for the latest details. You also can click the project menu and navigate to the bottom to easily find these resources:

We are still testing and improving our new code editor, hence you have two options, Source and Source (Legacy). We are aware that some issues might arise — we are keeping a close eye on those! You may notice some external extensions are not supported and need updates from the developer.

We would appreciate it if you could give the new source editor a try and help us make it even better! If you find any issues with it, please let us know! You can even click the information button near the source toggle and give us feedback!

This is one of the largest projects the team has undertaken, and we are so excited to lay the groundwork for more of the features you have requested.

As always, feel free to reach out to us at welcome@overleaf.com and share your thoughts and experience with Overleaf! Every word counts! You can also book an interview with our Product team, so we can dig a little deeper into your needs! And hey, you may also want to join our awesome Beta programme to get early access to new features!