Release Notes 2026

v2.0.x (April 2026)

More than 10 years ago, Christian Voigt presented his idea of "a simple markup syntax for incorporating argument semantics into online text messages" at COMMA 2014 (Voigt 2014): Argdown was born. Christian has since built an elegant and highly functional ecosystem of tools and plugins around the Argdown syntax—widely recognized, and beloved by its users. ♥️

To make Argdown future-proof and ensure it be available for another 10 years, we, i.e., Kushal, Hatim, Lucas and Gregor, have been renovating Argdown since the beginning of 2025. Our guiding maxim—at least from a user's perspective—has been: conservation "as found." Christian's Argdown being a mature and polished application suite, we've refrained from adding more features and tinkering with UX, focusing instead on systematically updating deep dependencies, fixing the framework, and refactoring code where required.

In consequence:

• If you use Argdown apps (e.g., the VS Code extension) for argument analysis, you will (ideally) not notice any changes when switching to the new 2.0 release.
• If you're a developer building applications or sites with Argdown, however, some changes and adjustments might be required on your side.

Breaking changes for developers

Argdown Core

If you develop an application that has direct dependencies on @argdown/core the following breaking change has introduced by using @hpcc-js/wasm-graphviz However, if you depend on @argdown/core indirectly this change should not affect you, because all other argdown application were adjusted.

• if you want to display argdown with graphviz, you need to load the graphviz ahead of time. If you use the argdown application provided by this package, you need to call the init() function to load graphviz. If you create a own Argdown Application you need to provide an sync implementation of graphviz:

Using the argdown application from package

  import { argdown, init } from "@hpcc-js/wasm-graphviz";
  
  await init();
  argdown.run(...);

Own argdown application

  import { Graphviz } from "@hpcc-js/wasm-graphviz";

  export const argdown = new ArgdownApplication();
  const graphviz = await Graphviz.load();
  argdown.addPlugin(new SyncDotToSvgExportPlugin(graphviz), "export-svg");
  // Other plugins you want to use

If you really really need a fully sync environment you still can provide graphviz synchronously (e.g. with aduh95/viz.js). A code snippet can be found here: https://github.com/argdown/argdown/pull/492#issuecomment-3724418415

Argdown Language Server

The command pattern capabilities were removed from the language server, to remove the @argdown/node dependency from it and allow the language server to be run in full browser environments. If you depend on the command capabilities, look at the @argdown/vs-code extension. Or this PR: https://github.com/argdown/argdown/pull/523

The entrypoints also changed to: server.node.js or server.browser.js

Argdown Web Components

The webcomponent was rewritten to svelte. But the attributes in kebab-case are deprecated! Please update the arguments to camelCase.

initial-view -> initialView
without-zoom -> withoutZoom
without-maximize -> withoutMaximize
without-logo -> withoutLogo
without-header -> withoutHeader

Markdown It Plugin

The createArgdownPlugin function is async now. You should await it, for a consistent experience.