An operation that some outliners support is *splitting* an item. For example, we have this outline:

Animal
Lions Tigers

We place the cursor after Lions and choose SPLIT. Now we have

Animal
Lions
Tigers

Questions:
(a) Is this actually used? How often? Does anyone have data?
(b) Is there a conventional keyboard shortcut?

I don't have any hard data since I don't track anything a user does in Zavala, but I do know it gets used. It was one of the first things I added to Zavala because of a user request. Since then, I have been asked how to do it on iOS (currently you can't). So I've been getting user feedback suggesting that is useful. Personally, I rarely use it. It is nice when you want it tho.

I used shift-cmd-return for the keyboard shortcut. I probably got that from OmniOutliner, but I can't remember for sure.

re Item > Split: Definitely a often used feature.

InfoQube re-used the same shortcut as venerable Ecco Pro, which is Ctrl + Shift + S
As a bonus, when not editing, IQ can batch split items using a delimiter string.
Details here: https://infoqubeim.com/drupal5/node/3956

Pierre Paul Landry
IQ Designer

Maurice, actually Zavala on macOS uses shift-option-return for Split, not shift-cmd-return. And works nicely.

Split, moving the split text to a new row, using the same keyboard shortcut as Zavala (shift-option-return) also works on Bike, though it seems to be undocumented.

eastgate wrote:

An operation that some outliners support is *splitting* an item. For
example, we have this outline:

Animal
Lions Tigers

We place the cursor after Lions and choose SPLIT. Now we have

Animal
Lions
Tigers

Questions:
(a) Is this actually used? How often? Does anyone have data?
(b) Is there a conventional keyboard shortcut?

I must be missing something. How is this different than placing the cursor after Lions and hitting return ?

nirans@gmail.com wrote:

I must be missing something. How is this different than placing the cursor after Lions and hitting return ?

Many outliners (and other apps, such as spreadsheets) do not split on Enter, but simply close the editor and switch to browse/select mode

Pierre Paul Landry
IQ Designer

nirans@gmail.com wrote:

How is this different than placing the
cursor after Lions and hitting return ?

Which apps do that? I just checked and OutlineEdit, Zavala and OmniOutliner use key commands to split at the cursor, and hitting Return simply creates a new sister-node in the outline.

My old 1980s-2000s outliner, Acta/DynoNotepad/Opal (it went through two owners and three names) offered the ability via key command to split to a 'sister,' 'aunt' or 'daughter' node. Sometime I really miss using that app.

satis wrote:

Which apps do that?

Hybrid text/outliner apps, such as Notion, are a good examples

(b) Is there a conventional keyboard shortcut?

Hi, that's a great question! In OutlineEdit (outlineedit.com), you can use the shortcut ctrl + Enter to split an item at the cursor position. It creates a new item on the same level as the source item, with the text content following the cursor position. The source item keeps all attachments and tags, while the newly added item only contains the text that was split off. Related to this, there are settings for keeping/removing white space and for the automatic splitting of pasted text into multiple items.

Paul Korm wrote:

Maurice, actually Zavala on macOS uses shift-option-return for Split,
not shift-cmd-return. And works nicely.

Split, moving the split text to a new row, using the same keyboard
shortcut as Zavala (shift-option-return) also works on Bike, though it
seems to be undocumented.

Thanks for the correction Paul. My brain misfired there.

I just tested Bike, Dynalist, and Workflowy. They all will split the row if not at the beginning or end of a line. They also will join two rows if backspacing at the beginning of a row that has content. This is very similar to how a word processor works.

I think this is a much more convenient way to do splitting/joining. I can't see any downsides to it. I will probably update Zavala to work this way. I hate changing a core behavior like this, but it would solve the issue of how to do splits/joins on iOS for me and just seems to work better in general.

They all will split the row if not at the beginning or end of a line

I meant to write "They all will split the row if not at the beginning or end of a line when hitting return."

Just to add to the list, but in Scrivener you can split any document into two using a keyboard shortcut.