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Why folding?
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Posted by Lucas
Jun 20, 2018 at 05:17 PM
Interesting topic. For the sake of clarification of the terms being discussed: My understanding has always been that, whereas “expand” and “collapse” are terms used generally in software that uses the outlining metaphor, “folding” is used more often in the context of plain text editors. Folding is thus an extra feature that makes editing plain text more outliner-like, whereas in dedicated outliners, it’s an integral feature that more often gets referred to as “expand” and “collapse”. Am I right? And if so, is the question here about folding specifically, or folding and expand-collapse more generally?
Posted by Paul Korm
Jun 20, 2018 at 07:21 PM
Though it might be a separate topic, for illustration in this topic I should ask what are the best examples of “folding” software and the best examples of “hoisting” software—in your opinion—on Windows, iOS and/or macOS? However you define “best”.
For me, I’m relaxed on the plain text / rich text distinction between “folding” and “collapsing” that @Lucas introduced. I also define “best” as “the feature works by a single click and, ideally, a keyboard shortcut that has the same result”.
With that, I think the best collapsing / folding, and hoisting, software is Tinderbox on macOS.
On iOS I would grudgingly go with OmniOutliner. (Agenda’s collapse feature in iOS is frustratingly inconsistent.)
On Windows I don’t know what is best.
Posted by nathanb
Jun 20, 2018 at 08:48 PM
I use folding for in-line comments and reference data. I suppose the real world metaphor would be a footnote in a book.
I’ve found it useful to keep certain kinds of notes ‘live’ by adding running commentary to them with time-stamps. That is the signal to myself that I’ve re-evaluated/re-affirmed/rejected whatever that item/idea is/was. This is particularly useful for procedural stuff like checklists so I can remind myself WHY step #3 is the way it is and that I’ve asked myself the question before. Then I might add ANOTHER time-stamped comment to it now that could be a pat on my younger-me’s back for being so clever or make a slight change based older me’s newfound wisdom.
It was OneNote where I first learned the joy of collapsing comments (and even attachments/photos if you put them in a 2 cell tables). This practice was inspired by OneNote’s (the original desktop version) in-line tagging, which was all about describing the content-in-place…... maybe this is a subject for a new topic.
I have this hangup where I always assume I’m smarter that I used to be and that my new ideas are actually new. This hangup tends to keep me from first reviewing old ideas before taking off with new ideas. When I overcome this dumb habit by looking over my old material I’m usually surprised that 1. I used to have pretty solid ideas and they are still just as valid now as they were then 2. I have a LOT of ideas that I think are original, but they’ve occurred to me before, sometimes several times.
So my memory sucks, and inline collapsible/foldable text is how I’ve figured out how to keep young me and old me on the same page, quite literally.
Posted by Marbux
Jun 20, 2018 at 08:56 PM
MadaboutDana wrote:
> I would love to see a knowledge management app
>that allowed you to move blocks of information/text into prime position
>without losing their links to their original context. This would make
>sense for writing purposes, but also for task management and other
>activities involving prioritisation.
NoteCase Pro does this with its flat “list” view of nodes. The list view exists only in memory, not on disk. Add the nodes you want to focus on to the list and then you can reorder them as desired. This does not affect the “tree” view or the node’s position in the file. And it’s just one keyboard shortcut (or toolbar icon click or context menu item) to toggle back and forth between tree and list view. Nodes in list view are fully editable, taggable, and markable. Nodes in the list view can be printed, copied, or cloned in list view order. But nodes cannot be deleted from file in list view, and new nodes cannot be created in list view.
Posted by nathanb
Jun 20, 2018 at 09:32 PM
>MadaboutDana wrote:
>
>> I would love to see a knowledge management app
>>that allowed you to move blocks of information/text into prime position
>>without losing their links to their original context. This would make
>>sense for writing purposes, but also for task management and other
>>activities involving prioritisation.
Notion.so isn’t far away from this. It’s very good at embedding pretty much any item within any other item (thus, letting you embed blocks of items into their prime positions). The problem I’m running into is knowing what emdedding/linking actions result in logical links (yay), one way dumb links (meh), or what breaks an item from it’s home database or hierarchy. I’m finding that I can achieve transclusion/cloning (item appears in multiple hierarchies) which already puts it ahead of many knowledge managers. Since you can create relational databases where each record IS a normal item that can be its own rich-content, it basically allows an unlimited scope of metadata for any subset of notes you choose.
It’s under rapid development, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they add the function where an item tells you what is linking to it (they call embedding links to notion items within paragraphs ‘mentions’) then this would be a truly impressive app with very few shortcomings. It’s already fully cross-platform with offline mode.