Brainstormsw : no shortcut to make descendants ?

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Posted by sicarius
Sep 11, 2019 at 05:22 PM

Hi all, first post here.

I’m testing the Brainstormsw outliner but I can’t find a shortcut to make an entry a descendant of another entry (I looked in the doc, there’s a shortcut section).

I can use SHIFT + drag the entry with the mouse but I’d rather use the keyboard since Brainstorm is supposed to be very fast.

I tried to use the marks, but when you “jump” to them it places the entry above the marked entry, not as a descendant of the marked entry.

To do what I want I have to select an entry, go inside its descendants, place a mark there then go back up and select the other entries to “jump” them inside my marked entry.
There’s no way to see where my marks are placed too so if I navigate too far up or down in the tree I get lost.

I hope I’m not too confusing ^^

Did I miss something ? I like this “jumping” concept in Brainstorm but if I can’t make it work like I want, I guess I’ll have to find another outliner.

Thanks in advance.

Posted by Chris Murtland
Sep 14, 2019 at 03:50 PM

Hi, welcome to the forum.

Yes, as far as I know, you have to place your marks as children of your target items first before throwing other entries to them if you want the thrown items to be children of your target. The only other option is to accept a little bit of temporary mess as you throw items to the marks that are siblings of your targets. You can then clean up individual sections later.

Promoting/demoting and marking positions in BrainStorm is very fast once you memorize the shortcuts, so I personally would just promote the target item, add the mark, and then move back up the hierarchy. Also consider using namesakes as a way to “teleport” around your model.

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Sep 15, 2019 at 07:37 PM

At the risk of stating the obvious: you can also use classic Cut (Ctrl+X) and Paste (Ctrl+V) instead of the Mark functions. I.e.,

- select the entry you want to make a descendant,
- Cut,
- navigate to the entry you want to use as parent,
- press Home to go to the level below
- Paste

If you want to select multiple entries, you can use Shift and the up/down arrows for consecutive entries, or Ctrl+LeftClick for non-consecutive ones. Brainstorm is clever enough to remember the order of selection, and will paste the selected entries in that order.

The Mark(s) is/are still very useful when you don’t want to navigate to and fro, e.g. when you are going through random entries and want to collect only specific ones, by Throwing them to specific groups; the term ‘bucket’ is used in other tools for this function.

In this context, you can maintain multiple windows open, each with the content of one bucket, so that you see them filling in as you are processing your source material.

Hope this helps,
alx

Posted by sicarius
Sep 16, 2019 at 07:56 PM

Thanks for the replies guys, it seems I didn’t miss any hidden shortcut so I guess I’ll have to accept this minor inefficiency.
I don’t get why it works like this. Are there any other outliners that has this function ?

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
> At the risk of stating the obvious: you can also use classic Cut

So obvious that I didn’t think about it :D
But I don’t think it would be faster than using the thrown function.

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Sep 16, 2019 at 08:49 PM

sicarius wrote:
>I don’t get why it works like this.

Brainstorm operates in a sort of permanent ‘hoist’, i.e. only editing one level at a time. So you have to be at a level to place entries there.

You can display more than one level in the ‘balloon’ view, but you can’t edit them.

Shift+drag does what you want, but I assume that the mouse functions were added later in the development history of Brainstorm (which originated in DOS) and they didn’t all get their keyboard equivalent.

>Are there any other outliners that has this function ?

I believe that most outliners that can edit more than one level in the same window should be able to do what you want.

>But I don’t think it would be faster than using the thrown function.

Throw is faster when the Mark(s) remain(s) in the same position(s) for several operations. Otherwise, cut and paste is faster.

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