Reports are being tagged with priority and severity etc., and voted on, and everyone should continue to do that. But I thought it might also be helpful to hear from people what their wishlists are for top bugs to be fixed or features to be added. It doesn’t have to be five - what changes are pressing and important for you? What do you use Legend for mainly? What are the things you love most?
If a bug or feature you’re mentioning hasn’t been reported in the respective forums yet, please do so, and then provide a link here.
Why I use Legend:
I’m using I’d like to use Legend to replace my old desktop-only outliner, mainly as a note-taking system or personal wiki. I’ve mostly used Things 3 for my task manager / to-do list, though I’ve been trying that out in Legend since it has a mobile app. I don’t have Google or Outlook accounts, and never will, so the e-mail and calendar integration isn’t useful to me.
Update, January 2022: It’s been almost a year since I started with Legend, but unfortunately, at this point I’m not actually using it anymore, except for testing. I’m now about halfway through the process of backing out the information I’ve put into Legend, and going back to my previous outliner, Circus Ponies Notebook, for now. The main problem is missing import/export functionality in Legend. I’m still not able to import 90% of my existing notes from Notebook, and I’m not able to export the new material I’ve created in Legend with its metadata - item creation dates, item types, etc. From past experience, I don’t want to use something where there’s “lock in” of my data, and the longer I use Legend, the deeper it gets, and the harder to back out if I have to… I can’t complain too loudly I guess, because I can’t find any other outliner that exports creation dates, other than Notebook. A couple have it on their to-do list, and most don’t even have them.
Moving the few notes I do have in Legend back out is tedious - I’m manually inserting creation dates for each item into the OPML, or just resigning myself to losing them. Notebook doesn’t import bold/italic, or formatted URL links, doesn’t have code blocks, and its OPML format for tasks, tags/keywords, priorities, etc., is incompatible with Legend’s, so I have to do all that manually too, though I’ve tried to avoid using those for that reason.
The other thing is that I had high hopes for the “mirroring” feature, which was a big selling point for me initially. Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked out for me; I haven’t been able to make it work at all, for my purposes, due to bugs.
Anyway, I hope someday I’ll be able to come back to Legend. I’ve updated my “top five” features and bugs accordingly.
Top feature requests
These are missing things that actually prevent me from using Legend:
- Support embedded line breaks - this is the main roadblock preventing me from importing my hundreds of pages of previous notes from my old outliner, which have embedded line breaks. It seems like it might not be difficult to implement, and several other people have requested it too.
- Import to a local file - this is the second roadblock for me to
fully switch over import all my files to Legend.
- Export creation dates in OPML - the third major piece of import/export functionality. Currently I can get dates data in, but not out again.
These would be nice to have:
- Alternative/editable link text for internal links - to enable more natural hypertext.
- Support integrations other than Google and Microsoft. Thunderbird and/or direct IMAP for e-mail, iCloud and/or CalDAV for calendars, and DropBox, iCloud Drive, or something else for files, would work for me.
- Hide annoying info popups - some method to hide “click to expand” and “are you sure” popups etc., after I’ve seen them nine hundred times.
Top bugs:
- Various bugs in the mobile app, some have been pretty bad. I’ll try to update with more details. If there wasn’t a mobile app, I wouldn’t be using Legend…
- “Include Prefixes” option in Export has no effect - makes exporting of item types like tasks not possible.
- Mirroring bugs. Jay was working on this a lot, and there were already big improvements. Unfortunately there are still a couple of things that mean I’m not really able to use it. Mirroring is a really powerful thing, and I’m eager to make
more use of it.
- Various bugs in code blocks, particularly that result in Legend modifying the code.
- Various bugs in basic text entry, where text being typed goes somewhere other than where the cursor is, or just disappears.
Things I love:
- End-to-end encryption and local files - because nobody needs to read my notes but me, unless I invite them to.
- Import/export OPML, including creation dates (currently import-only) - because I’ve been using outliners for a long time. Also, the fact that Jay added the creation date feature I requested…
- Syncs to a mobile app.
Mirroring. Well, I like the idea of it, but so far I haven’t been able to actually use it.- Active development - Some competing products are extremely slow in making changes and responding to user requests. Jay puts in a lot of work, and you can see the results. It’s not always what my priorities are, and I wish there was a little more time spent fixing bugs and finishing features before adding new ones. But overall, the development progresses well, and I’m hopeful that the features and fixes I need are somewhere on the to-do list.
Updates:
2021-10-15 - changed info about mirroring bugs, added mobile bugs.
2022-01-26 - added more info about import/export, updated some other points.
