New filtering system

andrew

Jay Thumbs up to all of these changes.

Jay

The advanced mode tweaks were already in progress so I just finished them 🙂. In advanced mode the buttons change to text and insert the text at selection instead of toggling, so it doesn’t break grouping. And I added more options for dates. How do you feel about that?

andrew

Jay I’m not sure it is a good idea to try to auto-convert typing in non-advanced to buttons. For instance, I like to have a couple buttons toggled (not completed, is star) and then have advanced text like pri:high or before:tomorrow. When I start typing and enter pri:high it turns on the high priority button and deletes the text before I have the chance to type or. This happens even if I start as if I am enclosing in parentheses (pri:high. Also, if I have an existing pane, or create a pane with an advanced filter with pri:high or before:tomorrow it toggles the button and leaves or before:tomorrow and if I enclose the filter text in parentheses like this: (pri:high or before:tomorrow), the filter text ends up as (or before:tomorrow). Of course, I can just go to or stay in advanced mode and do it, but it is really nice to be able to use the buttons for all the AND terms and just use the filter text for OR terms. I also think in non-advanced mode, the filter text should always be treated as if it is enclosed in parentheses and treated as grouped terms, even if not explicitly entered as such, so entering this or that would always group the OR terms together.

I guess the other alternative is to not consider or allow any OR operator in the filter text in non-advanced mode but rather only treat all terms as AND terms (and treat OR as literal), but I personally like having the ability to use both buttons and OR logic in the filter text.

Jerud

Jay Just responding to your questions, will have to test the new update tomorrow.

I keep clicking the “X” button when trying to place the cursor at the end of existing filter text because there’s so little whitespace separating the two. I guess the width of my Panes just happens to be exactly wrong for the amount of text I have in the filter (in concert with the icons displayed) so the text ends right at the edge of the box. The box doesn’t resize itself until it’s completely “full”

I don’t want to show items withpri:low+ AND is:task – I want to hide them – but ONLY if the items have both properties. If it’s just a task or just has priority, I want to keep it. I think what I want is more like:
-(pri:low+ AND is:task)

But I tried that and it had no real effect 🤔

andrew

Jerud You had said you wanted to show tasks with priority, so I was a little confused. But if you want to hide tasks with priority, your -(pri:low+ AND is:task) should work but doesn’t. Perhaps negating parentheticals is not implemented yet. Instead, you can try -pri:low+ OR -is:task. That seems to work.

Jay

andrew Jerud Ok you got it! Negated groups works now, so -(pri:low+ AND is:task) should do what you’re looking for.

I’ve gotten a bit excited about making that work, so the bug fixes are coming next 🙂

Jay

I hadn’t thought to do negated groups like that, but it should be doable. I’ll look into that tomorrow. And I added more padding to the right of the filter in the last update. Is that better?

Jerud

Thanks for all this Jay…did something happen to the has:date filter? My Panes that already had it still show the icon, but it’s not available in the filters list?

webalstrom

@Jerud, would date:any do the trick? I saw that under the advanced options on my filter drop down menu. When I click on that all the items with dates come up

I am wondering how you got the “Option” line to show up. I don’t see that on my drop down menu.

Jerud

webalstrom date:any and date:none do work, but there used to be a button for them (right next to has: note). In my screenshot at the far top-left you can see the icon is still applied in this pane according to the small filter icons. But if I clear it, I can’t get it back.

The Option button only appears in panetypes that offer options. In this case, group-by-tag. It took me way too long to figure that out and I initially reported it as a bug 😞!

webalstrom

Jerud Thanks for the tip about the option button. It looks like other pane types have various options available. That is one thing I’ve noticed about Legend: there is a lot under the hood and learning what all the options are (and how to access them) can take a long time. I like all of this power, but I know I’m only using a fraction of it. I hope Jay and team will create a detailed (but not too complicated) user manual sometime in the not too disant future.

As far as the has:date filter goes, did Jay remove that since the other date filters are in the advanced options and are for premium/pro subscribers only?

Jay

andrew Basic mode doesn’t really work well with or or parentheses since it tries to move the icons to the front. Should it be less aggressive about rearranging icons and text and let them intermingle? I had that originally but it felt cleaner to have the icons all arrange to once side.

Another thing it could do is when you type in a ( or or convert to advanced mode automatically?

Jay

Removing date:any was accidental when I moved it to the “date” section when in advanced. It should be back now in the latest update. It also includes a big revamp of the system locking items in place while editing and after they change, and now they show a dashed outline instead of fading out. What do you think of that?

Question: Should locking matches work differently? It could:

Not automatically hide them, but show a button at the top of the pane with the number of items no longer matching. Clicking it (or a hotkey) would re-run the filters and hide non-matching items.
Show a button/progress bar of the countdown before hiding them
Fade out for 1.5 seconds (or a different amount of time) before disappearing
Something else?

Jay

And with the fix to auto-expanding in the latest version, I think this is good to release to the stable version. Of course there’s more we can do with some of the ideas you’ve come up with here, but the current state should be a big improvement at least. Do you think it’s ready for stable or does anything else need to be fixed/improved first?

andrew

Jay I’m not seeing the updates from today… still on 1641169536553.

andrew

Jay Going to also chime in again on my favorite topic of auto-expanding/collapsing, also mention by @Jerud:

It should at least be an option, if not the default behavior, that auto-expansion occurs when any filter is changed, not just the text filter, whether the filter is set by buttons or text (in simple or advanced mode).

As Jerud metioned, matched items should be auto-expanded to show their children solely due to the children matching based on inheritance. The children should have to meet at least some portion of the filter criteria. That said, I think inheriting properties for filtering is too complicated and confusing to be the default behavior. I haven’t seen that with other major outliners, but I could be wrong. Maybe make it an option also?

Related to this, as you know by now as I have been begging for this for years 😄, I also feel strongly that matched items should be auto-collapsed (or that should be an option too) if no children match the filter criteria on their own (this is the way other major outliners work). I approximate this by always keeping a pane with the outline fully recursively collapsed, but that shouldn’t be necessary.

Jay

andrew Thanks! Must be some weird wifi issue… Our release script said it completed but it didn’t actually push. It should be up now.

andrew

Had inadvertently replied in the Beta Updates thread so deleted and reposted to this thread instead:

Not sure what’s going on, but I’m getting weird behavior with the dashed border indicators and the filters. After setting a filter, I’m getting dashed borders on a whole bunch of items that are not to be hidden and then not getting it on an item that is changed to not match filter. And then that item never disappears until I make some other changes. Can’t really figure it out.

I think I prefer the old way (faded, automatic but delayed disappearing after losing focus) but I’ll reserve final judgment until I see the dashed border thing working properly. While I didn’t mind it, I recognize the conflict with completed items, so not sure what the answer is. Could consider changing deleted items to strikethru, though that’s not visually as easy to work with as faded text.

Maybe instead of the dashed border, try faded text but with a color, like light red?

Jay

andrew I added a General setting “Collapse matches of filters” to collapse matches if no children match. We’ve gotten that request a lot, and the new system make it much easier to track that 🙂 And it should be more stable now than when you tested the previous version.

Should that be a global setting or do you want it to be per-pane? Or should it be a button/hotkey?

andrew

One weird behavior I’m seeing witht the dashed border is that if I am editing an item, then change the filter, the item being edited and all its ancestors, remain visible, each with the dashed border, until I change the focus away from that item, then the item and its ancestors disappear. I’d expect that changing the filter would remove focus from the item and thus it would immediately disappear if it did not match the filters.

Sometimes in addition to the item that currently had focus, an item that I had previously been editing also remains visible after changing the filter until I change the focus to another item.

Jerud

I like having a different visual effect from fading. The dashes are okay though I might prefer red like andrew says.

In filtered Panes I’m seeing dashes within the results as I apply the filter, not when I make changes to the items. It seems like the dashes are between two items that are non-consecutive in the (unfiltered) outline. I like this, though I’m not sure if it’s intentional.

Auto-expanding to show filter results is happening now but is too aggressive. If a top-level Parent matches, it gets fully, recursively expanded even if none of the children match. I understand that technically all those children do match and are thus included in Pane contents because of inheritance…but this isn’t a helpful behavior.

I am trying really hard to just learn and understand inheritance without asking for different features or behaviors…but in so many cases it’s counterintuitive or just plain unhelpful for what I’m trying to do. Surely it’s not so weird to just want to see items that exactly-match a filter? I keep coming back to the idea that having explicit control over whether inheritance is used to display filter results would solve this. For this specific case, at the very least, I think legend should understand the difference between self-matching and inheritance-matching and only auto-expand as far as needed to show self-matches.

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