dfrigon When I first started, I was a little confused by some of the item types. First was the difference between “bullets” and plain, non-bulleted lines. For one thing, Workflowy uses the term “bullet” to mean the item itself, i.e. the line of text, rather than the bullet character: • That can be confusing if you’re coming from there, and the help document could be clearer about it. It could also mention in the “Bullet points” section that there’s a setting to make bulleted items by default, or not.
Many other outliners let you turn the display of the bullet character on or off for all items, but I don’t know of any others that have both a bulleted and non-bulleted item type at the same time. Eventually I figured out the differences: showing the visual bullet, the fact that you can click on the bullet to zoom in, and that you can filter and search separately for bulleted and plain items (is:bullet). The latter isn’t shown in Jerud’s chart.
One more difference is if you’re or copying text from Legend to another place (or using the experimental “export as Markdown”). If you use bullets, you’ll get dashes in front of the lines, which is compatible with Markdown, and will create an indented, unordered list as you’d expect, when you paste it into an editor that supports it, like the one for this forum we’re using right now. If you don’t use bullets, you just get tab-indented text, which isn’t compatible with Markdown. On the other hand, if you export as HTML, you’ll get unordered lists for both, with the bulleted ones having a literal dash character. All these things should probably be noted in the “Bullet points” section of the help document. In the end though, there isn’t much difference, and you don’t have to use one or the other for any particular purpose - just whatever suits you. I don’t use bullets myself, because it looks cleaner without them. But that means if I want to paste an indented outline from Legend into a Markdown editor like this one, I first have to paste it into a text editor and add dashes to the beginning of the lines.
I was also particularly frustrated about not understanding what Projects (now also Headings) do, how they behave. The help document has been improved, and mentions the different sizes, pane views, and filters, but still doesn’t give the whole story. It should mention that they show up by default in the “Move” menu, as show in Jared’s table, and also in the menu for creating internal links and mirrors.
It should also explain better, probably in the Links and Mirrors sections, that this is just for convenience, because it might be more likely that you’ll want to choose a heading or project to move, link, or mirror - but you don’t have to choose one of those. You can start typing, to search for any item you want to link or mirror from. Currently the help document simply says “Type [[ to open an autocomplete of items to link to.” but “open an autocomplete” isn’t very clear I think - and, especially, the menu itself gives no indication that you can type something. One gets the impression that you can only move/link/mirror to the items displayed. I’ve mentioned this bunch of times, and a few other new users have too, but it still seems to be a sticking point for new users.
Again, you don’t have to use headings or projects for anything in particular, or at all, other than maybe making things look nicer, and if you want the extra options for pane views and filtering. Depending on what you’re using Legend for, you might not need to do any complex views, filtering, or tagging. I use it mainly as a kind of notebook and personal wiki, rather than a task manager, and rarely use any of that except global search (command/ctrl-shift-F).
Projects especially don’t have any specific meaning, and can be whatever you think a project is. For some people it’s just a list of multiple tasks or steps, like in the GTD method. For others it’s a large overall project, with lots of different kinds of information. You can use it however you want, or not. I don’t currently use projects at all. They behave almost the same as headings, which are enough for my needs. The only difference at the moment is that projects can’t auto-size, i.e., change their size with different indentation or zoom levels (that may change soon), and their icons are different. Otherwise they’re just two of the same kind of container, that you can put two different kinds of things in, if you want to.
Another “superpower” not shown in Jared’s table is that when you complete a task, a completion date and time is assigned, which can be seen in the right-click menu. I don’t think you can do anything with that though, like filter or search for tasks completed on a certain date.
So there are still various small things about the different item types that are a little hidden… and probably more that I don’t know about.
PS, I agree that the mobile app really needs some improvements. I think Jay has been planning that, but has been busy with other things.
