Disabling the copydown of tags that are in the filter box

Jay

Jorge I fixed the bug with adding tags even though they were negated. Do you still want an option to disable that assuming it works correctly? If so could you create a new thread for it so it doesn’t get lost in here?

Jorge

This is a fork from the original performance issues discussion.

Current Behavior:
Given a pane that is filtered by a tag or a more complex criteria that includes a tag
When a new item is added in said pane
Then the tag in the filter is automatically added to the item.

In complex filters (say you have -negated tags), this was creating the tags in the new items. Jay fixed this in a previous release, so no longer a problem, but given that now we have a powerful filter query syntax it’s kind of unpredictable when a new patterns might create a problem.
I have never found too much use of this functionality (automatically creating new items with the tags inherited from the filter box) or perhaps is had been so unobtrusive before that I didn’t realized I used it when simpler filters were the only option. Or perhaps it is that I always add children in a filtered pane (and my parents are the ones that have the tags) so it never made a difference for me. Since others depend on this more, maybe an option could help deal with this more complex query scenarios.

@Jerud mentioned here https://forum.legendapp.com/d/343-new-filtering-system/147 that he also would like to have a way to disable this in some cases, so there might be more people that could benefit from a switch that turns off this function in the options.

LauraH

Jorge
This discussion got long, and I have not read it all.
But - per this intitial request: I 100% agree that I do NOT want the tags coppied down into my work!

Example: I use a week number tag to be able to easily get to various weeks. In this view, I have 4 weeks up at once (easily found and updated due to the tags, without me having to rezoom this board all the time). However, anytime I now edit the weeks or add events, etc - it’s adding the week tag to the individual items! (See the red circles.) This is annoying and NOT the desired behavior at all! (In fact - it’s one reason tags loose a lot of their power for my use - they get in the way when filtered for.)

Jerud

I think the “advanced filter” checkbox should disable copydown. If you “have to” use that box to get what you want, the filter is surely too complicated for Legend to copydown anything meaningful onto new items in filtered Panes.

Copydown is a pretty neat feature though for the simpler cases where it can work reliably. It does save time, and (perhaps most importantly) it helps “teach” legend. When a new user filters a pane to some #tag, then creates a new item and the #tag is automatically added to it, that really reinforces how filters work. I know it helped me.

I’m guessing that so long as the filter in question is only made from the standard filter buttons (show/hides joined only by ANDs), Legend should be able to get this right at least most of the time. The obstacles I see are:

Text filters are a wildcard and will have to just rely on the dashed lines to appear and clue the user in if their item is about to disappear (that needs to be fixed btw, it’s not working well right now).
Matching multiple “nots” might be too hard. Example: prefixes. If user builds a (not-task AND not-bullet) filter, that leaves 4 other prefixes plus no-prefix that could all be used. If no-prefix is the default, then this is easy – but what if the default item prefix is bullet? What should Legend apply when user creates a new item?

webalstrom

I would argue against having “copydown” of tags from the filter box. I think this would be very confusing: why did this tag suddenly get added when I didn’t type it in? And if this is taken to other elements, like prefixes, that would make things even worse. My default prefix is a bullet, but I’ve filtered on projects, so why suddenly is everything I’m trying to add to being turned into a project when I just want a bullet (or to manually change it to a task)?

Jerud: it helps “teach” legend. When a new user filters a pane to some #tag, then creates a new item and the #tag is automatically added to it, that really reinforces how filters work. I know it helped me.

I don’t see this as helping to learn how Legend works! As a new user I would be frustrated by having things added that I didn’t want added. I know (or would quickly learn) they will disappear once that line loses focus, but there is the “dashed line box” that indicates it does not match the filter and (I think this still happens) the alert at the bottom of the screen that an item is being hidden because it does not match the current filter.

I did a quick check of Workflowy and Dynalist and neither of them automatically copydown tags from their search/filter boxes. In fact, both platforms continue to show anything that is added that doesn’t match the search until the search is refreshed. Perhaps it is because I learned how to use outliners with these two apps that I at first found Legend’s behavior of immediately updating the contents (hiding unmatched items) disconcerting.

I haven’t encountered the copydown of tags yet since I don’t have a lot of filters that rely on tags, but I am hoping if this is going to be the default, that this is a way to (globally) turn off any sort of copydown while in a filter.

Jerud

webalstrom I take your points and I suggest that this behavior is probably one that either “works” or “doesn’t” depending on the individual, so maybe it should be a global setting.

If copydown were completely removed I would not (for a change) have a strong opinion about it, just wanted to mention the value that I do see in it for the sake of discussion.

webalstrom

Jerud It would be great to have an on/off setting for this, but since I’ve never really seen this in action, I won’t be packing up my toys and leaving if I don’t get my way! 😉

What I do think is important that if this is the default option (or the only way it works), it should be explained in the help docs and somewhere in the start up manual. But that is true of just about everything, isn’t it!

Jay

This copy down feature has been there for a super long time, but it was augmented a bit with the filter updates, and it seems like that may have pushed it over into trying to be too smart to the point of annoying… I can definitely see that it doesn’t make sense in Advanced, and could just be disabled there. Adding a setting could work, but if it’s annoying everybody maybe it should just be removed?

It brings up a larger point though - Legend tries to always keep the filter up to date so you don’t have to manually refresh the search (and it’s been like that for a long time). That adds a ton of complexity, especially with:

Showing dashed outlines on items that are about to disappear
Trying to make sure newly added items will not immediately disappear

So, should we just remove the immediate refreshing? We could:

Just remove it, and the next time you change the filter (or switch Boards) it will refresh. That seems to be what other apps do?
Show a message at the top (or bottom) of a pane that X items have changed since the filter, and click to refresh pane items
Add a hotkey for refreshing the pane items

webalstrom

Jay Two things here.
1) Copy down. Since I haven’t encountered this before, maybe I am wrong, but I feel it would be more confusing to beginners who would be using the basic filter mode to get something mysteriously added that they didn’t type in than it would be for more experienced users who are in the advanced filter mode. I usually use the advanced mode because some of my filters get complicated and just because… I like typing so much! 😉 But having an option in the settings for on/off or on for basic/advanced (or however complicated you want to make it) would be great!

2) The auto update for the filter panes is one of those things I love/hate about Legend. It is nice to have a current view of what you want to look at, but I find when I make a change I sometimes like to see it there in its new state (that doesn’t match the filter) just to make sure it is what I wanted to do and maybe I want to make another change. Or to just admire having completed the task and seeing it sit there crossed out! Having it disappear, even when it is clearly marked that it is going away, can be disconcerting.

What I would like to see is choice #3: a refresh button near the filter box. I know it is crowded up there so maybe it wouldn’t fit but I think that area of the screen needs some reworking. And nothing changes in the view as things are removed from the filter criteria until the refresh button is clicked. I’m not sure if we need a message that X items have changed (although it is nice to have the alert when you apply - or in this case reapply - the filter that items are no longer being displayed because they don’t match the criteria).

I think option #2 (showing a message) would look sort of clunky and take up real estate space on the screen. On a laptop, every pixel is precious! If #3 is too difficult because of space at the top or coding wise, I’m fine with #1 where nothing will change until you switch boards (or click “Restore default view” on the sidebar, I assume).

Thanks for asking for our opinions and listening to our ideas!

Jay

webalstrom Thanks for all of those cents!

I’m curious what other people think about whether we just remove the immediate refreshing (Jay). Do you like the way it is now or should we remove it?

Jerud

I think copydown is thoughtful and has value, and if it were kept simple it would probably not get in the way much even for those who don’t like it. The only place it’s not helping me right now is in Panes with advanced filters and that’s easily addressed. Everywhere else I have zero issues.
Overactive copydown would be aggravating but maybe it could just be dialed back rather than removed. We should be careful about anything done around filters since those are the main thing that is so different (and hard to learn) about Legend. Comparing vs. Workflowy or Dynalist doesn’t hold water – those “saved searches” are vastly simpler than Legend’s true filters, which are clearly confusing for many to learn.
Copydown did help me when I first came to the app. When a #tag was ‘mysteriously added’, I was like, “wtf, why did that happen, I don’t want that, you stupid app!” Exactly as @webalstrom says. So…I deleted the tag…and the item immediately disappeared. Ohhhhhhh, okay I get it, that tag had to be on there or the item doesn’t match the filter. Perfect. Confusing once – and then I got the lesson. I’m probably not the only one.
Copydown has been here for a long time and I don’t personally recall seeing much fuss made over it in the past. It’s possible some folks don’t even realize they’ve been taking it for granted? I dunno. I’m game for blowing it away and trying that out in Beta, to see how it feels. Maybe, for a change, the right answer is to simplify rather than add features.

Jay So, should we just remove the immediate refreshing? We could:
Just remove it, and the next time you change the filter (or switch Boards) it will refresh. That seems to be what other apps do?
Show a message at the top (or bottom) of a pane that X items have changed since the filter, and click to refresh pane items
Add a hotkey for refreshing the pane items

This feels like giant steps backwards. The immediate feedback of the Panes updating and “dashed lines” item-locking behavior is so intuitive and helpful, both as a new user and today. I love seeing things instantly disappear when they should, sometimes from other Panes nearby – or maybe even appearing in nearby Panes. It reinforces what you’re doing, confirms your understanding of how the filters work, and maintains the consistency of the experience. I’ve always been impressed by how smooth a quick that felt – even between devices. If Panes didn’t update until manual refresh (or worse, leaving the Board) it’d drive me batshit. The next thing I would do is download Notion.

The current item-locking (dashed lines) behavior is broken though, I posted this as a bug in “new filtering”. It’s way too slow, doesn’t show the lines immediately when you “violate the filter” and comes off as a bunch of meaningless animation that just happens to appear right before an item disappears. When Jay first added them they were perfect; something happened.

The only thing about manually updating Panes that appeals to me has to do with auto-expanding…I am real weary of constantly collapsing my Outlines just because I wanted to peek at a completed item or fix an accidentally-applied prefix. “Back” can help here, but not always, and you have to think about which order to do things in. And the “memory” for back clears when you switch Boards. I do want an auto/manual switch for expanding parents to show matches…. but that’s not the same thing as auto updating filtered pane contents. What functional reason is there to actually want a delay?

I do think there’s room for imprvement in the Pane Toolbar, but will leave that aside for another thread as I’m far too worried about having to manually refresh my Panes to think straight : )

Jay

webalstrom When you say “that area of the screen needs some reworking” what do you mean? I’m not super happy with with separated pane and filter menus but I’m not sure how to improve it. Your suggestions would be much appreciated!

webalstrom

Jay I’m not sure what to do to make it more usable since there is a lot of info contained up there:

show documents button
pane name
navigation button
expand/collapse button
pane view option button (for the drop down menu)
filter bar
pane options button

It has been said by others, and I agree, that it would be great to have the full name of the pane always visible. If there are multiple panes on a board, it can be hard to know which is which if the whole name isn’t there (i.e. three panes that all begin with the same word, such as INBOX-Work, INBOX-Personal, INBOX-Family). But if the pane name is too long, then it might be cut off no matter how much room you give it if the app window is narrow and/or there are multiple panes unless you let the name continue onto a second line (which I don’t think is a good idea!).

But adding a second line for things besides the pane name is one way I can think of having all those elements present but not crowded together. Of course a second line will take up more space to see the outline but that might be a small price to pay for ease of use. One way to organize this area could be to have the following in the first line:

navigation button - I think most people are used to having the back button in the upper left corner
name pane - long space for long names, with the breadcrumbs listed below (or above if the pane has no name) as it currently does
pane options button

On the second line would be the options that effect how the pane appears:

expand/collapse button
pane view option button
filter bar - this would give more room to show a long series of filters

The alternative to having two lines is perhaps to make the filter bar into just a button that you click to see the filter. But I would rather not have it be just a button because I like having the visual of what the filter is right there in front of me. Having to click to see what is being filtered could cause confusion for people (especially new users) when they don’t understand why they can’t see something they know should be there.

This leaves the show documents button that (maybe - will this change with the new document structure?) needs to go somewhere. I’ve never felt that it is in the right spot where it is right now. And for some reason it seems strange that each pane can have its own documents list showing. I’m not sure how to change this since how would you navigate each specific pane unless there was just one document view area on the left (to the right of the Boards sidebar) and that it would only affect the active pane. But I think that would end up frustrating me too since I would probably end up thinking a different pane is active and navigate in the wrong pane. Perhaps it could be second element on the first line (between the navigation and name) or maybe the leftmost element on the second line?

Sorry for the length of this but that is my two cents (or perhaps 22 cents?) on the matter.

Jorge

Jay I DEFINITELY NOT want the immediate refreshing to go away. I think it is extremely useful, and removing it would make the app feel like a static browser app. The interactivity of getting immediate feedback is priceless, especially when you are trying out filter combinations. Having to go to press refresh would be annoying and drive me nuts because I use the filters so much.

I’ve used other organizational apps on the web, and one of the things I hate is having to refresh the damn page to see what I want. The instant update that Legend has was one of the feel good suprises that made me want to explore Legend further.

Jay

Jerud Don’t worry, I’m not making any changes to this yet! I don’t think we’d want to fully remove the auto updating in any case, but it could potentially be an option (enabled by default), so people could turn off auto updating? But if it’s useful but just sometimes buggy, we should fix the bugs instead of throwing it all away 🙂.

I’ve got the locking issue on my todo list. I’ve seen it in my own usage too.

Jerud

Jay Glad to hear about the locking fix, wonder how much it’s related to the slow auto-update? New filters are sooo sweeet!

Jerud

LauraH However, anytime I now edit the weeks or add events, etc - it’s adding the week tag to the individual items!

I agree this behavior is not desired, but disagree that copydown should be scrapped entirely because of it.
These items are shown because of the tag on their parent; it seems possible for Legend to “notice” that and thus not add the tag.
It may, however, be the case that copydown is currently a very simple bit of code, and any changes to make it “smarter” would in fact be a substantial ask.

My ideal is for copydown to remain – but be smarter. Barring that – or while we wait for it to rise in priority – simply disabling it seems like it would make a lot of people happy.

tmrae it actually saves me a lot of time

In some cases, yes it can. And that is nice.

tmrae make individual tags easier to remove? Other apps have a little ‘x’ by tags to remove them, or right click on it and select delete, or some such behaviour (doesn’t really matter to me), making it easier to rectify if a tag gets accidentally added.

Alt+Clicking will remove a #tag! BUT that dosn’t work for !date tags or +contact tags, which baffles (and frustrates) me. That’s been in my personal request list for ages, but am on a feature-request hiatus until the bigger bugs are all gone : )

tmrae it otherwise feels disconcerting to type something and then if the tags are not copied it immediately disappears, then if I wanted to make further edits to that item I need to go and ‘find’ it

Yes, that is exactly the main benefit, I think especially for new users and those learning filters.
Maybe the user hates it and turns it off right away…but having it happen just once is the single best way the app can communicate how/why filters work. Thus I maintain that copydown should remain, and default-on, but be disable-able.

tmrae

I actually like how the tags copy down, one really nice feature is when pasting a number of items, it marks all of the items with the desired tags and it actually saves me a lot of time, so I would be pretty unhappy if it were removed entirely. It is true that sometimes it has an undesired effect (a tag gets added that I did not want), but I see that as something that can be easily solved by changing my behaviour (make sure desired tags are there before I add things, have an empty filter pane for adding things, or whatever). An option that could be a good solution around this is make individual tags easier to remove? Other apps have a little ‘x’ by tags to remove them, or right click on it and select delete, or some such behaviour (doesn’t really matter to me), making it easier to rectify if a tag gets accidentally added. This has the added benefit of being a nice additional feature to the app which will make other workflows more efficient and brings it in line with other similar apps.

Another thing to consider is that, if it does not copy down, it otherwise feels disconcerting to type something and then if the tags are not copied it immediately disappears, then if I wanted to make further edits to that item I need to go and ‘find’ it (I have noticed this behaviour already when in situations where it does not match the filter for some reason), and it feels very disconcerting and inefficient, so that issue would need to be resolved if this feature were to be removed or made an option (which is sounds like some people certainly want to be the case). I agree that more complex filters should not try and be applied due to the greater likelihood for undesired outcomes, so if we could have a balance it would be good, without having it an ‘all’ or nothing option button.