Great discussion as always. Something must have been wrong with my install because yesterday mirrors had no tally boxes (and were thus indistinguishable from regular items) and links didn’t show them on-hover. But today they look ‘normal’ again.
Anyway, here’s a cluster of loosely-related thoughts and nitpicks on links, mirrors, and formatting thereof:
The new way of showing links is fine with me, especially if it’s in parity with what’s evolving to be ‘standard’. I do not like seeing the [[]] though. Some of my documents use Linked Items as top-level projects and this makes for a kinda ugly screen especially when the those linked items wrap the line, since the [[ pushes the text right. The [[]] also display in Pane Headers if I zoom into these items, which I also don’t like – especially since I can’t actually ‘follow’ the link via the Pane Header. I’d like to turn off the [[]] entirely (simply making them transparent in CSS would not solve the text-shifting). But, you know, I can live without that 😉
Linked-item text has no “complete” display state. So complete items which comprise mostly or entirely linked-item text are indistinguishable from incomplete ones.
- It would be nice to have a stylesheet entry for the “complete” color/formatting of both linked items and their [[]]
- for that matter, there should be a stylesheet entry for just regular complete items, too
I use linked items three ways:
- The first is as I mention above, as a header to help connect related areas across outlines or documents (without fully mirroring them). In that case the link comprises the entirety of the item.
- The second is to indicate “prerequisite” items for a task. For these first to applications, it would be great if linked-item text could change formatting to indicate when the target item itself was complete.
- The third is to ‘attach’ items to other items, as ‘references’ or ‘supporting documentation’. This is a great thing about links, that they can be put inline with ‘normal’ item-text. But this can get super messy with longer item-text, and even worse now with the color and [[]]. Straight-up request: let us choose to display a link as just the “chain link” icon – no text, just the icon – which would allow this second “attachment” method to be used in a much cleaner way. It would have to be done per-item…perhaps by a toggle that appears in the tally-box popup?
Speaking of tally boxes for linked items: The “original” item should always be listed first. Today it sometimes isn’t, especially if there are more than one link in a single item.
Also, in the tally-box popup, the breadcrumbs get truncated long before they run out of space in the box. I’d like to see them take the full width of the box (and I wouldn’t mind if the box were wider, too).
And w.r.t. multiple links in a single item…that makes the tally box’s “tally” useless. I already thought it was kinda pointless anyway. I’d rather the tally box just be changed to a “chain link” icon for item-links.
I found that the color-controls for the [[]] are separate from the link item text itself, which I appreciate. I changed it to hot pink, then tried use the “reset” button to set it back to grey and…no effect. I don’t think the Reset button is working. That should definitely be fixed…but also – what if each entry in the stylesheet had its own “reset” button? Sometimes I play with something, then wish I hadn’t but forgot what it used to be set at. There’s no way to revert just that one entry without blowing away all my other customizations at the same time. Since we can’t swap between saved stylesheets, being able to just reset per-line would be nice.
On the topic of CSS controls…there are entries for links but not for mirrors…I would really like to see an entry in the stylesheet for mirrors since it seems from previous discussion that we all seem to think they should look different from regular items (aside from the tally box), but all have very different ideas about what that difference should be, exactly.
The CSS “layout” entry for hyperlinks specifies underlining…but removing this entry has no effect on how hyperlinks are drawn, and when you return to the CSS editor the “underline” entry reappears. Don’t show it if you won’t let me actually change it.
Also, you can’t use cut/copy/paste within the CSS editor. Those commands happen in whichever Pane has the focus in the background.
P.S. What’s the trick to making this forum software “continue” a bulleted or numbered list? Hitting return doesn’t proceed from 1. to 2. or create a new bullet?
