I hear you on that. I normally ‘just’ try once with a new/untested source and if the result in Tinderbox is poor, I generally scrub the text in something like BBEdit to get rid of source layout dross before importing. Decades of inter-app work have taught me sadly all too many apps give next to no thought to output (usable to other apps). A shame that as it leaves users with the sort of confusion you describe.
As a general rule of thumb, unless you’re pasting into $Text to explore (into a container of siblings), you want to be pasting into the view (left) pane. If more used to using wiki apps that only have a code/text for a the selected note/node. At first, it may feel a bit different—as few apps have multiple views, but just give it a try and the comparative power and flexibility should come out.
In context, wow, I just noticed Obsidian’s in-app export choices is are … ‘Export to PDF’. I think this why apps like Tinderbox have to do the PKM inter-app heavy lift as other ‘source’ apps are so inconsiderate of the user’s export needs. (I’m sure there may be plug-in/scripts for export but those are add-ons to work around an apps sparse feature set). The source franken-format of semi-rendered Markdown text probably adds to copy-paste confusion.
If you’re referring to the outline view being useful for helping organize thoughts, then yes. If you’re referring to something else, then I’ve lost something in the translation.
As I’ve noted in previous posts and in my TBX courses, I try at all costs to keep design (formatting: “structure” and “appearance”) out of my content (i.e. attribute values, including $Text) until the VERY last minute. When I do, I keep it simple, with basic patterns (e.g., markdown or my own syntax) that I can easily parse and transform.
Despite my comments about the difficulty of writing a parser, there actually is good support in the action language to enable one to write outline parsers without ridiculous effort.
The keys are twofold. First, Tinderbox functions are recursive, to you can write a recursive descent parser. Often, these are the easiest to grasp.
Second, the “streaming” operators in the string library are useful. You could, for example, do this:
Get the next paragraph.
If it begins with a •, make a new top-level note that is the younger sibling of the current top-level note.
If it begins with a -, make a new note that is the youngest child of the current top-level note.
If it begins with a o, make a new note that it’s the youngest child of the current second-level note.
etc
This is ugly, but needed to support Word-Style outlines where the plain text doesn’t tell us the indent level of the outline.
The main point is that, if you want to write a parser for a simple format, you can.
I’ll try to provide an example. Say I start out with a string of loosely related thoughts, one tripping over the other, all about the topic on mind. I might:
Enter (using a keyboard shortcut perhaps) “###” prepended to each individual idea/thought
When, in my flow, I need a little bullet text section, I’m assured it’s anyway preceded by the “###” and can therefore be isolated
Comes time to Explode, I find myself with several discrete notes; the one containing bullet points isolated as an individual Note that I can Explode further if and when required.
I generally trend toward atomization, like @satikusala; that said, my sections may remain amorphously connected for weeks or months. New contradicting thoughts may come along and re-direct the original cluster of thoughts. As this is organically occurring, Tinderbox is there in the background - allowing me to take branches and re-organize segments without losing overarching flow. The more time I spend doing it this way, the more intuitive and powerful the journey gets.
I stand by my html-shy stand lol. In the past few weeks of using Obsidian as a daily notes tool (cross-platform accessibility is essential to my workflow), I’m constantly reminded of how little I like markdown, too. Too much left-braining for times when I need to be predominantly right-brain, perhaps; too much stumbling over subheadings that jump when I cursor past, or hunting among folded sections for inadvertently gobbled orphan text. That’s rarely happened to me using say Taskpaper.
Interestingly - and although at this point I’m unlikely to switch to it as I’m too taken with Obsidian’s window management system AND iOS access - Bike offers the kind of flexibility I would need for daily quick notes and outlines - a rich text editor that saves in html-friendly (and opml and plain text) formats, and allows idea nesting.
All said, I’m happiest once my work is in Tinderbox where I may write, alter, and reproduce in any format I need at this point.
Interesting, in earlier test of a user issue, I noticed that in TextEdit that although I could happily (visually) indent outline levels, on conversion to plain text the only level differentiator left was the bullet style which only differs between level one and level two:
I detect a slight arts/tech clash here between those who hold that more than 2-3 outline levels aren’t needed (or indicate poor thought by the author and just about any other use of an outline. Think of a traditional mind-map a an outline with one root note and the next level drawn radially around it (i.e. a circle) and the outline goes as deep as it needs to go. Apps like TextEdit appears to cleave the the first notion with the unhelpful (if unintended) result seen above.
But, to me this reinforces the fact that the receiving app (forget names) is not automatically to blame if proffered data doesn’t just work. The real cause of pain is the apps that give no thought to export/export in tractable formatting.
This results in something that is yet another kind of indent (not tab-based, as visible when looking at the ruler). Found it in aTbRef, but still curious about how this relates to using tabs.
Copy+paste of text that is formatted using this function into the Outliner view does not retain indentation structure. Nothing shows up in the plain-text clipboard resembling this kind of indentation.
What made me want to use this function is, that one can indent regardless of cursor position, which I think is really nice.
@archurhh as you seem quite familiar with Jesse Grossjeans work (Bike and Taskpaper) – do you know if the the absolutely delicious butter-smooth cursor movement in Bike is proprietary to it? It really struck me as making the whole typing experience feel very … premium I guess. I’d love to see this in more software.
I’m really quick’n’dirty about this, I’m afraid. As I’m constantly switching between MS Word / Pages / Obsidian / Tinderbox / etc, and because each has their preferred manner of formatting - I just use what works, then begin to curse along the way and adapt… but mostly tabs, spaces, and dashes if it were up to me (Taskpaper has a brilliant ubiquitous system). For the more formalized material, alternating numbers/letters.
You know, I was just wondering that when I dipped into Bike moments back - it seems to have been added in the past couple months. I love it - indeed, as you say, buttery. I left the app running just for that reason lol. Seems like a characteristic Grossjean touch. No doubt he would have logged its addition in the Support forum.
Hah! I find the newfangled cursor movement very distracting and turned it off as soon as I found the setting. In fact, I genuinely thought it was a bug when I first saw it… Word for Windows pulls the same trick, and being Word, it’s very difficult to turn it off.
No problem with it being there for those who want it, but I wouldn’t buy a program where there’s no way of turning it off…
Different strokes…
Other than that, Bike’s a very good program and if I didn’t have other outliners, I’d be happy to own it.
