Move text blocks between tear off notes?

Tinderbox Tasks
33

This arrow-key request seems reasonable. I do have some questions, though these might better be discussed backstage…

  1. Should up-arrow place the insertion point in the last line of a multi-line note, or the first line?

  2. I expect that, after pressing up-arrow, lots of people will then want to move to the start or the end of the note. In fact, I think that might be more common than wanting to edit at the exact point above the insertion point. Which behavior is most common?

  3. I expect that, after pressing up-arrow, lots of people will want to select the entire title of the previous note and replace it with a better title. I think that might be more common than wanting to edit at the exact point above the insertion point. Is this behavior in fact common? Is there a key binding for select all whilst editing a text field? (Yes, it’s ⌘-A, but I had to check!)

  4. All of this can be done pretty easily with the mouse. Want to edit the previous note at the position above the insertion point? Click there and hold.. You’re done. I know: some people don’t like to use the mouse, but macOS is mouse-centric.

  5. TINE: Tinderbox Is Not Emacs. (How do you quit vi? It’s easy: press Esc-Esc-colon-q! How do you quit EMACS? Well, you have to abandon your ideology and abjure the idol of your youth.)

  6. At most, this is a mild quality of life issue (see 4 above). It competes for resources with issues that let people do things — things like finding answers to important questions — that they could not do otherwise. Now, I like quality of life as much as the next fellow, but this doesn’t strike me as a terrible hardship: is it the very best thing to do?

  7. One consideration is the outline tool in macOS. Other things being equal, I like to follow the HIG and Mac conventions. Offhand, though, I don’t know how NSOutlineView handles up-arrow while editing a text element. My guess is that it does what Tinderbox currently does, but true confession: I’ve never instantiated NSOutlineView myself. Does anyone know?

I used to refer questions such as this to OmniOutliner. Before that, my standard was Frontier. @tedgoranson, of course, knows more about this question than anyone. I wonder what he thinks? This discussion, it seems to me, may be influenced by Bike, Jesse Grosjean’s new outliner: it’s very cool and quite radical. Is that in fact the case?

On the whole, I’m more supportive of trying this than not, but I’ve almost talked myself out of it while writing this.

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