I am in need of some elementary guidance on the use of tabs. I have about 1K notes for a project.
Details depend on the view. As a rule, just set the view the way you like it, and create a new tab to hold a copy of that view.
See the initial portion of this thread - I use it to have certain windows be and stay open.
Basically when you “view as text pane” - Cmd-Opt-X (and in general, if you “tear away” a pane), it stays consistent and doesn’t change even when you hop around your project. The windows will reopen on restarts too.
I would just make aliases of the Notes I need and drop them in a Container, then change the view of that Container as needed.
The result of your Agents are in the form of Alias Notes within the Agent’s Container. So you can set an Agent to look for an Attribute value like “Essay on GeoPolitics" or set a Boolean User Attribute “ActiveEssay” or…. (the idea being to collect the results in the Agent’s Container) and go from there. The same applies to your prior question, you can roll these into one.
HTH
A tab doesn’t ‘open’ notes. The view (left) pane of the window, depending on view type and scope will show some notes. Clicking on note in the view pane selects it and causes its data to be shown in the text (right) pane.
A note can be opened as a ‘stand-alone’ window (which is not a tab) by selecting note in the view pane and using Cmd+Opt+X or View menu ▸ Text window.
Lets say your TBX’s outline is like this:
If I double-click the icon to the left of ‘chapter 1’, this is what the outline looks like:
I then right-click the tab and select map view:
Switching back to outline view, if I want the view to only show ‘Section 1.1.’ I double-click the icon to the left of the note name:
If the selection of notes is ad hoc, i.e. a collection from all across the outline, e.g. all xhapters, then I need to use an agent:
By double clicking the icon next to the agent title a can also hoist this, i.e.:
So you don’t need specific tabs as changing the view scope is easy and instant, but you can have multiple tabs if you so choose.
Notes:
See more on:
Before anything else: with the thoughts below I’m initially responding specifically to point 1 of the initial post, i.e.:
Reading through that discussion made me notice a small but workflow-relevant friction that seems to emerge once you really start “tinkering” with tabs as part of your working method.
From Outline view (or Map view) I can right-click a note and choose Open in New Tab. This is already great, because it lets me keep my navigation context (Outline/Map) while opening a second workspace for the selected note.
However, the resulting tab is initially a split context:
If I want the tab to behave like a dedicated editor, I switch to a “Pure Note” display via CMD+4 (full Note view, without the left Map/Outline area).
Here’s the issue that keeps breaking the flow:
Even if I switch that tab into a full Note view (via CMD+4), when I navigate away to another tab and come back, the UI can revert to the split view again. In other words, the tab does not reliably persist as “this is a (pure-)note tab”.
In practice, that makes it hard to treat tabs as separate workspaces, e.g.:
Because the editor tab keeps collapsing back into “navigation + text pane” mode, the mental separation of roles (“terrain” vs “workbench”) gets lost.
What I’d love to have is something like:
Open Note as Note (i.e., in Note mode) in a new/separate tab
Not just “open this note focused in a new tab”, but explicitly open it as a Note.
Sticky Note mode per tab
If a tab is opened (or switched) into Note mode, it should be able to stick to that mode.
A simple UI affordance could do it (for example a checkmark / “pin” in the tab header or tab menu):
This may sound small, but it becomes important when a workflow “emerges” over time: once tabs become part of one’s method, mode persistence is what turns tabs from “temporary navigation” into “stable workspaces”.
Would that be worth considering? I’d be happy to clarify expected behavior further (e.g. whether the sticky Note tab should follow the current selection or only change when navigating inside that tab), but the core point is: A tab should reliably stay a Notes tab, if desired, and be something one can turn off when no longer needed.
Does this make sense?
Cheers,
andreas
I don’t think that is intentional, i.e. the designed intent of the feature, although I can’t find the latter formally documented anywhere so it is hard to know. Also I can’t replicate what you describe in v11.5.0 (the current release).
It is the case that if I use Cmd+4, tab switch out and back, start like so, the result is a small sliver of the view pane shows. Thus, set to Cmd+4:
Swapping to another tab and back:
I’m not sure if this is intentional. It doesn’t happen swapping from Cmd+6 away and then back.
Regardless, looking at the TBX’s saved XML, I see the splitRatio value of the tab tag updating to reflect the split seen/saved.
Many thanks to Andreas and Mark A for your help.
BTW, have you tried rt. mouse clicking on a note and select “Text Window”? This will open the note it its own windows.
You might also like @andreas’s thread that show how to open up TBX text windows in the macOS tabbed window: Merging and Managing Tabs in Tinderbox: A Quick Demo.
