So I started brainstorming with a bunch of notes at root level, moving them around on a map to make sense of things. As things progressed, it would have been nice to clean things up at the top level and move my initial brainstorming notes into a new container (e.g. to separate them from the Prototypes and Templates containers which don’t belong on the map).
But if I do this, all my careful layout is lost when I demote the notes into the new container – they get “cleaned up” into a flat row.
I don’t understand why this is happening – I’ve set the CleanupAction for the new container to “none” but I still get a straight row rather than my layout.
Is this the intended behaviour, and if so, is there a way to avoid it?
(Other than planning ahead, of course, but one of the usual virtues of Tbx is not having to do this, i.e. the famous incremental formalisation)
How are you moving the notes? It seems like if you move them with the outline they get rearranged into a line. But if you select a bunch of notes in the map view and click and drag them as a group into a new container, they keep their layout relative to each other. Here’s a video screen recording demonstrating this:
The problem, of course, comes when the destination container already holds notes. Tinderbox can’t simply put the new notes wherever they happened to be in their old home, because there might already be notes right there!
If you select the notes you want to move and drag them into the new container in map view, their relative positions will be preserved.
If you select the notes you want to move, Copy or Cut them, and paste the into the new container in map view, their relative positions will be preserved as well. (Click in the map to tell Tinderbox where you want to put them.)
If you move the notes in outline, there’s no really good way to know how you want to handle them in map view. Tinderbox chooses a safe place automatically.
The problem was I was moving them into the new container in Outline view – moving the in the map view does indeed preserve layout as you say. Nice to know this is possible