I think the conclusion is that the current behavior is standard in an outliner, in the sense that it doesn’t do extra things. In your example, the “extra things” would refer to moving the two "B"s under the “A” that you promoted. These two "B"s were siblings of the “A” that you moved, but after promoting, you suggest that they should become children of the “A”. Although it’s more intuitive for a text editor, taking in the hierarchy into consideration, it’s doing more work than unindenting should.
With that said, I agree what you suggest is useful. The coincidence is that I was working on this today (in fact I just finished when I saw your post). I added a new option that allows unindenting items in-place, which is pretty much what you suggested.
It’s not live yet, but it will be soon. I’ll post an update again when it’s released to the web version.
The problem with making this a settings option is that it means that users have to choose between having it one way or the other - all the time. What if you only want to alter the behavior for a particular action? I know that there are already a lot of shortcuts for this app, but it seems to me that adding a shortcut to temporarily override (e.g. ctl-shift-tab) the default behavior would allow users to chose what happens when the unindent rather than having it always work one way or another.
yeah i was under the assumption i could have both of them not just one of them
95% of the time I would still use the standard SHIFT+TAB workflowy / dynalist convention
5% of the time I would use CTRL+SHIFT+TAB for the push back bulletpoint at current location
A vast majority of the time I’ll use the latter is because I’ll realize that I’ll write a list of bulletpoints, only to realize afterward the very first one should be the parent of all the ones below it. Like so:
EDIT I’ve been using the new method in preference, push back at current point, its been actually much more useful to me than the other default workflowy / dynalist method. I have one SPRINT log that I move between projects a lot, and this makes it very convenient now
So I can work on one project, take notes. Move over notes to different project, continuing looking at one pane. Move notes again to another project, etc