Pasting multi-line text as single item

I appreciate that when I paste multi-line text from the clipboard, Dynalist creates a separate item for each text line.

But sometimes I really want that multi-line text to be a single item and not a note.

Examples:

  • Additional information to an item that semantically does not warrant to create a separate item, but also is not a note.
  • An important multiline code block that I donā€™t want to hide away in a note.

I know I can manually start a new line using [Ctrl]+[Shift]+[Enter], but pasting text as multiple items and then manually ā€œstitchingā€ them back together into a single item gets tedious fast!

My suggestions:

  • A keyboard shortcut that pastes text as mulit-line text with soft line breaks. (E.g. [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[Shift]+[v]).
  • Or whenever pasting text, interpret the ASCII control character ā€˜Vertical Tabā€™ (0x0B) as soft line break, like e.g. Microsoft Word does.
17 Likes

Interesting QoL request. Seems like a niche use case though, have you thought of writing a keyboard macro or something? Not saying you should, just curious.

Also this reminds me of this feature request: https://trello.com/c/2t0soCIT/78-merge-multiple-items-into-one, if you can merge with newline rather than by space (the default).

Funny you should ask ā€¦ in fact I did write an AutoHotkey macro that pastes the clipboard content line by line, ending each line with a soft line break by sending the [Ctrl]+[Shift]+[Enter] shortcut.

But that shortcut for the soft line break, does not work 100% reliably on my two systems. Sometimes it is ignored and requires me to press it again. But it does not happen consistently.

E.g. (this works quite frequently)

  1. Create a new item.
  2. Press the [a] key to type an ā€œaā€.
  3. Press the [Ctrl]+[Shift]+[Enter] shortcut to insert a soft line break. => Nothing happens; the cursor stays in the same line as the ā€œaā€.
  4. Press the [Ctrl]+[Shift]+[Enter] shortcut again, and now the cursor jumps to the next line.

Letā€™s see if anyone else needs this then! :innocent:

Sure, but could you investigate why that keyboard shortcut does not work every time?

I tried it on 3 different computers (Windows 10) and 2 different browsers (Chrome, Edge) with the same result:

1 Like

Thatā€™s this bug: Blank lines at start of note skipped by Up arrow

Basically browser only renders the newline when thereā€™s an existing newline at the end.

Weā€™ve investigated this issue before, and itā€™s a browser behavior that we need to do extra work to work around, not because we did something wrong. Itā€™s quite some work, and to properly fix it, we need to backfill everyoneā€™s existing content too.

Sorry for the delay in fixing this!

Hi, Iā€™m struggling to paste multiline text in the single bullet. I basically want to paste this in a single bullet.

ā€œfiles.associationsā€: {
"*.txt": ā€œjsonā€
}

I tried entering spaces first and then entring the code but it failed.
then I tried pasting it first and then decorating it with code. which should by default removes the bullets and make it in a single bullet but it is not happening either.
Iā€™m using latest chrome browser on Win 7 as of now.

I also find that this would be useful. It happens to me quite often to have to stitch together copy-pasted content that gets distributed over many nodes.

1 Like

Yeah, sorry multiline paste only works in the note field right now.

1 Like

Related feature request: https://trello.com/c/2t0soCIT/78-merge-multiple-items-into-one

This feature request is good for other scenarios too, when you didnā€™t copy paste and just want to merge a few items into one.

This bug still hits me sometime. Deleting and pasting again usually does the trick, but sometimes it still fails the first time!

A bit off topic: @Erica @Shida Did you improve the pasting recently?
I remember that pasting content into Dyanlist sometimes was a pain, but now everything stays in place and even formats like the original text.

Depending on when youā€™re comparing to, weā€™ve made numerous small fixes over the years haha

1 Like

Nothing special. Just notices that the overall experience got better :smile:

There is a workaround that allows to paste multiline text into a list item, not just into the note field of a list item:

  1. First paste your multiline text into the note field of any list item.

  2. If you want your text to appear as a multi-line code block in Dynalist, it is easiest to add the code fence markup now:

       ```
       your pasted text here
       ```
  3. Select your pasted text again and cut it to the clipboard (Ctrl+A, Ctrl+X).

  4. Now paste your text into a list item directly. It will create a multi-line list item, not multiple list items.

Tested with Firefox 76.0. I have no idea how this workaround works. Because when I cut the text from the Dynalist note, paste it to an external text editor, cut it from there and then paste it to a Dynalist list item, the workaround does not work.

3 Likes

Skip the part with the text editor, i.e. cut from the note and directly paste as an item.

Copying from the note preserves the soft line breaks (in the clipboardā€™s ā€œHTML Formatā€). Pasting and re-copying in a text editor strips this HTML format, thus converting all soft line breaks to ordinary ā€œhardā€ ones. (This could be used to reverse the effect - converting multi-line text to individual items.)

1 Like

Did this ever get implemented? I find myself wanting this a lot.

Try this Alex, When I paste I alternatively use the Shift key for either paste paragraphs all in one entry vs individual entries.

ā€¦for it to work it may depend on what application you are copying fromā€¦