Desired behavior when adding a checkbox

đź“‹ Polls
1

I’ll describe three scenarios and please tell us which one do you like the most:

Behavior 1: all items. When making an item a checklist, all of its descendants on all levels, plus itself, get a checkbox in front of their text. This is the behavior Dynalist started with.

Behavior 2: all descendants. When making an item a checklist, all of its descendants on all levels, but not including itself, get a checkbox in front of their text. This is the behavior Dynalist changed to last year.

Behavior 3: per item (sticky).

When adding a checkbox to an item, only itself will get a checkbox, no other item will be affected. You can add checkbox to multiple items at once when multi-selecting. You can use the same menu option or shortcut to remove the checkbox.

When you create a new item from an item with checkbox (Enter at the end or in the middle), the new item will automatically get a checkbox. An option to “bulk add checkbox to all children” will be provided as a convenience feature.

This behavior addresses a common issue where checkbox cannot be removed from a child item of a checklist parent (see https://trello.com/c/yoj6qb8o/75-force-item-to-not-have-checkbox).

Which one would you prefer in your use case?

  • Behavior 1: all items
  • Behavior 2: all descendants
  • Behavior 3: per item (sticky)

0 voters

Thank you in advance for your participation!

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2

My preference would be to have it work the same way as number lists. If I mark an item as a a checklist, its direct descendants get checkboxes (but not the item itself). But further descendants do not get checkboxes.

This would allow me to add notes and sub-items to checklist items without being forced to make them into tasks as well.

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3

Hmm, good point, sorry this was not an option in this poll.

I guess the closest to your option is Behavior 3, given that the “bulk add checkbox” option adds only to the direct children, not all descendants.

4

OK, thanks for clarifying. I voted for behavior 3 then. :slight_smile:

5

Update: for this use case, in the next setup, you’ll need to select all children (Ctrl+A a few times until all direct children of the parent), and then use the “Add checkbox” option instead of “Bulk add checkbox”.

I hope that’s not too big of an issue! Otherwise for deeply-nested lists, adding checkbox to all descendants would be lots of manual work.

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6

OK, so it sounds like you’re planning to implement per-item checkboxes. I can see the reasoning for that approach. I like the idea of automatically setting checkbox if hitting enter on an existing checkbox item. I think that will work fine for me.

Thanks for iterating through this with us! I appreciate your dedication to improving Dynalist.

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7

Yes, the new checkbox will be a per-item basis. New item will get a checkbox if the previous item has checkbox. This allows toggling checkbox at any level at will.

The remaining issues are (1) migration and (2) bulk adding checkbox, which we plan to solve with the “Add checkbox to children” option. So to add to children on all levels, use the “Add checkbox to children” option; to add children to one level, select all these items (with help of Ctrl+A if list is too long), and use the “Add checkbox” item.

I hope that clears thing up! Thanks so much for the understanding and support.

2 Likes
8

This change is live: https://blog.dynalist.io/psa-checkbox-revamp/

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