Don’t grey out children when zoomed into completed item

🐛Bugs
1

Steps to reproduce

Zoom into a completed item with uncompleted children

Expected result

Children are not greyed out.

Actual result

Children are greyed out even though they are not completed.

Environment

Chrome/macOS

Additional comments

The point of greying out completed items’s descendants was visual clarity. When zoomed into a completed item, no visual information is added by greying out children since all the children would be greyed out. In fact, greying out everything is a hindrance, making it harder to work with the children.

Completing archived or unimportant items and occasionally zooming into them to work on them is a common workflow for me and others I’d imagine, and it requires the chance mentioned in this bug

2

Counterpoint: If I’ve marked the parent “complete,” then by definition I’ve completed the children steps as well.

1 Like
3

I agree with @Luke here.

And also we’ve made the compromise before to distinguish between crossed-out and greyed-out items, so what you see does reflect their status (checked itself vs checked via parent).

If it’s personal preference, this can easily be fixed with some Stylish CSS (I wish we have a plugin system to better meet the needs of people with conflicting preferences! :confused:)

1 Like
4

How about something akin to Firefox’s advanced about:config tab?

5

Sounds interesting! I didn’t know about that actually (my primary browser is Chrome). Looks interesting. Perfect for power users, and average users don’t even need to know about it.

We’ll think about that!

1 Like
6

Can this one be closed? In a hierarchical system, it doesn’t make any sense for child nodes to be considered incomplete when the parent is complete. It’s like deleting a folder and then asking if some files in it can be considered not deleted.

7

We usually only close an issue when the OP agrees to it being closed, that’s the convention. Otherwise a lot more posts would be closed. We just thought it might be a little rude to just close others’ posts without asking.

Speaking of closing posts, there are some bug reports that we should catch up on closing though.

@Yatharth_Agarwal: what do you think of closing this? And now I think about it, it should be doable to write a Stylish script to achieve what you described.

1 Like
8

@Alex_Pasternak I would humbly correct this to “In your conception of a hierarchical system, it doesn’t make sense,” and that’s a perfectly reasonable and common position. For not just me but Workflowy’s designers themselves though, it makes sense to have “projects” checked but to be able to work with their items unhindered by grey coloring when zoomed in.

Go for it! Here’s my Stylish script for anyone who stumbles across this thread. I copied the colors from the Sepia theme, so those may need adjustment for other themes.

.Node.is-checked .Node-content,
.Node.is-checked .Node-renderedContent,
.Node.is-checked .Node-note,
.Node.is-checked .Node-renderedNote { 
	color: #3f2a18;	
}

.Node.is-checked:not(.is-currentRoot) .Node-content,
.Node.is-checked:not(.is-currentRoot) .Node-renderedContent,
.Node.is-checked:not(.is-currentRoot) .Node-note,
.Node.is-checked:not(.is-currentRoot) .Node-renderedNote { 
	color: #999;
}


.Node.is-checked.is-currentRoot > .Node-self .Node-content,
.Node.is-checked.is-currentRoot > .Node-self .Node-renderedContent,
.Node.is-checked.is-currentRoot > .Node-self .Node-note,
.Node.is-checked.is-currentRoot > .Node-self .Node-renderedNote {
    color: #999;
}
2 Likes
9

Thanks for sharing this! :slight_smile:

It will also work for the default theme, won’t work for dark theme though. If anyone wants the Stylish script for the dark theme let me know!

10

Following this up @Erica, I’ve noticed that when you have a list as ‘checklist’ i.e. showing checkboxes, completing the parent adds ticks to all the boxes of the children. In combination with the change you made following this thread, this has the odd effect where if you then click to complete the child, the tick remains but it goes ‘more greyed out’.

Generally I like the ‘two stages’ of greyed out, however I think when the check box is showing, they should go ‘stage 1’ greyed out when the parent is completed, but their individual check box should be empty - only when you actually click on them to take them to ‘stage 2’ greyed out, their tick box should be ticked.

What do you think?

Stephen

11

@Stephen_Dewitt: sorry for the late reply, this must have fallen through the cracks somehow.

I agree strikethrough should be consistent with the tick, whereas greying out indicates it’s checked via parent status.

We’d like to implement that, but under a closed bug report this is undiscoverable. Do you mind opening a feature request for it? I can do it too if you’re too busy.

12

Hi @Erica yea I’m a bit swamped with work actually and don’t have it in me to write this up as a feature request, if you could that would be awesome :slight_smile:

13

Added!

1 Like