Warning: This post is pretty long and confusing. Feel free to ignore.
My imagined solution goes a little like this:
You can enter a special ‘superman’ mode where everything is a list again just like Workflowy. The one difference is there’s a ‘super checkbox’ next to each item that determines whether or not the item is at the folder/document level or not.
In terms of code, you could add a button to the file pane. When you click this button, a special modal using almost all of the screen opens up. A superman list is generated from the user’s regular Dynalist stuff and displayed in this modal. The super checkboxes are ticked or not depending on whether an item was a folder/document or not.
When the user now checks a ‘super checkbox’, all of the parents’ super checkboxes get checked too if they weren’t already. Similarly, if the user unchecks a super checkbox, all of the children’s super checkboxes get unchecked.
The user can drag around items and edit them and expand and zoom and do all the things they can do in a regular list.
All of the edits right now are still in this special superman list. They have nothing to do with the user’s regular Dynalist stuff.
When the user clicks a ‘Done’ button, the user’s Dynalist stuff is updated/generated from the superman list. The superman list is discarded.
I don’t know how clear the above is, but hopefully it makes some sense.
I also imagine it would take quite some work, so it’s just a pipe dream. Still, I thought multi-item was a total pipe dream at some point, but it happened, so putting this out there!