I used this feature a lot in Workflowy, enough so Iām even considering going back to Workflowy just for this. Okayā¦maybe just for a minute I thought about it, but not really
I tend to reorganize, move, prune my content a lot as Iām building up a tree structure representing my notes and findings on a topic Iām researching. The ability to quickly expand and collapse levels really speeds this kind of reorganizing by allowing me to focus on intermediate levels of a list.
I find having to click many, many nodes to partially expand/collapse a tree very time consuming and distracting.
While drilling down into a list is useful to block out content not needed at the moment, not drilling all the way to the bottom of a list is also useful when you want to focus on an intermediate level of topics.
In any case, this is something I would use every few minutes if it were available.
I think I might have suggested something like this (based on Workflowy or CheckVist habits) some while back but certainly support this notion. That there are not more votes I think suggest there are many who have never seen the facility of such a workflow in an outliner. I hope it is just a matter of time before this idea takes off and is implemented.
Iām not sure if this is the feature Iām looking for but itās related.
Everytime I open Dynalist, it remembers the state of my expanded children nodes. While thatās a good feature, itās information overload for me when I want to just see the parent notes. Right now, this requires several clicks to do. I basically just want to collapse children and show first level parents in the active node.
Iād love for this to be easy. I was a long-time comapping user before coming here. In terms of flow, those guys really nailed it. Dynalist has so much promise and it really needs this feature.
Expand All isnāt optimal. I want to hit a hotkey to iterate thru Expanding levels 2,3 4,5 etc.
Perhaps a variable tracks your deepest open level, and other variable for your shallowest collapsed level, and the Expand Deeper and Collapse Shallower hotkeys begin at those points to roll things up or roll them out, across the document.
Alternatively, taking advantage of the fast that I probably just want to explore a few levels of headings, hotkeys for just rolling out levels 2 or 3 would be sufficient.
Itād be a nice feature because Expand All explodes way too deep making the outline Iām looking to skim stretch out so much I have to manually roll up all the deep stuff every time with my mouse to get to the level view I need to skim.
Iām worried this request is dead. There are MANY ways to implement this but the basic issue remains the same: weād like a way to āprogressively openā a topic. I store LOTS in Dynalist and I start my day opening each project ONE LEVEL DEEP to see what each needs doing for that day. Right now, I can open up and see the projects or open them ALL THE WAY DOWN. Thatās too much. Iād like an āOpen Next Levelā command which opens the first level children, then the next etc. SHIFT would collapse.
It is depressing, isnāt it? Wish I could offer hope, but the roadmap shows a heavy back log of work. So Iām not holding my breath on this.
Thereās another feature I find missing from my Workflowy days and thatās auto-completion when searching for tags using the search bar. Used that all the time in Workflowy. And, there is auto-completion on tags when you type them into a document, so why it does not also auto-complete tags is the search bar seems very odd.
All these things we request yet I have no clue about the details of the nitty gritty to make it exist. Iām a big dummy. I wish I knew how to program projects like Dynalist. Itād feel cool - hundreds of people clamororing and complaining for things only I have the skills and know how to do. Theyāre all like āitās easy!ā and I would just chuckle as they pout.
I was going to teach myself programming by making something similar, then I found dynalist was close enough to my vision, and it took the wind out of my sails.
Not that this completely covers what I think you guys want, but I see no mention here that with ctrl+. you can expand just one level - then if you select all the nodes at that level and ctrl+. again it expands the next level - this is good enough for me personally
Edit: you have to fully collapse (ctrl+shift+.) first before you can use ctrl+. to expand level by level
