I’m hitting many points of friction in the Jump To Item and Move Item features. I use them constantly while using Dynalist, so even a small improvement would be massive for me.
I’ve already documented some bugs in this bug thread - the sort order changes as you type, often being wrong, and items that are children of completed items show up when I’d expect them not to (or at least be penalized in rank).
This feature request is to request improvement to the expected behavior itself, which as I understand it is to currently show any item with prefix-matched word as the top ranked results, in the order they occur in the document.
Even without the bugs I mentioned, this expected behavior isn’t great for me because it doesn’t reflect other signs of item importance that distinguish between equally valid matched items. I’m sure opinions can differ on exact implementation, but here are some improvement suggestions that I think should be widely acceptable:
- Items that are deeper in the hierarchy should be penalized vs shallower ones. I can’t see why a match at the root level wouldn’t be the top match.
- Bookmarked items should be boosted to some degree. (idea from BigChungus in the bug thread linked above)
- Case-sensitive matches should be boosted vs case-insensitive matches.
If we can go ever further, other signals of importance might be: number of links to the item, recency of visiting the item (or moving an item into it), number of times that item has been visited (or had an item moved into it), though I’m not sure what the relative importance of all these ideas should be.
I should mention that this feature request would be a bit less important to me if the bugs were fixed, so please fix that first. For example, very commonly I jump to my inbox, but even though it’s the 2nd item at the root level of my document, it shows up at the 4th result (all the higher results are both lower in the document and MUCH deeper in the hierarchy).