I love the new ability to open any item, not just bookmarks or documents. Something Iāve wanted for a while, thanks Dynalist!
Question though, looking for opinions here: is there any point in having āopen documentā and āopen itemā mapped to two separate keys, as two separate commands? For me I think of them as the same thing, essentially itās a keyboard shortcut to take me from one part of my Dynalist to some other part. Would it make more sense to just have both these features combined into one, with one keyboard shortcut, or am I missing something here?
The main issue of combining them is how to order them and how to display them, when mix-matching.
Right now the plan is to have a search that combines everything at some point, instead of combining them right now. So you have the choice to search for documents and bookmarks only, or search literally anything. This does add a bit of cognitive load though. I admit we are inspired by IDEs/code edtiors about this, namely IntelliJ and Sublime Text. Thereās usually a search command that does everything, and a few others that let you search files, symbols, or go to a line number.
Also, each document is also a root item, so technically if youāre not searching for bookmarks, Item Finder can do both document and item.
Regarding the original request though, in the end it might be better to make an all-in-one search. For example, you should able to go to folders too. The result would be that the folder is expanded and highlighted in the left pane.
I like having them separated, for now at least. I personally split all my information into many different documents, so Ctrl+Oing between documents and Ctrl+Shift+Oing between items is a clear distinction in my mind!
Maybe if you were to combine them, which would be awesome, it could be Ctrl+O for everything, Ctrl+Shift+O for just items, and Ctrl+Alt+O for just documents? (although it does use up 3 shortcuts)
āFile finderā for searching documents and bookmarks makes sense.
āItem finderā for searching just āitemsā (tags, etc.), but excluding documents from results would make sense.
āItem finderā for searching both items and documents doesnāt make sense for me. As the name states, it should search just for āitemsā.
As āitem finderā is implemented, listing both items and documents, the āfile finderā became a bit useless. In that case to have an all-in-one search makes sense (unification of file finder + item finder in a single tool).
I was trying to explain to a colleague who just started using Dynalist (coming from Workflowy) the three available searches (four searches including the global search - ctrl+enter). She got a bit confused, finding difficult to make sense of all these searches, and the overlap of āitem finderā and āfile finderā both searching documents didnāt help her sense making!
IMO, I donāt see problem on having all these searchers, since they create different levels of specialized searches. But a boundary should be set to āitem finderā, in order documents arenāt listed there anymore, and since just items are listed, it would be even easier to select from the search result (I wouldnāt be concerned to differentiate if the result is a document or an item). This way I could explain to my colleague easier:
Use document search āctrl+Fā to locate items in the opened document;
Use global search āctrl+enterā to expand the search for all Dynalist items;
Use item finder āctrl+shift+Oā to perform a fast global search for Dynalist items (only)
Use file finder āctrl+Oā to search for documents and bookmarks from the left panes
The root item of a document is an item too though. Notice how you can hover the name of the document (not in the file pane but in the document side) and use the same item menu. Document is a wrapper over the root item which can have more properties, such as sharing information.
You could try explaining it this way: if you use bookmarks, use Ctrl+O to search for bookmarks. If no bookmark is used, one can live with the item finder alone.
