Option to collapse a bulletpoint from the bottom of its list

@Vincent_Tang that is a sweet feature idea. I like it… I like it a lot!

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Yep, that would be very nice for longer lists, and I believe I’ve seen this feature in a few outliners.

Thanks for this!

is there a roadmap on trello for this yet?

i would like to vote on it if so :slight_smile:

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I can put it up – a short and descriptive name would help. Honestly I’m not sure what that grey line should be called.

If it’s called “A”, this feature can be called something like “Use A to collapse list”. Also, I don’t think this needs to be an option – everyone can benefit from this.

To anyone who’s reading this – if you spot any problem with this, comment and let us know!

I guess you could call it a “Bullet Liner?”. Its a vertical line downward for a bulletpoint, should be self explanatory right?

I’m not sure how the exact UX /UI behavior of the collapsing list / uncollapsing list would look like when something is clicked. Maybe perhaps a poll for this or suggestions?

Ideally, what it needs to have for sure is prevent fat-fingering / error prone / accidental collapsing of lists you didn’t want to collapse

so if you close things at the bottom of a list, you might also click and expand the list below it, since the button might be very close to each other

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Maybe this could be implemented in conjunction with

Any shortcut suggestion?

We’re hesitant to add more shortcuts as at this rate, there will be more and more shortcut conflicts, taking into all popular browsers, operating systems, and locales into consideration.

I don’t understand how collapsing and uncollapsing with shortcuts would work though

But, I think if there was a shortcut implemented, all the keys should be able to be done with left hand only by default

Personally I collapse and uncollapse lists with just visually clicking it. There’s shortcuts for these CTRL+SHIFT+` in dynalist, CTRL+Down/Up in workflowy, but I can’t see myself using them

I imagine the vast majority of people probably feel the same way and just visually collapse / uncollapse items

If you do make the line clickable, it should have a very narrow clicking area though imo

I agree with most of the post on the original link from @Ron

Maybe CTRL + LEFT_ARROW to collapse a list to its parent. CTRL + RIGHT_ARROW to expand the current bullet?

This would be a lot more work, but it would be super cool if we could customize our own key bindings. :slight_smile: That way you could just have a list of commands that are available, and we could record our own bindings in a settings menu. :smiley: :smiley:

Ctrl+Left is a universal shortcut to move left by a word though…

Dynalist Pro has this right now! Look under Settings - Keymap. We don’t have any empty shortcuts to be filled in right now, maybe in the future.

I notice CMD + period expands/collapses the current bullet.

What about CMD + SHIFT + period to collapse/expand the parent bullet?

I can see a potential usability issue though… Let’s say you were working on a list:

  • Foods

    • Banana
    • Eggs
    • Pancakes <== Your cursor is here.
    • Ice Cream

If I’m focused on Pancakes and I hit CMD + SHIFT + period, it will collapse the parent’s bullet, so it would just show:

  • Foods <== Your cursor is now here.

Now what if I immediately hit CMD + SHIFT + period again?

One of two things should happen:

  1. The list should expand again, and my cursor should move back to the Pancakes line.
  2. If Foods is nested under another parent item (e.g., Stuff I Like) it should collapse to its parent bullet.

I kind of like #1 because it allows me to use CMD + SHIFT + period as a quick toggle, to see the parent and then jump immediately back to where I was working.

However, #2 is also nice because it keeps the command consistent. It always collapses to the parent.

One hybrid solution might be:

  1. In normal situations, it collapses to the parent bullet.
  2. If the most recent action taken was a “collapse to parent bullet” action and the cursor has never left the current line, then it will toggle and instead expand the bullet.

Just brainstorming… :slight_smile:

In code editors, this is the code folding ribbon or something along those lines.

You could call it the “outline ribbon” or “list folding ribbon/strip/bar” or something similar.

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Unfortunately Ctrl+Shift+Period is already taken for expanding/collapsing all bullets (all levels).

I prefer #2 as well. It’s consistent, and it assumes you don’t want to “undo” the collapsing action in most cases, which is a reasonable assumption in my opinion.

Is Ctrl+Shift+period taken? I thought it was only Ctrl+period?

I’m on Mac so I use CMD+period. CMD+SHIFT+period doesn’t seem to do anything differently, except when my cursor is on the title of the document.

To me, it makes sense that CMD+period would toggle expanding/collapsing of its children, and CMD+SHIFT+period would toggle collapsing/expanding of its parent. That would be some nice symmetry.

Also, in many apps, the SHIFT modifier does the “opposite” of an action. Like TAB vs. SHIFT+TAB for indent/outdent. or CTRL+Z vs. CTRL+SHIFT+Z for undo/redo.

Ctrl+Period is for toggling the current bullet itself, whereas Ctrl+Shift+Period is for toggling all levels of sub-bullets under this bullet. If your bullet has more than 2 sub-levels you’ll see the difference.

Ctrl + Up? (needs just one hand)

With regard to the number of shortcuts’ conflicts, do you think is a good idea if it starts empty, to be filled by the user?

Personally I think this is a poor idea. If there are shortcuts have a standard set of short cuts and allow the user to customize them if they wish but don’t start them out without any and make them go through and assign every single one themselves. That becomes a lot of work for something most people expect to just work out of the box.

Yep, that’s the plan. We need to make some slight modification to the current shortcut customization system to make that work; it doesn’t support empty shortcuts right now.

Ctrl+Up is already used to swap an item with the previous item, sorry about that.

Alt + Up/Alt-Down don’t seem to be bound to anything and I don’t think it’s a universal command for anything.
Alt or Cmd + PageUp also seem like viable alternatives.
Really missing a shortcut to collapse to parent :slight_smile: