Select multiple items on mobile

As the title suggests, you should be able to somehow select multiple items on mobile and do things with them.

Related bug report: Can't copy multiple items on mobile

27 Likes

This one is very important to me. Is there something I should do to encourage development on this item?

3 Likes

I donā€™t think so. The timeline would depend a lot on what we have on hand.

Commenting on the forum is already the best way to let us know you need this, in my opinion.

2 Likes

Many iPhone list apps feature an Edit button. When tapped, all the items get an open circle (or something like that) on the left side, which you tap to select, tap again to deselect. Having selected them, you can activate a command (Delete is the most common). Since you have a lot of commands to activate, this would maybe be a series of buttons you can pick from?

Edit mode often also offers a second handle on the right, and easy swipe actions that do something.

3 Likes

Alt idea : thereā€™s a lot of special interactions a phone can register. Eg. Hold-release is the way to activate select in a text editor mode. Whay about hold-release on the zoom dot? It already selects one item and initiates a move. Suppose you then use additonal taps, maybe with multitap, to select more. And then allow drag-move or the hamburger menu to do its thing with the selected items.

3 Likes

Nice idea, only downside is that itā€™s not very discoverable.

People might try long pressing on an item, and they get the text select menu. It might not occur to them to long press on the bullet point. In other words, itā€™s more like a hidden feature, like many other things in Dynalist. Itā€™s nice if a user reads the docs, but we canā€™t expect them all to. So being able to discover these features without reading documentation would be nice.

That would imply having some button or option to ā€œenter bulk edit modeā€, and in that mode you can do a single tap to select an item.

I think a bulk edit mode would be good. As pointed out above, many iOS apps have such an option. When clicked checkboxes (sometimes rounded to avoid confusion with the appā€™s built in check boxes) appear next to each item. This would make the mobile app much more useful. My most common need is simply to bulk indent/outdent or move items.

5 Likes

To take this a bit further:

On a phone, the keyboard takes up a fair bit of screen space. If we had an Edit Structure Mode, activated by an icon at the top (similar to the lock icon), the program could be so much better at manipulating things.

When you tap an item, instead of going into edit with the keyboard, just select the item and enable the command bar (which normally shows above the keyboard) at the bottom of the screen.

Tap again to deselect, tap something else to select something extra.

Use the command bar to do things to the selected items.

Or use the typical drag/drop to move items, but this time because thereā€™s no keyboard in the way, and thereā€™s no accidentally going into Edit on an item, itā€™s easier to pick things, drag things, and see context to figure where it needs to go.

As far as I can figure, this UI would achieve exactly the same as Ctrl-Clicking stuff in Windows, so it should be clear what commands belong in the command bar for this, as itā€™s the same as your Windows hamburger menu. Except I additionally require Duplicate which seems only to exist as a keyboard shortcut.

2 Likes

Yeah, exactly. Thatā€™s what we imagined as well. On desktop/web, you press and hold Ctrl to enter select mode. On mobile app, you enter this mode by toggling a button (like read-only mode).

2 Likes

One possible addition. There are times I just want to move around the list and rearrange stuff and change formatting. It would be handy if the expand/collapse and zoom were still enabled while in this mode.

I get this could complicate implementation, and I donā€™t want complications to interfere with a speedy implementation of this.

Just want to say that Iā€™d like to have such a feature. Though have to say that while I do use it regularly, itā€™s like once or twice a day, not more often. So time saved wonā€™t be that huge.

2 Likes

Part of it is not actually doing the multiselect, but not having the keyboard take away half the screen when working on one item.

1 Like

I was also looking for it today and did exactly what you suspected. I long pressed for a minute and gave up haha!

1 Like

I too would like this feature to exist. Itā€™d be really really nice. I want to mass indent or mass turn-into-checklist, and I canā€™t seem to do that on Android.:cry:

3 Likes

Discovered today there actually is ability to select an item in dynalist: you tap to the left of the bullet. It just shows the standard icons at the bottom but no keyboard. Great! It would not be hard to enable multi select without really changing the UI.

Wouldnā€™t address missing functions ( cut paste for example), but being able to indent or highlight etc mutliple items would be cool.

2 Likes

This would be a really useful feature! Has there been any progress on this?

3 Likes

Chiming in in support of this idea. Having to manually move items one by one (or else wait until Iā€™m back at my PC) is a big interruption in my workflow.

4 Likes

Common alreadyā€¦
I see such requests with many ideas for three years already.
Copy paste bulk is basic functionality in my opinion

1 Like

To be honest, although I was requesting multiple select, if you merely made a way to duplicate a deep node on mobile, that would be the most important step.

At present there is no way to complete this task.

Not 100% true, but only via a workaround: you need to use one of the software keyboards with a ctrl key (ps. the blackberry keyboard is awesome and has one - you first have to download the ā€˜blackberry managerā€™ app from the playstore). Then you can add e.g. ctrl+L to be a shortcut for duplicate - a voila

Also, yes, multi-select, or some kind of select mode would be :+1: - Personally I would really like this to be a ā€˜modeā€™ e.g. in the current ā€˜locked / non-editā€™ mode, you would be able to press on an item to select it and choose to e.g. move, change colour etc without the faff of your keyboard popping up and down

1 Like