Transclusion/clone (display item in multiple places)

🌟Features
#86

@Erica I can fully understand that these concepts are hard to add to a data model after. For being an outliner and list manager, Dynalist has really hit the mark with perfection and few can touch it. What is even more amazing is its done by a small team of pro’s. So respect! I think this is a question if you want to continue to be just a GREAT outliner, or if you want to really extend into a new class of tools people are looking for that help them think. Not just capture notes or make lists, but THINK. This is where Dynalist comes to a halt. I say this because…

I have been using Roam now for a month. As an outliner, its inferior. But its functional. However, for knowledge capture, linking and thinking, its a very powerful model. It changes the way you think about capturing information, connecting it, mixing it and reusing it. What is the point to capture info if you can’t reuse it. I really like this concept (linked to Evergreen notes).

So the editor/outliner is weak, but the underlying database, with transclusion (embedding/linking) and back linking is years ahead of the document centric model used by Dynalist (and to an extent Workflowy). This is not meant as a criticism of Dynalist, but just a statement how the models are different.

I don’t think people are going to be just looking for an outliner anymore (which is what let me to Dynalist), but looking for tools that help them think. (Obsidian is breed of this new tool, but lacking outlining and also is desktop centric).

Dynalist UI, with Roam engine, that would be a match made in heaven.

I wish you would also open-source dynalist UI :wink: but we don’t get everything we want in life.

For transclusion, backlinks and a plugin API I would very happily pay a pro price, and even a more expensive pro price.

I think your development efforts would have been better spent on Dynalist than obsidian. Dynalist could be extended to be a hybrid of dynalist and obsidian key features, and being a real competitor to roam. Outliner is the secret sauce that makes te roam database and its advanced features so approachable.

Your team has done great work. Sorry if any my observations sound negative, but after being a long-time dynalist user and short-term roam user, I can say it will be hard to stick with Dynalist if it remains an outliner.

5 Likes
#87

I’ll respectfully disagree with Chris. I’ve briefly tried Roam, and whilst I wouldn’t say I’ve had that “aha” moment which Roam devotees seem to have had, I understand the differences in its concepts and how it’s used. It’s powerful but an outline fits my mental model better for some reason. Maybe it’s because I just know where everything is in an outline.

I’d be cautious of trying to make one great product be a bad imitation of another, in an attempt to overcome the weaknesses of a competitor (the UI) experienced by its users. There’s room for both, and whilst a large overlap in target users and uses exists so Dynalist will lose some customers to Roam along the way, it doesn’t mean there’s “one true way” that both should be converging towards. I can create tables with numbers and sums in MS Word, but it doesn’t make it MS Excel.

So for things like cloning I can see a huge benefit of this in an outliner application, not just to try and copy Roam, and not that it should be part of a move away from an outliner model.

I do kind of agree with Chris on Obsidian: it could be a breeding ground of ideas that make it into Dynalist, but there’s a huge amount on the Dynalist roadmap that would be great to see, and you can only spread yourselves so thin.

5 Likes
#88

@Stuart_Gibbons, good counterpoints! Thank you for more perspective on the matter.

2 Likes
#89

+1
This is exactly how I felt. Actually, I came to Dynalist to help me think. I secretly was looking for something like Roam.
In fairness, Roam is not even perfect. Something is missing.
That where Remnote offers something quite interesting. It is not only about “thinking” but “learning” which may fit more with my mental model.

Side question: yes should definitely be a pro feature.

1 Like
#90

What if (because the alternative is out of reach for the current program architecture) transclusion was implemented as simply a display option like in Obsidian where the embedded document/section is just shown in the same way you currently show a picture. The rendition would be expanded collapsed as it would look if you followed the link.

Only features needed are to open the link, and to hide the content. And interestingly if this was implemented, you might not even need a special kind of link. Just a tool to preview(expand) the link in-place.

2 Likes
#91

As Jamie1 brought up in another thread, workflowy just launched the feature, if you want to try it out in action. https://workflowy.com/feature/mirrors/ . It was being discussed on their forums too.

I am not going to jump ship for it, to be clear. I love dynalist’s features that workflowy doesn’t have.

It does pique my curiosity, since any node that’s an internal link jump, can instead be a mirror you drill into, in place. It transforms the finite tree into an infinitely looped fractal tree, just like the old game nested. If someone was bored, they could completely remake that game in workflowy mirror bullets. I recall in other outliners the concept is called clone nodes. The workflowy forum was referring to it as transclusion, for a while too. I am not sold on it being useful, it seems to just be a UI paradigm of how the travel between internal links renders. I can’t imagine my workflow or productivity getting a boost by it. It is certainly neat though, and I’d give it a try if it ever came to dynalist. I haven’t really found a use for backlinks either yet, though. It takes me a while to wrap my head around anything new.

2 Likes
#92

Workflovy’s implementation is great indeed.
Personally, a read-only version of the referenced source would be enough form me.

2 Likes
#93

I’ve just finished modelling a whole system using backlinks, but got to say the Mirroring feature in Workflowy looks very tempting from the video demo.

#94

It seems nifty, but I am unsure of how often I would use it. Anyone who has a suggestion for a killer usecase?

Boards, tables and iframe/embeds on the other hand that I would use all the time.

#95

I would use it for Journaling my work. The journal is ordered by time, and would mirror notes ordered by topic. So I have two views of the same information.

1 Like
#96

That’s my use case too: I have many documents, one per each customer/project.
Then I have a document dedicated to scheduled meetings with my manager. This document is made of notes and links to projects tasks, requiring a click every time I need to look at some details.
Having a mirror would save those clicks, keeping all the info I need for the meeting in one place. In my use case, a read-only mirror would be enough.

#97

The holy grail for me from the countless apps I’ve used over the years would be to keep things in place where they were created (e.g. meeting minutes, or a project plan) and have them display in other places (e.g. task lists) where I needed to see them, without copy & pasting, or elaborate filters or browsing through links or trees. Updates in one place to be reflected in the other places, which is what Mirrors seems to do very well.

I think I’d like some more UI clues than a diamond bullet, but I can see how they’ve tried to make all mirrored items equal to each other. But the demo video of showing almost that exact scenario of tasks captured in a meeting node, which was then shown in a kanban/table with the tasks mirrored from other nodes was very very tempting.

At the moment I’m using backlinks to achieve this and similar concepts - e.g. I have a “Today” node which I link to from all the tasks within projects I want to do today, so the tasks stay in place in the project but appear in the backlinks list, but that list isn’t sortable or directly editable so it’s a little clumsy.

I’m still not ready to make the jump from Dynalist and miss out on the custom CSS, dates, colours, separate files, Zapier support, but I dropped Workflowy years ago when it started to feel like a bit of a dead product. It’s very much back alive now. I understand the team are few in number and Obsidian is exciting, but it’d be a shame for Dynalist to start looking stale.

4 Likes
#98

Following discussions with @Stuart_Gibbons in this forum, I’ve adopted a similar approach to linking tasks and projects. The project node is used for notes and brainstorming with all tasks in a separate document linked back to the project using [[.
It means that tasks are visible from the project node using the ‘This item is referenced in:’ window but if created from meeting notes there’s no true link, the task is still physically somewhere else in my Dynalist structure.
I’ve been trying out Workflowy mirroring and it works really well. Where Dynalist scores is in it’s use of dates (Workflowy is still too vague IMO) and the ability to quickly import new tasks using IFTTT, webhooks etc.
If WorkFlowy offers this in the future then I could be tempted :wink:

2 Likes
#99

This is a huge issue for me…
I am completely invested in Dynalist and would hate to be forced to look elsewhere, but the idea have having my notes ‘mirrored’ would add hugely to the way I am set up. The Obsidian/Roam model holds no appeal, it’s simply not my use case. But there are now a lot of newcomers offering backlinks/transclusion and I am sensing that Dynalist is no longer the focus of attention for @Erica. Others such as Amplenote are doing really interesting stuff and the enthusiasm and energy going into their development reminds me of what brought me to Dynalist years ago. I hate the idea that Dynalist has been demoted as a priority as it changes my own enthusiasm for the product. I sincerely hope that it continues to get the love that currently seems focussed elsewhere. :crossed_fingers:

7 Likes
#100

That echoes my own thoughts almost exactly. Over the last couple of years I have come to rely on Dynalist and have been waiting for new features to be added (WYSIWYG was promised a while ago, and I’d love to see transclusion).

Dynalist’s developers seem trustworthy — I wish they’d just come out and say it like it is. Whether it’s “hang tight, all is well” or “sorry, we’ve got other priorities”, at least we’d know and could make decisions about whether to stay or go…

(My dream scenario, by the way, is that everything’s gone quiet because there’s a behind-the-scenes rewrite underway to allow some of the features we all want to see. I get less confident in this idea as the months go by, however).

2 Likes
#101

It seems unlikely to me that it could be anything but the latter. They are a small team who have turned a huge percentage of their time availability to turning out a new product. It must therefore follow that the time spent on Obsidian was not spent on Dynalist.
I had never really considered before just how much the apparent love for the product by its developers impacted my own enthusiasm. Dynalist is obviously just as good as it was but something has changed for me. Perhaps it’s about supporting a great team in their goal to produce something great that feels like a partnership. So when their efforts wane I wane with them. I came to Dynalist, some years ago, from Workflowy. At that time, Workflowy had lost its way and Dynalist was dynamic and focussed. Just sayin’…

1 Like
#102

I think we all suffer from “shiny new thing” syndrome, myself included. Dynalist is a great, mature product which I’ve put a lot of time into it meeting my needs, but then when you see something in another app you think would enhance it further I think it’s natural to consider whether that other thing would work better or wish it to be incorporated. As you say, we’re all invested to some level in our choice to use Dynalist and its future (and been stung by other apps being abandoned or shut down), so if you feel the developers aren’t as invested as they were it has an effect.

It’s not for me to announce, but as it’s public knowledge in the team’s Discord channel and before the impression is created that the devs have lost interest, there’s been another recent delivery that’s been taking their time, as well as the focus being on Obsidian.

1 Like
#103

Transclusion is far away as I have understood. Because one of the fundamentals in Dynalist is One Item kan only exist in one place.

I constantly try out other stuff. Usually I run back to Dynalist screaming.

  • Remnote: Feature rich, but confusing UI and very learning centric.
  • Workflowy: Fractal boards and mirroring, but too simple.
  • Roam: Feature rich, but confusing and technical UI.
  • Dynalist: Easy to use UI, Lightning fast and the clear winner for me. But missing mirroring, boards and embeds.
2 Likes
#104

Noted! :blush:

#105

What are embeds?