When you split an item with Enter key, should the children follow the first or last character?

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#1

Imagine you put the cursor before f and hit Enter
image

Current behavior:
image

What I’m proposing:
image

My reasoning is that it’s dangerous for children to follow the wrong item, because you might collapse them and delete all the children without realizing they moved items unintuitively. Personally, it’s unintuitive for them to follow the last character. I consider the first characters the item, the anchor, and the last character is usually a trailing thought that could easily be moved to the children at any time. The fact that trailing thoughts seemingly kidnap the children items scares me and has caused data loss when I don’t notice it happen.

  • current behavior, children follow last character
  • proposed behavior, children follow first character

0 voters

When parent is split in two, which half should keep the child nodes?
#2

lol i cant beleive half of you voted for this: Sep-20-2019%2012-34-41

#3

If you want to add “another lamp” to target, try putting the cursor in front of “more ziploc bags”, write “another lamp”, and press Enter.

That’s if you absolutely want it to be the first item. Making it the last one would be easier, of course.

#4

Yeah, BigChungus, you’re right. It’s downright wacky and counter-intuitive for the children to be attached to “another lamp” as their parent, rather than to “Target”. Not sure, though, that I entirely agree with your solution. It’s fine, and probably is the most economical choice in most cases–which of course is why you chose it, but I might suggest leaving the children with the “target” parent, and making “another lamp” a sibling of “target” down at the bottom of your screen example. Reason being that it better embodies the idea of “splitting” one item into “two items” (at the same level). And if it’s sometimes more awkward to do it that way, at least there are NO side effects, and the user has to MANUALLY change “another lamp”'s level and make it a child of “Target”.

#5

Oh I see what you mean,

target another lamp

  • blah

becomes

target

  • blah

another lamp

Honestly I’d be fine with that since it’s just a matter of hitting tab to make it go my way

Also wow, a year later and the change is winning in the poll

#6

I can’t see why anyone would want the current algorithm as you describe it. It’s clearly just a bug. Either the parent item should be conceptualized as “Mom and Little Billy”, as you did, or it should be conceptualized as “Peaches and Cream”, as I did. The current algorithm conceptualizes it as “Little Billy and Mom”, and for no reason. Probably the best answer is that it should be conceptualized your way, when it stands alone with no children yet. And it should be conceptualized my way when it already has one or more children.

1 Like
#7

I just don’t like change :innocent:

1 Like
#8

I look at it like this: Is it easy enough to get the result you’re looking for, because I want each result in different circumstances, depending on the context.

I see 3 desirable results:

  • new node created as first child
    • select to end of line (shift+end), cut (shift+delete), enter, paste (shift+insert)
  • new node created as sibling and children belong to new node.
    • (just press enter)
  • new node created as sibling, children remain with the first
    • (Collapse the node (ctrl+period is my shortcut) and press enter in the middle of the line.)

The first works because enter at the end of a line is different from enter in the middle of a line. It might seem more natural to change the middle to also create a new child, but then what if you want the third result?