Boostnote: Feature Request: Allow Notes (and Folders?) to be arranged as parent/children in a tree/hierarchy

[df2k2]

Feature Request

Add the ability to arrange notes in a parent-children hierarchy tree. If possible extend this functionality to be used for Folders and/or Snippets.

Details

I would like to request the ability to organize notes in a hierarchy tree. Allowing notes to be children of other notes would help organize notes as relational items. Unless I am not familiar with functionality that exists, I feel this will reduce the difficulty navigating through many notes stored in a folder.

Notes that contain child notes could feature drop-down arrows that show and hide the child note items. I would prefer the state of open/closed be saved so closing the program will not reset their open/closed status.

Some of my folders with notes are growing quite large. It is also difficult for me to associate and group the notes that feature similar content.

Examples:

Web Development

• HTML
  
  
  
  • Elements of HTML
  
  
  • HTML References
  
  

• CSS
  
  
  
  • CSS Preprocessors
    
    
    
    
    
    • SASS / SCSS
    
    
    
    • Mixin Snippets
    
    
    
    • Examples using SCSS
    
    
    
    • LESS
    
    
    
  
  
  • Flexbox
    
    
    
    
    
    • Flexbox Layout
    
    
    
    • Flexbox Examples
    
    
    
    • Flexbox References
    
    
    
  
  
• JavaScript
  
  
  
  • JS Libraries
  
  

---

Notes / Ideas

Setting Relationships

Some suggestions for methods of setting notes to children:

• Drag and drop as child items to a parent item.
• Promote / Demote indent so that the indentation of a note item indicates it is the child of it's parent item above.

Notes with Children Snippets

It would be nice if we could add snippet notes as children of markdown notes. This would give the ability to detail a feature/functionality using words and then attach working implementations as snippets. Snippets can be differentiated with an icon and given the ability to click-to-save-as would then allow for the snippet to be duplicated for edit/usage externally (the point being to preserve the integrity of the original file)

Thank You!!

---

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[kazup01]

Hi @df2k2 , thanks for your suggestion!
This is great idea, but I want keep Boostnote simple. If you make multiple storage, you can use two-level Folder.

[evmin]

+1 I would like to have this feature as well. Multiple storages is a workaround.

[rsalmei]

Please @kazup01, it shouldn't be hard to implement this. At least multiple folders in a tree.
In the same way you have a folders in the root level of the boostnote.json, you could have a nested folders item in all entries. If there isn't any sub-folders, a simple "folders": [].
What do you think? I really need this feature. Thank you.

[TeraInferno]

I agree with the previous comments in that having subfolders would greatly expand the usability of Boostnote. For example, I have over 50 various snippets relating to Shell scripting. I would lot to be able to organize them like:

• Shell
  
  
  
  • Search
  
  
  • grep snippets
  
  
  • Config
  
  
  • config snippets
  
  
  • Admin
  
  
  • admin snippets
  
  

Thanks!

[kazup01]

Thank you for feedback!
Could you help us? We are welcome to your pull request.

[davidmigloz]

What about having hierarchical tags like evernote?

[vincentcox]

Any news on this?
How do you create a two-level Folder?

[eyleron]

@vincentcox I'm thinking the way it works now may be:

1. Create a new storage location in Preferences > Storages
2. Create a folder in that storage location.

If this is the case, it seems overly bloated. I think of each of the Storage Locations to be like:

• "Drive on local computer"
• "One Drive: Work"
• "One Drive: Personal"
• "Google Drive"
• etc.

So making me make a new storage location for the purpose of top level "concept containers" is like making a new mapped drive in order to support just one layer of folders underneath each.

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[louiealmeda]

Hey Guys, I started working on this today, here's what I got so far:

Progress and approach seems to be promising. I'm planning to make the drag handle to be the folder name and place the collapse icon on the left side of it.

Let me know if you have any feedback with the approach.

here's how it looks in boostnote.json

{
  "folders": [
    {
      "key": "832e179b58ef42b0429c",
      "color": "#E10051",
      "name": "Main",
      "folders": [
        {
          "key": "831e179b58ef42b0429d",
          "color": "#E10052",
          "name": "Sub"
        },
        {
          "key": "832e279b58ef42b0429e",
          "color": "#E10051",
          "name": "folders"
        },
        {
          "key": "832e178b58ef42b0429f",
          "color": "#E10053",
          "name": "inside",
          "folders": [
            {
              "key": "832e179b68ef42b1329f",
              "color": "#E10052",
              "name": "inside 1.1"
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "key": "832e179b58ef42b0428c",
      "color": "#E10051",
      "name": "Main 2",
      "folders": [
        {
          "key": "832e139b58ef42b0427d",
          "color": "#E10052",
          "name": "Sub 2"
        },
        {
          "key": "832e172b58ef42b0426e",
          "color": "#E10052",
          "name": "folders 2"
        },
        {
          "key": "832e179b58ef42b1425f",
          "color": "#E10052",
          "name": "inside 2"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "key": "832e179b58ef42b1436f",
      "color": "#E10052",
      "name": "Outside"
    }
  ],
  "version": "1.0"
}

Items left:

• [ ] Save boostnote.json correctly after drop
• [ ] Collapsing folders
• [ ] Draging folders inside/outside of folders
• [ ] Sorting of parent folders

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[ghost]

@louiealmeda what is the progress with this feature?

[louiealmeda]

Hi @adtofaust, unfortunately I stopped working on it. Upon digging into the code, I found out that it is not DRY and a Shotgun surgery is needed to implement this feature. It will just take up too much effort to push this through. 😕

[mattkoskela]

@louiealmeda do you have a feature branch with your front end progress at least? It would be nice to have a starting point to work off of.. Also, any notes on your research findings would be appreciated - what DRY issues were you running into (for example)?

This is obviously a highly requested feature, and I'd love to help, but starting from a good place would be super helpful...

[Danmou]

@mattkoskela awesome that you want to work on this feature! I'll also gladly help but I'm afraid my front-end development experience is limited.

Anyway, before too much work is put into the folder hierarchy idea, I would like to suggest going back to the original idea proposed in this issue: having the notes themselves arranged in a parent/child hierarchy. I find this approach more flexible when you use the hierarchy for topics and subtopics - you often want to add some general information about a topic that is not specific to one of the subtopics. And of course, you can still imitate a folder by using an empty note as parent for the notes you want to group together. This model is similar to how OneNote works and it also would allow Boostnote to more naturally replace popular hierarchical note taking programs such as Workflowy and Dynalist.

From a UI standpoint there are several ways we could show this kind of hierarchy, and I'm not sure which would be the best. I think the simplest option would be to have the notes list as a collapseable tree (possibly as a third mode in addition to the flat default and compressed views), but it would also be possible to put the parent notes in the folder list like in louiealmeda's implementation.

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[richardtks]

@louiealmeda Can you kindly further elaborate what kind of DRY and shotgun surgery in details?

[Airgunster]

Can someone please help to get current status of this issue? Looks like we had a good progress, but then everything was rolled back and it's unclear where are we now.

Thanks a lot in advance!

[Fratt]

I'm interested to know this as well.
I really want to move from OneNote to Boostnote, but I need this.

[mattkoskela]

I've slowly started picking away at it when I have time (which is not often), but have not made significant progress. If anyone has the time to help, I'm available on the Slack channel.

[wikispish]

+1 for subfolders, at least a few levels. Boostnote needs this to be useful as an information repository.

[wAuner]

I think an even better solution would be to merge the tag and folder function and allow nested tags.
bear and notable both use this kind of navigation. At first I was very sceptical, but when you look at how bear implemented it, it's really great.

[dskopa-softdev]

@wAuner agree, hierarchical tags would cover both tags and folder tree functionality

[aakbar5]

Any update on this feature

[Flexo013]

To help organize the efforts of people implementing this feature, let's continue on this other issue: #125

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