"Muting" Notes/Notebooks

Aye, might be nice to have the ability to temporarily hide notebooks so they don’t show up in searches and other prompts. It is sort of the same idea as being able to select a select a single notebook, but the inverse in cases where you want more than one open in the workspace. Another slight variation of this theme is to “lock” notes/notebooks as read-only to avoid deleting or otherwise changing them. Locked notebooks would also be hidden in note moving menus. As always, just some thoughts, as it would seem pretty easy to implement as a database flag. Much thanks for all your hard work.

Hi ebigram,

Thank you for the suggestion.
It seems to be interesting but I’d like to know why you need to temporarily hide notebooks.
I guess it’s mostly enough if you switch to a workspace view.

Regarding the lock feature, please refer to the existing topic:

In my opinion, while muting and locking are useful for some people, they are kind of confusing for some people.
I can imagine that I will get reports like “I can’t edit a note!” and “a notebook is lost!”.
So, we have to consider such features very carefully.

I wrote a long response but it disappeared. But maybe it’s for the best. I agree, I’m very wary of contributing to feature bloat unless there is a natural way to consolidate it with existing ones. Other than bugsnag not sure if you have much by ways of telemetry, but that might not be a bad way to roll out new features in an opt-in beta context (only).

When I’m not on my phone I can illustrate the MVE scenario I mean more succinctly with a few screenshots. But generally I’d say the What Would Takuya Use (WWTU) design principle has served you well.

I received your message via email, so I paste it:

Yes I understand, I should’ve given a better motivating use-case for “muting/hiding”. In the broadest sense you can really think of it as either “archiving” having a good reason to store it long-term, but really no immediate daily use for it. This is less how I’d use it, but effectively one could if they wanted to.

The other case is a bit more temporary, I’m a little OCD, so I always try to use the minimal “working set” of any project I’m currently working on. Like right now I committed to help in some course and I need to come up with a good example project. I have one notebook dedicated just to that purpose, but it has internal note links to other notebooks with standalone past projects I’ve worked on. Everything else unrelated to those set of notebooks just kinda gets in the way, even after I did some manual sorting, and that’s only going to continue to grow. This is most evident when switching notebooks, or getting confused where the other relevant notes are without violating the logical hierarchy of notes for every new task.

Another workaround that could work in the plugin space is to provide a “drawer” component, roughly the same idea as “pinning” only that is accessible from anywhere. But basically anything that would allow switching between searchable/visible sets is good. Temporarily going into notebook view is virtually pretty close, thoughnot sure it would scale when I have hundreds of notes.

The read-only case is self-explanatory, I’m not going to cry either case tho lol. I’m on my phone rn, be easier for me to explain my use-case later with some screenshots. Maybe if a critical mass of users agree it’d be worth revisiting.

Speaking of archiving, that’s why I added note status feature.
If you set a note as completed or dropped, it’s no longer listed in a notebook unless you search.
But I understand it’s basically used for task management.
If you want to archive a whole project, hiding a notebook would make sense.
As your notebooks grow, you may be more distracted by past projects.
I’d make an “Archive” notebook and move them into it. Yes, you feel it violates your logical hierarchy of notes though, it’s simple and obvious, rather than adding more complex UI components for archiving.
I remember that OmniFocus supports a feature like that, but I was a bit confused to understand how it works.
In my case, I’m using a common notebook for small projects, tag them, and hide them by setting status as completed.
In terms of implementation, indexing performance would slow down as it involves notebook flags, especially affected on mobile. It’s not that easy as you would think.

Yap, I understand read-only prevents you from accidentally editing notes, which is handy. But I think a few power users only need it. I’d like to focus on improving other core features instead right now.

I admit I wasn’t thinking of that… :relaxed: for some reason I thought you’d have to make a special filter for it. I also think that versioning helps a lot to avoid anything truly catastrophic. As I said these are not “make or break” for me; it’s been a few months now and I’m running into new use-cases now and it’s becoming interesting to see how Inkdrop manages to scale with the time/space complexity. not just in terms of indexing performance but usability as well.

Takuya! as always it appears you’ve thought of everything… :pray:

This is about the point where I’d abandoned Quiver as my main note-taking app, it is a very sleek piece of software I still use regularly, but it became too unwieldy for anything but short-term reference. It’d be interesting to see now tf this is an “ebigram issue” where I simply get overwhelmed by my own lack of organization skills, or if Inkrop really does jive with my mental model moreso than the alternatives. I was about to give up and just start writing on random notes on my table while using my brain as the database, though i think too many all-nighters have slowed down my I/O significantly so I’m hoping this Inkdrop really sticks.

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