Breadcrumbs for Structured Cards

Feature Requests
1

I’d like to see breadcrumbs that allows my notes to resemble some structure.

Currently, I can add children to parent cards and this is awesome. I don’t believe there’s a limit here; which is great.

In this first screenshot, I can see the hierarchy through the parent labels.

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However, when I zoom into a card; that hierarchy isn’t visible at the top left. There’s no indication of where these cards fit in the world view.

3 Likes
2

This is definitely something we would like to improve.

One problem you have touched on is that any card can have multiple parents, without necessarily being in an actual hierarchal structure. On other platforms, which only allow for a single parent at a particular level, it is trivial to trace “breadcrumbs” back to a “root” card. However on Supernotes your breadcrumbs can be a graph, which can be hard to show in the UI without becoming a mess.

One idea we’ve been toying with is to show breadcrums as you drill down, so if you are in Layer 1 and then open Layer 2 from within L1, it will show L1 as a breadcrumb in front of the card button in the top left of the noteboard. So rather than being a comprehensive view of all parents all the way to the root, it is rather an ephemeral history of how you’ve been “drilling down”.

So that is where we are with our thinking at the moment. Thanks for starting the discussion on this, would love to hear more thoughts!

3

I was actually adding an issue about multiple parents, but I am not allowed to create a new post.

I really love that a card can have multiple parents, that is awesome.

However, it’s not that intuitive to remove one of those parents. I don’t even know if what I did was correct.

But “Cut”, I think, removed one.

4

So I understand why breadcrumbs are difficult here, definitely.

I’d like the breadcrumbs to show the path I’m “in”, rather than an “absolute path” for the card.

So as I browse in a structured fashion, that path can be visualised. IF that path could also show the forks, or alternative routes; that would be killer. One step at a time :slight_smile:

5

Yep, we’re aware that currently on the platform there is a lot of flexibility and it’s not obvious what everything does, as we have had to make up our own terms to differentiate behaviors.

Right now, we have:

  1. Junking – this puts a card in your “junk”, which means it won’t show up anywhere on your system. However, anyone else who has access to this card will continue to see it as normal with no change (except you will no longer show up as a member). You can then “restore” a card to put it back where it was, including all parent relationships. Once a card is junked, in the “junk” view you can then “remove for me” and “remove for everyone”, which do what they say on the tin. This is generally the most common behavior you’d see on other platforms.
  2. Cutting – this removes a card from a parent, for everyone. This is obviously a term we’ve invented in an attempt to make it clear what is happening. Cutting also has the behavior of removing general access to a card for anyone that hasn’t interacted with that card before it was cut. So if you create a Layer 1 card and give me access, then add a Layer 2 card as a child of L1, I will get access to L2. But if you decide that L2 actually isn’t super relevant to L1, and decide to cut it, that will remove L2 from L1 for everyone, and then also remove general access for anyone that hasn’t interacted with the card. So if I haven’t interacted with L2, and you add then cut it from L1, L2 will no longer appear in my system, at all. It will however continue to appear on your system since you are the author of the card and in the system of anyone else that interacted with it (edited it, added a tag, added it to a different parent) before it was cut.
  3. Hiding – we actually plan to remove this in the near future, as we want to replace it with Archiving, as nobody is currently using hiding, and we’d like to keep things as simple as possible. But at the moment, the idea of hiding is that you can hide a card in a particular parent. This is only for you, so if you hide a card, everyone else will continue to see it. So it some ways it was meant to be like a “personal cutting”, but its not actually that useful, so we will be removing this in favor of:
  4. Archiving – this is a behavior people have asked for, where you can “archive” a card within a parent without “cutting” it completely. This is useful for looking back on things that are still relevant to a particular parent, but are done and dusted (think past todos, old meeting notes, modules you’ve finished, etc). This will archive it for everyone in that parent.

Anyway yes, there is some complexity here. We’ve done our best to reduce it as much as possible, but I am sure there is still remove for improvement. Definitely let us know if you have any thoughts on how we could make it simpler but continue to give a lot of power to users in how they structure / collaborate on their cards.

P.S. We’ve upped your trust level on the forum, so feel free to repost your cutting question in a new topic and I will migrate my response there as well and clean up this thread.

6

May I suggest some changes?

Orphan: Remove a parent(s) from a Card
Discard or Disown: Remove access for only me
Junk or Delete: Delete for everyone
Archive: You’ve mentioned :+1:

2 Likes
7

Add my vote to this feature, thanks!

8

Hi @fredmarkle, the major challenge with breadcrumbs is how to handle multiple parents, as Connor mentioned above.

We’ve tried to semi-implement this with the recently introduced “Locate” button or Cmd / Ctrl + Shift + O, which will show you where a card is in the Outline. Do you use this? Or would you still prefer more in-depth breadcrumbs in the Noteboard target?

9

Yeah I was thinking the same thing when I posted that earlier today. Not sure if it’s possible, but I would be cool if it showed the breadcrumb of how I just recently navigated there. Or could you possibly do breadcrumb more like a graph or horizontal tree? Would be cool to figure out a eloquent way to do this, not really sure though.