I feel like the behaviour in the universal coupler is not yet optimal. I thought about why I feel this way and would like to share my thoughts.
First, the behaviour seems inconsistent. Adding a tag will leave the user in the tags selection panel, while adding a parent will close the menu alltogether.
Moreover, my most common use-case feels a bit clunky, when I add several attributes (parents, tags, color, …) all at once after creating a new card. The coupler closes every time I add something, so I / quite a lot which feels unnecessary. The visual flicker of the menu closing and reopening adds to that impression.
How about this: Instead of leaving the user at the current stage or closing the coupler after selecting an attribute, why not redirecting to the top level menu.
I could still add multiple tags just by typing
/# tag1 ENTER # tag2 ENTER
which is almost the same as the current
/# tag1 ENTER tag2 ENTER
so I dont see we lose a lot (except for mouse input, but hey, we are at the keyboard at this stage anyway as nobody selects tags with mouse). We gain that we can now do the same with parents. I have a feeling this would really streamline my and potentially other users’ experiences.
I think universal coupler should provide two ways to use it:
/ : same as current flow
option/alt + / : batch edit mode – same as current design but a little bit “pinned” – users can set multiple card properties (icon/color/tag/parent) without closing the modal, also can add multiple images/templates/links without closing, and finally users can press Esc to close it
I like the idea of two options. How about we don’t add the modifier to opening the menu, but to the selection of the attribute?
i.e. when I select a parent and press enter (click), the parent is added and the menu closes, whereas when I press mod + enter (mod + click), the menu remains open (it remains to be discussed whether it should jump to top level or remain in the current submenu). Modifier for mobile would be long press, I guess.
This would even solve the current issue with leaving tag selection, which currently is esc, twice, which feels more like cancel than it should. Simply add the first tags with modifier, and last tag without modifier.
Some good ideas in here! We are already in the midst of finalizing the new coupler flow that will be introduced in Supernotes 3.1, so I think it would be best to see how everyone feels after those changes are live and pick the conversation back up if there are still issues people have with the flow.
Yeah 3.1 is just the beginning of the coupler rework, it will be improved gradually over the next few releases. We also have an inline style coupler in development.
Re. parents, we currently use the > hotkey and this conflicts with blockquotes. I generally always add a space after the angle bracket to create a blockquote however this isn’t always required. How would you feel if we made it the same behaviour with this hotkey?
I’ve modified this to be a feature request so we can keep track of this better.
I too use a space after > to indent blockquotes. Actually, I thought it was mandatory in MarkDown… So, in my opinion, that would sync very well with the behaviour of #!
