I make extensive use of parent notes to give my notes a “contextual hierarchy”. I find this approach makes it easier to find notes, understand notes, rediscover old notes, and make new connections between notes.
The tree panel makes it easy to explore this “contextual hierarchy”, and to open notes to work on. However, if I’ve navigated to a note without using the tree (e.g. via the command prompt, or a link) then I don’t know how to automatically navigate the tree to that card to see its context (i.e. I have to find it myself by clicking around the tree).
An option for the UX/UI of this feature could be a “Show in tree” button in the meta-data panel (which could have a target icon), or just the target icon directly on the card itself (perhaps half-way between the share icons and the tags). I’d also suggest adding a keyboard shortcut for this command.
One challenge with this feature is that a note can have multiple “contextual hierarchies”, due to having multiple parents. I’d suggest making the “Show in tree” button navigate to each tree position in turn, in alphabetical order, upon multiple clicks. The button could show how many times this note appears in the tree with a number in a bubble (like how notes show the number of children they have), or next to the icon (as with likes, comments, and shares).
A closely related question:
I heard that “parent” cards used to be called “context” in an earlier version of Supernotes. Why was that changed to “parent”?
I ask because, for me, the entire value that parent notes give is summed up by the word “context”, so using that word feels like it should make the intent of the feature clearer for users. “Parent” feels so generic, un-opinionated, and lacking in guidance.