← Back to team overview

rednotebook-users team mailing list archive

Re: My dot-point review of RedNotebook

 

Hi Janet,

thanks a lot for your comments and suggestions! I have already replied to your bug reports. Sorry, that we probably won't be able to do much about most of your reported issues. I will answer to your comments inline below:

Am 18.01.2014 05:19, schrieb Jackson:


      What I like about RedNotebook

  * Simple and fast
  * Files are stored as text (even if it is a baroque format).

That's true. I might reconsider the format in the future and switch to json which should be both simpler and faster.

  * The Calendar -- although a hierarchical blog-style calendar would
    be useful too


      Other things that don't work properly IMO

  * When I click on a hashtag in the tag cloud, it doesn't take me to
    the part of the text where the hashtag is. IMO this should work
    just the same as when you search for a word and click on one of
    the entries, ie, take you to that part of the text and highlight
    the search item.

Nice idea, added to todo list.

  * Minor bug: Searching for " " space to get a list of all entries,
    as suggested in the help, produces nothing

Thanks for the heads up. I edited the help text. Searching for "-" will list all entries.


      Other Features I would like

  * A 'poetry' or 'verbatim lite' text format that preserves newlines
    and whitespace and wraps long lines. But note: 'YAML's line
    folding employs an intuitive method of handling line breaks. A
    single line break is folded into a single space, while empty lines
    are interpreted as line break characters. This technique allows
    for paragraphs to be word-wrapped without affecting the canonical
    form of the scalar content. ' (I guess this is why people send --
    and display online -- poems double-spaced, even though it looks
    horrible.)
  * Highlighting in Edit mode (I can use custom code to set background
    colour to yellow, but the yellow is displayed only in Preview mode)
  * Hierarchical hashtags!#dream/recurring/houses (or some such
    syntax) and have a tree view mode in the tag cloud, with + and -
    to expand and close the categories
  * Preference to edit using $EDITOR (vi, in my case). And/or a
    WYSIWYG mode.
  * All options should appear in the Format menu: verbatim text,
    unparsed text, titles, numbered lists
  * Facility to define macros. LOL.

I like your hierarchical hashtags and also think that the format menu has to be enlarged. The other ideas are probably too specialized though, sorry.


      Things that bother me but probably couldn't be changed

  * Exporting is clunky (is there other software that could do it?)

You're right, the dialog is overly complex, but removing functionality is hard as some users might depend on it. Maybe it can be simplified or restructured.

  * An 'archiving' feature would be useful, where you can archive old
    journals so that they are not included in the current journal. The
    problem is, I don't want to see all my hashtags from 2 years ago
    in the tag panel! I can probably do this by hand, though, or use a
    script.

You could start a second journal with "Journal -> New". Be sure to backup your data though.

Cheers,
Jendrik

References