Idea and RFC: Editor toolbar for title and other fields

I have a number of ideas to make naming tiddlers much easier, help you overcome duplicates and time or date suffix to uniquify or deriving a title from other information available such as current project, existing tasks or tiddler type. The fact is this is often called for in these forums. Even automating titles in context.

  • I have some proof of concept ideas that look promising but I thought it would be nice if it was extensible by others and so we could share these tools.

Then I had this idea an “Editor toolbar for title and other fields” so for example I could use, create and assign editor toolbar buttons to a version of a field editor, generally, or with the button condition field, to one of more fields.

  • Imagin when editing a tiddler title, a custom editor toolbar button for that field appeared! or to edit other fields with a custom or general toolbar appearing.
  • You could use this for editing any field and provide existing or editor toolbar buttons making use of the existing suite of features in developing editorToolbar buttons, many of these which will also prove useful in a standard text editor.
  • The same option could be applied to nominated fields in the editor, edit fields template.
  • Auto complete and even code mirror may work here.
  • A switch to indicate text or text area would be good.

I have been doing a quick hack and this may be easier to do than I thought however I would like your thoughts before I influence them.

I have that (I think you’ve seen it). My titles are numbers
<chapter-number>--<section-number(pad3)> So, 1-010 is chapter 1, section 10. The textual title lives in a subtitle field, a field TW doesn’t care about.

I click a button,"+" and up pops a little editor offering
<current chapter>--<next-free-section-number> e.g. 1-020 based on the increment setting of 10.

When I’m on a creative roll, I spend zero time thinking of titles at the point of creation. Later, the subtitle will get filled in when it reveals itself to me.

Because I also use a uuid field, renaming tiddlers (actually, renumbering) becomes very easy. I have macros that link to tiddlers via the uuid. So when they’re moved (renamed/renumbered) it has no effect at all on existing links since the uuid is unaffected.

So, yes, field-level gizmos are good.

I see the value in this. Can you imagine putting it in an editor toolbar button to make it available to any field editor? Keep in mind in more general wikis you will only want some new tiddlers to take on a new title.

Inspired I changed the Control panel > basics > Title of new tiddlers
to New {{{ [get[object-type]else[Tiddler]] }}}
then if you do new here in a tiddler with an object-type it will name it ‘New object-type’.

  • Makes me think we could provide evaluated fieldnames and values for new tiddlers as well.

Back to the Original Topic, Editing a “list field” with the editor toolbars allows you to search for and add tiddlers using ctrl-L or the link button.