Hi everyone,
Tana gave me things to think about. I haven’t actually been able to try it yet, so I think I may get more ideas after I have tried it. But below are a few nebulous ideas that maybe someone might want to create.
1. Button to select and order custom and default viewtemplate elements
A button in the viewtemplate toolbar that displays a dropdown where you can choose items that will be tagged $:/tags/ViewTemplate //for that tiddler only//. I had a crude version of it in TiddlyBlink, and I moved it to the sidebar in Stroll. But what I am envisioning would do the following:
a) You could uncheck $:/core/ui/ViewTemplate/tags and $:/core/ui/ViewTemplate/subtitle on tiddlers where you don’t want to see them
b) You could open and close a references section, like the options in Stroll, or something more elaborate like Soren’s reference section for his Zettelkasten.
c) You could open certain edittemplate sections from the viewtemplate toolbar, such as tags or fields, when you want to edit them without going into edit mode.
d) You could drag these items within the dropdown to reorder them.
2. Insert templates from Editor toolbar
Tana’s templates got me thinking that we could create tiddler templates for contacts, bibliographies, checklists, recipes, etc, and use an editor toolbar button to select the template or snippet to paste into the tiddler body. So instead of clicking a custom new button to create a contact tiddler, you could create a regular new tiddler, and in the editor toolbar, choose the custom template to insert. It is basically just adding snippets, but we could have a library of these snippets somewhere, with a specific tag to identify them, and users could drag them to their file and have the ability to choose them from that editor toolbar button.
3. Form field input CSS
Since some of the templates from the previous idea might involve form fields to enter data in view mode (i.e., a contact template would have a name field, an address field, etc), it would be nice to have a standard css class to make that look more visually appealing, like a light gray border rather than the black 3D-ish border in the fields section of the edit template. Something that looks like a table with light gray borders, but when you click on a cell, it opens up as an edit-text.
4. A “Tana” inspired titlebar option
Not sure if this would be a theme or how best to conceptualize this. But my cheeky image from last night was an attempt to treat tiddler titles as nodes. Streams treats the text field as nodes, more like an outliner (Dynalist, Workflowy). But my idea treated the title as a node: making the title font size much smaller, trimming the padding and margins, moving tags to the right of the title, and putting a fold button to the left of the title.
My experiment yesterday was a partial success: I reduced the font size, trimmed the padding and margins, and moved the tags to the right of the title.
But there are problems: I didn’t know how to get the fold button to the left. And the tag dropdowns do not display properly. And I couldn’t find the ‘target’ icon that outliner programs use to indicate nodes with hidden content below them, so I used a triangle.
If anyone wants to pursue this, here is what I did:
First, the content of $:/core/ui/ViewTemplate/title/default
\whitespace trim
[WORKING FOLD BUTTON NEEDED HERE] <h2 class="tc-title"><$view field="title"/> <span class="tc-tags-wrapper"><$list filter="[all[current]tags[]sort[title]]" template="$:/core/ui/TagTemplate" storyview="pop"/></span></h2>
Second, the stylesheet:
/*FONTS*/
.tinygray {color:#999;font-size:10pt;}
/*FRAMES*/
.tc-tiddler-frame.tc-tiddler-view-frame.tc-tiddler-exists {padding-top:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:10px;padding-right:10px;}
.tc-tiddler-frame.tc-tiddler-edit-frame.tc-tiddler-exists {padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:10px;padding-right:10px;}
/*TAG LABELS*/
html body.tc-body .tc-tag-label {font-family: 'Arial'; font-size:8pt; color:#000;background-color:#dcf;margin-bottom:6px;font-weight: bold;}
html body.tc-body .tc-menu-list-item {font-weight: bold; color:#eee;}
/*TITLES*/
h2.tc-title {font-size:12pt;font-family:'Arial', sans-serif;margin-right:none;}
div.tc-titlebar {line-height:1em;font-size:1.5em;}
.twanatable table, td, th, tr {border: solid 1px #fff; border-bottom:solid 1px #ccc;}