Entering a new action is as easy a pressing the enter key. Great.
However if I do this by mistake when the cursor is not at the end of the line I will break the action into two and that’s a bit silly. For instance if my action is called “buy groceries” and I accidentally hit enter after the first letter “b” i will end up with two new actions: one called “b” and one called “uy groceries”. This is particularly annoying because there is no UNDO, as far as I can tell.
You should make it so that the enter key will create a new action without splitting the name.
(I’ve changed this to an idea, at it is working as designed)
Great suggestion. My only question is what if someone actually wants to split the item and create a new action? Granted, that is a edge case, but we need to still allow for it somehow. Ideas?
Easy. In those presumably rare cases the user can ctrl-X and ctrl-V the desired part of the task name. I think this would be good enough. (You could of corse also implement something like ctrl-enter to split in the exact position, but I think that would be overkill.)
Sorry, the more we have thought about it, we really don’t like the idea of having ENTER start a new line anywhere. We want GTDNext to respond very much like a text editor would. We don’t want people to have to learn a bunch of new commands to make it work. What I do is just hit END and then ENTER. For me, it’s no, slower than working with Word or any other editor. As, always thanks for the ideas and keep them coming!
Isn’t that a strange comparison? I would have thought that the majority of users would be comparing it with other todo apps, where you normally have a “create new” key to create a new task, not with text editors or typewriters.
If you hit Enter in the middle of “Buy beer”, who would want that to become a “Buy” task and a “beer” task? The more frequent intention would be (I am sure) to leave “Buy beer” intact and start a new untitled task either before or after. That’s how I think most other todo apps work - you place the cursor and hit “create new” .
It might seem that way, but I think the cognitive model most people would employ while working in an outline is that of a word processor, not some other random todo app.
Well, it is hard to tell what others think. I personally do not perceive todo apps as “random”, and I do not see “working in an outline” as a main point at all GTDNext - it has unlimited levels; that’s the value I can see and appreciate. Whether this is implemented as an “outline” or in some other unlimited hierarchical form is completely immaterial to me. But we are all different; I realize that.
What I meant by “random” was that not all todo apps do it the same way. Asana for instance does it exactly as we do, so does workflowy. So I just meant that some, not all todo apps do it in the same way. Of course I don’t feel that todo apps are random in general.
No it does not. It does it the way Giorgio suggested in the original post above that it should be done. In other words, it does not break the line where the cursor is, it adds a new line after. (But if you type in just a letter etc it will add it where the cursor is.)
Well, Workflowy is not a todo app. It was designed for another and much more general purpose. I am still not convinced it is a relevant comparison.
Anyway, it is quite fun to learn how differently different people can think. We learn something every day
