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Notable's author here. > My biggest problem with these note-taking apps is that there is no way to have a manual order in the file list. This has come up a fe

Notable's author here. > My biggest problem with these note-taking apps is that there is no way to have a manual order in the file list. This has come up a few times, I don't have anything against it, I'm just not sure how it should work exactly. Like since the app supports sorting notes by a few dimensions (title, creation date, modification date), how would a manual sort order fit into this? Would that be a separate sorting dimension? Would that work alongside the built-in dimensions? How do you know if a note is being rendered at position X because a built-in rule or because you manually moved there? How should the user remove manually-set note orders? If you have any suggestions I'm all hears, so far I haven't been able to think of a really good solution to this. > The reason we have so many "Yet-another-note-taking-app" is probably that everyone has a few personal quirks when taking notes, thus the requirement differs from person to person. I can't speak for all people who made note-taking apps but I would personally agree with this. Slight rant: part of the problem IMHO is that people have hundreds of note-taking apps to choose from, some of which even completely free and open source, and they just don't want to pay for them, often not even technical users, and if a project is not financially sustainable _eventually_ it's going to die, or it will never get to implement the features needed by those other people that will eventually end up starting new note-taking apps, maybe that's a factor that contributed to the proliferation of all these apps too.

krainboltgreene 6y ago
> Like since the app supports sorting notes by a few dimensions (title, creation date, modification date), how would a manual sort order fit into this? Just store a position on the note. When someone doesn't have a sort order, order by the position. When you do, order first by the value then by the sort order.
- fabiospampinato 6y ago
  Even that is tricky, what's a position? Is it tied to the current sorting dimension only? And all my other questions I still don't have good answers for.
  - johntash 6y ago
    Not the person you're asking and I'm not sure if it's a good example to base anything off of, but the only example I could think of is Jira. It has a "rank" attribute that it somehow keeps track of for tickets. Somehow that rank still works when you have a list of tickets from multiple projects (each with tickets that could have their own rank as well). IMO a custom order should only be relevant to whatever the native view is that that note shows up in. I haven't used notable (yet), but I assume you have folders/notebooks/etc that the note is stored in. When in a view that shows the contents of that folder (and nothing else), you could allow users to move the note's sort position. In any sort of search or tag view that shows notes from multiple folders, I would expect the notes to be ordered by date/name and not by this custom order.
    - fabiospampinato 6y ago
      I'll take a look at Jira, if you like how they handle this they probably have got the logic figured out well already.

krainboltgreene 6y ago

> Like since the app supports sorting notes by a few dimensions (title, creation date, modification date), how would a manual sort order fit into this? Just store a position on the note. When someone doesn't have a sort order, order by the position. When you do, order first by the value then by the sort order.

fabiospampinato 6y ago
Even that is tricky, what's a position? Is it tied to the current sorting dimension only? And all my other questions I still don't have good answers for.
- johntash 6y ago
  Not the person you're asking and I'm not sure if it's a good example to base anything off of, but the only example I could think of is Jira. It has a "rank" attribute that it somehow keeps track of for tickets. Somehow that rank still works when you have a list of tickets from multiple projects (each with tickets that could have their own rank as well). IMO a custom order should only be relevant to whatever the native view is that that note shows up in. I haven't used notable (yet), but I assume you have folders/notebooks/etc that the note is stored in. When in a view that shows the contents of that folder (and nothing else), you could allow users to move the note's sort position. In any sort of search or tag view that shows notes from multiple folders, I would expect the notes to be ordered by date/name and not by this custom order.
  - fabiospampinato 6y ago
    I'll take a look at Jira, if you like how they handle this they probably have got the logic figured out well already.