4 ms·

What are you talking about? Notion is clearly not just a bunch of lists like Trello is.

• samueldurante 4y ago
  The implementation of the Notion can be bunch of lists, like Trello. However Notion's UI doesn't pass this feeling.
• eropple 4y ago
  It can be, if you want it to be. https://www.notion.so/templates/kanban-board https://www.notion.so/templates/kanban-board I use this all the time, alongside my other personal databases and such. I wish there was an open source or self-hostable gizmo that was as flexible as Notion is.
• jitl 4y ago
  Semantically our data model is an infinitely nested hierarchical tree of lists, although the UI might not look or feel like "just a list". Our editor is more like an "outliner" than a traditional word processor, and before January 2022, you could't even select text across multiple blocks. We rebuilt the editor to work like both an outliner and a traditional word processor at the same time. You can still "feel" the tree/list structure when you select and drag multiple blocks around, or use indent/dedent - you can't indent a block multiple times within another block because that doesn't make sense in the tree structure. I wrote a bit about turning our outliner into a word processor here: https://twitter.com/jitl/status/1483918085384028163 https://twitter.com/jitl/status/1483918085384028163 And also about the data model itself here: https://www.notion.so/blog/data-model-behind-notion https://www.notion.so/blog/data-model-behind-notion
  • tough 4y ago
    Thanks for letting us know about the details, honestly not being able to select text between blocks was wan of the UX deal-breakers for me, seemed like a way to avoid -exporting- your docs or whatever not allowing to copy the document fully easily. Glad its solved
  • shafyy 4y ago
    Thanks for the detailed explanation. But you do understand that from an enduser view, this doesn't really matter? What the original commenter meant that they like the simplicity of Trello, because it's just a kanban board. Notion is much more flexible than that as a user.
    • ChildOfChaos 4y ago
      Yep can confirm. I just don't like recreating a kanban board in Notion, it just seems too complex and cluttered, I don't care about all the other stuff, I love trello for how simple it is, but I keep finding different ways to use it, the simplicity is the key as it allows me just to dump what I want into it and use it however I wish, Notion is just overwhelming for me.
  • jdougan 4y ago
    Ah, so it mirrors the NLS internals
    • jitl 4y ago
      We're inspired by the greats (https://www.notion.so/about https://www.notion.so/about). Our Github code review bot is named doug-engelbot
      • jdougan 4y ago
        Did anyone actually go over the NLS internals docs over at bitsavers? I went through them, it is impressive how much mileage they got out of the '68 designs. Still parts missing that no one seems to want to add to their new outliners.
• PurpleRamen 4y ago
  The underlying data structure is really just a list of typed elements. But the interface is also hiding this pretty well, to the point that it becomes a bit messy on the corners, making it hard for new users. Trello in that regard is significant cleaner in its representation, but also more limited.