Feature Request: Displaying recent files in empty tab

[jacksonkernion]

With macOS Sierra adding support for ‘tabs everywhere’, I thought that this might be a good opportunity to rethink the default ‘new file’ view.

Here’s one idea: When creating a new tab, what you see is something similar to Safari’s empty tab view. You get a list of ‘favorited’/frequently opened/recently opened files, maybe with some other useful ways of displaying taskpaper files that help with quick launching.

I think most Taskpaper users work with a relatively small number of taskpaper documents, so a pretty easy and pretty useful solution, here, might be a single, simple ‘recently opened’ list. So you open up a new tab and you see a list of filenames organized by date last opened/date last modified. And clicking on a filename opens that file in the new tab.

My thought was that this ‘empty tab’ view could serve as a nice, organic way to add ‘quick launching’ features to TaskPaper. My sense is that some people would like more powerful multi-file search/organization built into taskpaper (like Ulysses’ quick launcher or Notational-velocity-style file search). But I think one of the best features of Taskpaper is that it’s not bogged down with unnecessary file-organization cruft. So by hiding this stuff in a ‘new tab’ view, it might strike a nice balance: working on a single file is still super clean and simple, but you can also easily move around multiple files without having to go to Finder/Spotlight/Alfred.

So my thought was: first add a ‘recent files’ list as a minimum viable feature. And then a more advanced feature would be to use the newly-expanded search bar in the ‘empty’ tab to search through this list of taskpaper files using normal taskpaper queries. The hard part, I think, would be figuring out the UI for this multi-file search, since it would be geared not towards displaying the full query results of each document, but showing which documents hold items matching the query, previewing what items matched, and allowing the user to ‘launch’ one of the results.

Even more advanced: adding support, here, for saved multi-file searches.

@jessegrosjean, do you think this is something that would be worth the effort?

[jessegrosjean]

I am definitely thinking about macOS Sierra tab opportunities, but to this point hadn’t come up with anything as interesting as you propose.

First, the feature that I do plan it add is the ability to open a new view on an existing TaskPaper document. So for example you’ll be able to view a single TaskPaper document in multiple hoist/fold/search states. This is actually how TaskPaper 2 already worked… so it will mostly be getting back that old behavior.

As far as using the new empty tab view as a UI opportunity, that’s an interesting idea that I hadn’t thought of. I’ll keep it in the back of my mind, but at the moment I’m not in a position to think/work on it to much. Still in the midst of trying to get TaskPaper back on it’s feet while updating the UI layer to Swift. But once I get back into adding features I’ll try to look into it. Don’t hesitate to remind me again if it looks like I’ve forgotten about it. It does seem like a good idea.

[allensong]

@jacksonkernion

Here’s one idea: When creating a new tab, what you see is something similar to Safari’s empty tab view. You get a list of ‘favorited’/frequently opened/recently opened files, maybe with some other useful ways of displaying taskpaper files that help with quick launching.

Totally agree, no more windows, all tabs in one place, save time better.

[shryn]

@jacksonkernion

Here’s one idea: When creating a new tab, what you see is something similar to Safari’s empty tab view. You get a list of ‘favorited’/frequently opened/recently opened files, maybe with some other useful ways of displaying taskpaper files that help with quick launching.

That would be a brilliant way of doing it IMO.