There are discrepancies in Bike’s behaviour between text and outline mode when moving items around using the Move Up/Down commands. The first one I can understand: in text mode, moving an item that has children moves just the item, whereas in outline mode it moves the whole group. But the second one causes a lot of friction: if I have this:
In the town where I was born
Yellow Sub-item
Yellow Sub-item
Yellow Sub-item
We all live in a
In text mode, if I select any of (or in this case, all) the sub-items and move them down once, they keep their indentation, and I get this:
In the town where I was born
We all live in a
Yellow Sub-item
Yellow Sub-item
Yellow Sub-item
but if I do the same in outline mode, their indentation level is lost, and I get this:
In the town where I was born
We all live in a
Yellow Sub-item
Yellow Sub-item
Yellow Sub-item
I don’t really understand in which situation I would desire it. If I wanted to decrease the indentation, there’s a shortcut for that, which has the benefit of being explicit, and doesn’t require me to second-guess what is going to happen.
Here’s an animated GIF showing the issue. Hopefully the software supports it.
I expect this to become simpler in Bike 2, all movements will be outline movements. I think this will make things generally easier to understand and adapt too, but it will also be locking in the behavior that you don’t like :(.
To me this behavior makes sense because you can see ahead of time where the item will be moved. It also limits display surprises.
Easy to understand: When you move an item up you can see ahead of time exactly where it will be placed. The movement maintains visible items on the screen.
Limits display surprises: If I did try to maintain indent level then the movement would also need to expand the item’s new parent. That expansion can be very disorientating when the parent has lots of children. It will have effect of resetting your view when your goal was just to move the item. And it’s all hard to reverse if that’s not what you intended. You could use undo for the item movement, but the expanded parent is still expanded, leaving your outline in a different state.
The problem gets worse if your goal is to move the item several levels up.
