Maintain frame when file externally edited

[purple]

let’s say you’ve got a text file and you are focused on a branch in taskpaper like this as they would correspond to the text file on the right.

first of all, impressed with the resilience of TP when u edit stuff outside TP on the same txt file and it just maintains “frame” smoothly. for example, adding “hello” in a new line between lines 5 and 6. very nice!

my use case is that i have an AI system I collaborate with it, and its kind of like google docs where we are both updating a particular scoped project like “test project for taskpaper”.

it (seems like it) would be awesome if it could silently update the text within the current frame (per screenshot) and insert stuff and then taskpaper smoothly maintain frame and update it and show it.

is there a reason this isn’t supported?

I manually simulated this by using sublime (on the right) to add “cabbage” on the right in sublime between lines 10 and 11, and taskpaper pretty immediately loses frame and just renders the entire file normally rather than being in that one project scope.

curious to hear thoughts and not yet a formal request. i wonder if it’s also possible to update the text file in a non-obvious way as to accommodate this. currently, it just reads the file, updates content, and overwrites the entire file so there might be finer ways to do it on my part.

thoughts around any of this or how to make this possible right now? ideally, without having it go through taskpaper (like api) but I imagine worst case that is also viable

[complexpoint]

The TaskPaper documentation uses the term focus, as in the menu items Outline > Focus > (In | Out)

Is that what we are discussing here ?

You need to use another app to insert between lines outside the active TaskPaper editor focus, without disrupting that focus ?

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Perhaps the external application is overwriting or losing the extended attributes (as in man xattr) which TaskPaper uses to serialize focus state into a document text file.

[complexpoint]

See, for example, this thread:

Try to maintain folding state over modified text

As TaskPaper documents are plain text files, folding state can only be stored in extended attributes of a file, or in Apple’s user interface preservation API. The retention or loss of extended attributes, and the contexts in which each occurs, depends more on operating system design, and on the behaviour of other applications, than on the design of TaskPaper. As I understand it, TP discards the folding state, if the document has been changed externally. It’s actually not TaskPaper that disc…

[purple]

Yes, we are discussing the “Focus”.

I want to use another app to insert/update/delete between lines inside the active TaskPaper editor focus, without disrupting that focus

Will take a look at your reference