New line within a content block

A small thing: I don’t think there’s a way to have multiple lines of text within a single content block (i.e. SHIFT-ENTER doesn’t override the default ENTER behavior of creating a new content block.)

I’d like to be able to do this since I sometimes want to have a couple paragraphs grouped together.

I’ll likely consider this when I’m implementing rich text support… so will be sometime after 1.0 version.

I also don’t generally love the idea since it starts to make the model/visuals a little less clear. Generally if you want multiple lines to act as a single block the “Bike” solution would be to create a hierarchy.

Can you explain use cases where you would want this feature. Again after 1.0 version I also expect to start adding “type” options to items, and then different styling based on item type. So maybe that would be another way to solve the problem. I’m not sure.

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I agree – FWIW my personal preference is for preserving the distinction between structure editing and serialization.

There’s a clear case for multiple lines of text within a single content block in an export format, but I think we begin to lose the power and clarity of the outline model if we zip a sequence of peers / siblings together into a monolithic text block too soon.

The trick, I think, is to work on structure in a small node outliner, and then serialise out to custom document formats when we need them.

(It’s already possible, incidentally, to write such serialisations (export formats) from Bike html outlines, using standard xml parsing tools, with pandoc, for example downstream)

Very happy to sketch any examples that might interest people, perhaps this weekend, if there are any suggestions.

(An example might be to export the top N bike levels as headers, the next level as sentence groups run together into paragraphs, levels below that as bullets etc, and to write out to Markdown, or pipe through to pandoc for .docx)

I for one thing that would be cool to see :slight_smile:

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I think the only reason I want this is: I sometimes want to nest things under a complicated top-level idea/piece of content. If I can’t have multiline blocks, the children blocks then belong to the last item in my multi-item block, rather than to the larger group. And that’s not, logically, what I intend.

This might just be something that I get away from after using Bike instead of TaskPaper. But I currently do this sort of thing a lot in TaskPaper.

:point_up_2: This is very exciting. I think custom content blocks work so much better in the context of an html document model, so I expect this to be a lot more powerful.

Yeah, I think that would be a better match too. Thinking out-loud here, but a “Project” block with a title and description might make more sense then. I don’t know how easy/soon I’ll add that… but I would rather that approach then making the base text block more complicated.

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