Option to hide outline triangles?

Bike Outliner
1

Hi,

Is there, or could there be, an option to hide the grayed-out non-functional outline “triangles”? It think this would make Bike a better, flexible way to edit text that’s not a typical outline.

Especially when printing, it would make sense to hide these grey triangles. But also when writing it would be useful for me.

Thanks for the great app!

2

There isn’t a way to do this right now.

There has been a request to disable them for printing, and that’s on my todo list. I’m not sure if there’s been a request to just disable the grayed out triangles. At the moment I’m trying to figure out how best to solve requests for specific preferences like this:

  1. Claim I’m a perfect designer and say no! :slight_smile:

  2. In TaskPaper I solved many of these requests via stylesheets. The stylesheets were flexible and you could configure many aspects of the editor with some custom rules. Nice part of this was lots of flexibility without having to have tons of preferences. Problems with this approach are:

    • Style sheets were a difficult programmer thing to edit
    • Even if I want to use stylesheets in Bike I’m not ready to add them. A bit part of stylesheets in Bike would be a query language, and I’m not ready to design/implement that yet.

  3. For a while I’ve been considering just adding a kitchen sink worth of preferences to Bike. So instead of trying for a few well designed panels, I’ll just throw in all the preferences that people ask for.

    This idea is growing on me, but to make it work I need to redesign Bike’s preferences and add some supporting UI such as search/filtering to the preferences window.

    Also the problem with adding many preferences is that over time some of them will likely get removed/changed. So I would want to set an expectation that each individual preference isn’t necessarily a long time supported feature.

I’m curious to here what others think. Also (as always) I’m curious to hear about existing apps that you think handle preferences well. Many electron apps follow this “Kitchen Sink” approach to preferences. I’m not sure if many existing Mac apps do.

For this particular request of (hide handles) I think I’m going to say no for now, but will be possible once either I add stylesheets or decide on adding the kitchen sink preferences approach.

1 Like
3

Thanks for the reply! The grayed out triangles (disabled handles) looked like non-functional clutter to me (solely indicating a newline), but that’s a matter of opinion. I very much like Bike’s simplicity, so +1 for not having the kitchen sink :slight_smile:

4

The function they provide is if you want to drag and drop items you need to drag them from that handle. So it’s nice to have a visual target. Though I do break this rule for empty lines where I do hide the arrow.

5

I’m all in for a “kitchen sink” in the preferences. I’m quite used to this approach and it provides “one stop shopping” for customizing an app as I want it.

6

For printing Bike files without triangles or bullets, I personally use Marked 2 with some custom CSS.

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7

+1 to wanting to be able to hide them. Or, hide except for the current row you are hovering over (to allow you to drag still).

8

Since this thread I have added Settings > Editor > Controls … in particular “Hide Unloaded Controls when typing”, which will hide all controls except for ones indicating hidden content … so a folded rows control will still be visible.

1 Like