Hi Jesse,
Thanks for the new update! The saved search stuff in the sidebar is very interesting.
I have a few thoughts on the new system. I like the idea that searches could be universal among documents. But I’m a little worried that the new design cuts down on flexibility:
[Side note: I know perhaps you’ve anticipated some of the issues below and plan to address them in the future.]
- Searches in the sidebar can’t be reordered (have to delete and re-enter)
- Their contents can’t be batch-edited (e.g. find-replaced in TaskPaper or grepped in the Terminal)
- There’s no easy way to visually compare search strings as before
- Overall, the whole process of managing searches is changed from a pure text system (which is, for all practical purposes, infinitely automatable) into one of right-clicking and tabbing through fields
I would have thought it might be better to have a special .tp document where universal saved searches live. Then per-document saved searches could still live in those documents.
Otherwise, if we go the route of special controls for saved searches, I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to have a tab in TP preferences where they are all visible and rearrangable. Heck, it could even pull them from a remote document so that they are still mass-editable.
Hope this is helpful. Love this app.