Why folding?

Posted by satis
Jun 20, 2018 at 09:55 PM

Paul Korm wrote:

>I also define
>“best” as “the feature works by a single click and, ideally, a keyboard
>shortcut that has the same result”.
> >With that, I think the best collapsing / folding, and hoisting, software
>is Tinderbox on macOS.
> >On iOS I would grudgingly go with OmniOutliner. (Agenda’s collapse
>feature in iOS is frustratingly inconsistent.)

One of the things that finally drove me away from two decades of using Acta -> Dyno Notepad -> Opal was having to click twice on disclosure triangles to open and collapse. Drove me absolutely batty, finally. I even contacted the dev to see why he chose that when all the conventions - including the Mac’s Finder - use one click, and his response was not satisfactory, at least to me. He said he prioritized selecting text without an extra click, or needing an extra hit target to select a topic, by building the selection into the double-click.

I think the world has pretty much decided though: click to open/close and then decide whether you want to then click again to select focus. He decided to remain idiosyncratic, and I gave up the app. I constantly close/collapse, as I usually have a headline topic then lots of list items or blocks of text that don’t need to be seen (or get in the way if they are). And all that extra clicking, after far too many years grated on me and I had to flee… despite having used the app in one name or other starting in 1987 (and with pretty much the same exact features and keyboard commands the entire time, which is a lot of muscle memory to give up).