Here are some recent feature requests on my mind. Does anyone else want these features?
Choose Body Preview Starting Point for Workspaces: If I’m using Markdown with metadata at the top, the preview always shows my metadata first and sometimes metadata as the preview is not helpful. If we could choose which line (or line range) or symbol(s) for the body preview to begin, that would be incredible.
Static Action Bar Icon: The action bar icon stays on the left while scrolling, so you can easily tap and switch to another bar versus scrolling back and tapping it or swiping up and down. Sometimes there are multiple actions bars to swipe through and scrolling back to tap the icon for the menu could be solved if the icon remained there.
Favorite Actions (and/or Recents): I love organizing my actions in certain categories on the right in the Action List, but there are times I need to reference a few of them regularly. Instead of moving them around, along with searching, it would be cool to favorite them and go to a favorites list. Star and Unstar them.
A few suggestions on ways to tackle these feature requests with existing functionality.
Choose Body Preview Starting Point for Workspaces:
If this is something like typical front matter, you always have a separator as the amount of meta data can vary. It would be straight forward to modify a preview action to strip that out by splitting lines on the separator and joining the remainder.
Favorite Actions
Create an action group called Favourites and then add actions that call each of your favourite actions using an Include Action step.
Or, if you don’t want to switch across workspaces for this, create a prompt based action you can call which pops up a list of actions to choose from to run. The prompt could be built from a simple text list of action names that you could maintain.
Thank you for the reply. For Body Previews, I meant this:
If my common front matter was 3-6 lines long, it would be cool if I could trigger the body previews to start on line 7+ or start preview with the first hashtag. (For this screenshot example, I know Drafts records created, modified, and accessed metadata, which is awesome, but I want that information in the drafts formatted a specific way for various reasons.)
You could script a preview to dynamically work out where the start is in various ways, but hopefully seeing this gives you a clearer understanding of what I was suggesting and just how the system already supports previewing subsections of a draft.
I appreciate your responses, and I’m sorry if I’m not being clear. I’m referring to the Body Preview in the Drafts List. Unless I’m missing something, I don’t believe this area is scriptable. Here is the text from your example showing a before and after of what I was requesting.
Meta data line 1
Meta data line 2
Meta data line 3
Meta data line 4
Meta data line 5
---
# Title on 7th line
Some content
- Lorem
- ipsum
Honestly, while an interesting idea, I don’t think it would be a great feature to implement. It’s a pretty niche requirement, and adding additional calculation burden to the display of a list that could potentially have thousands of items is not ideal.
Not sure what your requirements are, exactly, but you could also structure your draft so you get the preview you want, and organize your meta-data in actions when you output the text - using some of the techniques @sylumer is mentioning.
Cool! Thanks for both of your input. And the preview idea is a great idea for certain cases. I don’t expect anything to be easy to implement, but I’d rather pitch the idea and hear no than sit on the thought.
I could be in the minority. Metadata is filled with chunks of information, so when I reference the Drafts List and the new Global Search, all of my metadata is showing versus the most memorable piece of information being the first heading.
Recently, I changed my drafts templates by placing the title in the metadata, so I see the title in the Drafts list and Global Search. I can’t rely on running an action, because I’m looking for a list of results versus one result with a preview.
These requests come because Drafts is amazing, and I wind up moving more and more workflows to this app. At the same time, I’m trying not to stretch requests too far because I don’t want to be part of Drafts losing focus. It’s hard to juggle. Keep up the great work!
