Linking text within a draft

Many thanks to everyone who has chimed in on this thread. I really appreciate it. What a resourceful forum this is, amazing.

I tend to agree with @bjb. You can reproduce a lot of this functionality in Drafts if you try hard enough, but it’s not really built for it. If block-based referencing is your goal, a block-based app (like Logseq or Roam) is better suited to the task.

Many with those sorts of needs use Drafts alongside as a capture tool and push to those systems for long-term storage/reference.

Aside: I get that Drafts isn’t designed with this kind of knowledge management in mind, but speaking as someone who’s tried many of the new-gen PKM tools available at time of this post, I really appreciate the features you’ve introduced over the past year or so that go at least part-way, and I’m happy that Drafts has thus far met a functional majority of my knowledge management needs. Just saying.

7 Likes

Yes, very true. Actually, even If your Block Level Filter Action which is a preview can in some way be converted into a new draft it opens up many possibilities. The problem with the Roam types is that there is too much ‘noise’, the product isn’t FULLY developed, and you can’t use it on an iPad. In the overall scheme of things, like you said, drafts just rules, wins whatever.

2 Likes

Right. And I don’t want to use Drafts as an intermediary; I want stuff to stay there - and will build eg automation to make it so. It doesn’t seem this thread stretches this too far.

1 Like

Oh, well that’s do-able. :wink:

Could do with some polish…

  • The draft(s) produced by this action will skew the results for future searches. It might be better to output to a fixed draft every time. That would allow users to work with filter results as a slide over or split screen draft sidebar/panel. Alternatively, I’d need to hide the draft(s) produced by this action from the filter for future searches… that actually might be a useful addition to the original action’s settings— an “ignore drafts tagged with…” option… This has been taken care of… added “ignoreResultsTaggedWith” preference to suppress results from drafts produced by this action (tagged with “filter output” by default).
  • As this action actually creates a draft (rather than presenting results in a menu), we’ll need a separate action to target the exact location of any specific block of context within its source draft. I’m sure something along these lines already exists… Doh! Highlight the block you want to locate and use the original action.
  • Including the UUID probably isn’t necessary. Edge case: might be useful if a title is updated before the filter output is refreshed? Edit: the UUID is more useful than I anticipated…
  • Ultimately, this could be just be folded into the original action as an option from the initial prompt.
1 Like

Excellent, that is perfect. Thank you so much. If I have to learn, is this all JavaScript or exactly what is the coding language for the drafts app?

Mainly JavaScript for the bits you’re particularly interested in, yes. The original action also has an HTML/CSS component, which I’m not particularly good with— it’s on one of my todo lists to determine how to add an extra button or two to the bottom of @mattgemmell’s original checklist prompt…