[Tip] The draft selection interface for knowledge-management

Tips & Tricks
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…alternatively titled “Showing a little love for app.selectDraft.”

The draft selection interface is a bit of an unsung hero. It’s been a feature of Drafts for a good while now (since 2018, in some form?) but it was only earlier this year that I really began to appreciate how useful it is.

Because it can retain context separately from the drafts displayed in the drafts list, and because its two-column grid (on an iPad) offers a higher information density than the regular single-column drafts list, it’s really useful to use as a complementary side-panel for navigating a custom workspace. Since there’s been a bit more talk about Roam/Obsidian-equivalent features in Drafts recently: this interface can be a functional equivalent to a side-panel of related items, even if it has to be loaded manually via an action.

Use cases

For anyone new to using Drafts as a tool for note-taking and/or knowledge management:

  • If you haven’t used the selection interface before and want to try it out, this action allows you to call the interface and load a selected draft.
  • Greg’s action for inserting wiki-links is a useful starter. We don’t have in-line auto-completion of wiki-links, but this works well as an alternative.
  • Need to review the contents of a related draft without navigating away from the primary draft you were focusing on? It’s not too difficult to imagine using the selection interface in an action that opens a related draft in a new window or preview.
  • It’s also relatively easy to create actions that allow you to filter sets of drafts as indexes to choose from. For example: an action on your extended keyboard that allows you to insert a wiki-link from a selection of active projects (where each of those active projects is a draft with a consistent tag or tag-set to base the filter on).
  • Other useful examples of actions based on this selection interface include selecting drafts to append or insert.

Feel free to suggest or link to others.

4 Likes
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I’m intrigued, but clearly ignorant…

What IS the ‘draft selection interface’ which ‘retains context separately’ with a ‘two-column grid [that] offers a higher information density’… ‘really useful as a complementary side-panel’.

You have sold it to me, but now I would like to know what it is!

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So it looks like this:

image
image1536×2048 670 KB

It’s an interface that’s called programmatically, so you’d need to access it via an action.

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It is actually mentioned, but the description is only applicable some of the time.

If you run app.selectDraft();

On the iPhone you get a single column selection box like this:

phone
phone1242×2208 221 KB

On the Mac, you get a single column selection box like this:

mac

On the iPad however, you get a double column layout like this:

ipad
ipad1416×1392 83.2 KB

EDIT: Looks like my answer was overlapping with @jsamlarose there. :laughing:

1 Like
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Fair point. And shows up my biases in terms of how I use Drafts!

I’ve updated the original post to acknowledge this, and included a link to a simple starter action that calls the interface. @greiggy: if you’re still interested after the above explanations, try that first action I’ve added to the list of use cases.

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Thanks for putting this together!

I’ve run into a little bit of buggy behavior with [[ autocomplete — and would ideally love to use the Quick Search prompt — but looks like working with app.selectDraft() is the only alternative right now.

@agiletortoise didn’t know if you’d considered having app.showQuickSearch() have the option of returning a Draft object rather than void? (I’ve found Quick Search to be pretty elite at full text search, but [[ autocomplete is 1) only by title and 2) disappears if a typo occurs.)

1 Like