What *little* convenience features/changes would help you most?

If I understand what you are asking for, I think that you already can display a creation date in the Workspace’s draft listing.

If I switch the Accessed/Created/Modified/Text option under each ‘folder’ for a Workspace, it changes what is displayed in the list.

Is that what you are looking for?

Y’know what, nevermind. I just found the toggle to show/hide the last action so this request is moot. That takes care of what I needed.

Pull down on the text of the current draft to activate the search bar.

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On an external keyboard, pressing the Tab key after making a bullet simply creates Tab spacing. It would be nice if pressing Tab would indent the bullet and Shift+Tab would “outdent”—as a faster way to create list levels. I know there are included keyboard shortcuts for indent and outdent, but I find simply pressing Tab more intuitive.

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Indents and outdents are things that are done with actions. By default, Drafts ships with indent/outdent actions in the “Keyboard-Basic” group assigned to the external keyboard shortcuts ⌘-[ and ⌘-] - which are common shortcuts for indent/outdent in many text editors. I know you mentioned knowing about these, but adding explanation for others.

Technically, you could edit these actions and re-assign them to tab/shift-tab - but I would not recommend that because it would make it impossible to actually insert a tab character. If you are OK with that, it is possible. You have to copy a tab character and paste it in the shortcut editor in the action because iOS will not let you type a tab in a text field.

I often use Drafts with my iPad in landscape mode with the draft list pinned open on the left. It would be nice if opening the action list didn’t automatically close the draft list every time. This has been especially noticeable to me recently, while testing out a scripting action I’m working on. When going back and forth between the editor and making changes to the action, it makes me reopen the draft list a lot.

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THIS! I have the 12.9" iPad Pro and also use it primarily in landscape mode which is more than big enough to have both the draft and action list open and not encroach on the draft itself. It would be nice for larger screens if we could just have both open. The switching back and forth is very doable…but causes unnecessary frustration.

My work around has been to create a master action that queries my main action list. I then run the master action and just choose the actual action I want to run. But it’s not terribly elegant especially as my list of custom actions continues to grow.

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Just seen a change in the latest beta to address this :smiley: - thank you @agiletortoise.

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Maybe this is just me, but perhaps there could be some UI tweaks to better identify options with workspaces. I like the concept, but how to set up a new workspace does not appear to be as obvious as it could be.

Also, I don’t know how small this is, but I’d love to see the Shortcuts integration of Drafts include the ability to add tags to a draft. Currently, I think the only way to do that is to use the good ol’ x-callback-url. Thanks!

I’m 99.9% sure that’s something we need the Shortcuts team to implement - I have filed a radar on that, and if you’re not on a beta iOS I suggest you go to Product Feedback - Apple to let them know you’d like to see it too :slight_smile:

I remembered one more: a script method for pinning the draft or action drawer. this would make loading a workspace + action group even better.

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Certainly did not get them all, but addressed a number of the items in this thread in the 5.5.1 release. Enjoy!

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The Next and Previous buttons in the bottom toolbar are inconvenient when the keyboard is visible.

For example: I frequently capture lots of stuff and then have a long list of Drafts to process or tag. An improved workflow: Tap tag button → Type tag and maybe edit draft → Hit down button → repeat without having to hide the keyboard to get to the down button.

Thanks

It would be nice to get the TextExpander refresh URL option you were considering in the next planned convenience feature update. Keep wishing I could trigger from a keyboard shortcut :thinking:

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I often collect links for reference, etc when working on a Draft. It often seems inconvenient to go back and forth the editing mode and the link mode in this type of use. It would be useful if you could just click the link in the editing mode as well. It works quite well in several other Markdown editors.

I’d suggest say some sort of long press, or alternative to activate something like that. I tap around my screen to position the cursor whilst editing, including for on URLs for modifying those URLs. I’d rather not tap on a URL to edit it and have it launch a browser. But, in my opinion, a tap and hold, or other less overriding option, would be practical and beneficial.

Yes, something like that. For instance, the Bear app has done it quite nicely in my opinion. For instance, the named links such as [My favourite discussion](http://whatever.com/wherever/43434343434 shows just the named link “My favourite discussion”. In my workflow at least it’s very rare that I want to modify the links after they’re inserted, unless I’d be working with some x-callback url magic. Most of the time at max I’d want to modify the name of the link, which is also rare. Most of the time I want to go to where the link points to. In practical use I’m not also interested in seeing the often very long links to the website that relate only to that website’s specific functionality. It can result in a great amount of clutter to just have the link there. I like having the links in Markdown format, but the ui could perhaps hide some of the clutter for most used scenarios, then maybe require double tap or cursor movement if you do the more rare thing such as actually modify the link. The check buttons in todo lists already give some kind of actionability over the Markdown syntax. Thoughs?

For what it’s worth, hiding the URL would not be a good change for me. I need to see the full URL where various links in the same draft are to the same site/app.

If there was an option to enable such a change in behaviour that may be something some would want, but personally, I wouldn’t want to have hiding parts of URLs as the default Markdown format behaviour.

Yes, I understand there are different needs between people for an app such as Drafts. I don’t know how all you other people use Drafts in your workflow. But in any case, the workflow to get to a tappable link currently is often so complex, including opening or closing panels, then switching to the link mode, then back, that I often find it’s easier to just copy and paste the link to the browser. I see the core of Drafts is to get rid of this kind of repetition through automation. This is the case for some easier way to get to the links in the editing mode.

The hiding of links is perhaps another related suggestion that could be useful for some users, As a usecase, I created an indented checklist of hiking item considerations, and the appended links sometimes took multiple lines of text, making the simple checklist quite convoluted.

Just some things to consider in this kind of an app with multiple kind of users and needs. :slight_smile: