Workspace Specific New Draft Settings

[sylumer]

Thanks for the insights everyone’s posting. It’s great to see that interest in this isn’t mine alone. Just to pick up on a few of the points above…

@PhilipK

Another approach might be for the Workspace settings to allow for specifying an Action to be called when creating a new draft within that workspace, since the functionality is already there in Actions to change syntax, insert templates, set action group, keyboard, etc.

I had considered that initially. Hoestly that would give the most scope, and I would certainly be happy with that approach.

The first reason I didn’t suggest that originally was that I couldn’t think of a case where the action wouldn’t be focussed on the creation of the initial draft from no content; in which case templates seemed to cover the vast majority of likely content creation scenarios I could think of; though others could have scenarios templating (and within them tags) would cover.

The second, mainly informed by the first, was that I figured it would be more accessible to a typical Drafts user. But this is just a gut feel on my part based on what I see posted in the forum and on Twitter, and I could be wrong about that.

@PhilipK

I’d probably want my template within a field, as with Actions, rather than external, but the option of an external template could be handy too.

Just to highlight that this external template came to mind simply because it is an existing feature in Drafts. Again I think having external templates is more powerful, but the extra hoops to jump through in creating and maintaining such templates is perhaps a nudge further than some Drafts users might expect to tackle.

@nahumck

My suggestion: create an action which provides the different tags/syntaxes needed for the different workspace, tie it to ⌘⌥N , and then select from a prompt the draft type you need. You could also query the workspace you’re in and have it create a new draft based on that. I think I’ll be setting one of these up for sure in the near future once there is a method in scripting to query the workspace.

Unfortunately tying it to a keyboard shortcut works only when you are using a keyboard. Most iPhone users for example wouldn’t have the device attached to an external keyboard when using it. I suspect the majority of iPad users also don’t use an external keyboard. My expectation would be that such users would simply use the standard new draft button (“+”), which is why I suggested tying the behaviour to the draft creation process rather than a particular action.

As it happens, you do seem to be able to extend CMD+N to trigger an action after draft creation.

@nahumck

You could also query the workspace you’re in and have it create a new draft based on that. I think I’ll be setting one of these up for sure in the near future once there is a method in scripting to query the workspace.

Well that assumes it will exist in the near future. Anyone who wants that should probably post some support to the thread @martinpacker created:

Identify Current Workspace in Javascript

While the structure of the app internally may not have a currently loaded workspace object, perhaps it has a notion of the last applied workspace? The app can load a workspace and once loaded, the name of that workspace is visible within the app, above the folder names on the draft list. Therefore at some level within the application, that data must be held. I’m assuming since in the JavaScript the loading of a workspace is against the App object, that it would most likely be some correllati…