Split screen for long notes

[Etaoin Shrdlu 3]

I regularly make long notes, using them more like a lab book. I have a note open now that is over 2000 lines long, and it's a pain having to scroll up and down it when I want to refer to something several "pages" back. If you could split the screen and scroll the top half up to where you want, then you could refer to it while writing in the bottom half, and vice versa. You can do this kind of thing in Emacs, where you can actually split the screen many times and have each section parked on a different part of the document.

You could argue that I should create a new "lab book" note for every day, but it's more efficient and intuitive to have a single "book" to write in without having to stop and figure out which file to refer to.

Basically, an Evernote "notebook" is treated instead like a folder on one specific subject, and contains not only short notes, photos etc but one or two long notes which in the real world would be lab books.

 

NB: there are several posts on this subject in other forums (see https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/89561-split-screen-on-laptop-app/ or https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/34565-archived-split-screen-view-and-edit/) but they don't have answers, and I can't find anything similar in this new Feature Requests forum.

[jefito 5,589]

2 hours ago, Etaoin Shrdlu said:

NB: there are several posts on this subject in other forums (see https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/89561-split-screen-on-laptop-app/ or https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/34565-archived-split-screen-view-and-edit/) but they don't have answers, and I can't find anything similar in this new Feature Requests forum.

Then a better thing to do would have been to go to one of those posts and added your comment there, and also upvoted it. Aside from that, these are feature requests, and are collected by Evernote staff (indeed, all posts are read by them), but no response from Evernote is guaranteed.

Edit: the one referenced thread isn't in a voting forum. I'll change that. Eventually someone from Evernote may come along and merge the threads. Or not...

[DTLow 5,736]

3 hours ago, Etaoin Shrdlu said:

I regularly make long notes, using them more like a lab book. I have a note open now that is over 2000 lines long, and it's a pain having to scroll up and down it when I want to refer to something several "pages" back. If you could split the screen and scroll the top half up to where you want, then you could refer to it while writing in the bottom half, and vice versa....

As was mentioned in the posts you referenced, the desktop platforms allow you to open a note in a separate  window.  This will provide two instances of the note.

The iPad Pro allows for two windows, also allowing two views

btw  I would also suggest avoid long notes.  
Possibly use a table of contents to consolidate notes.  
However that doesn't solve your split screen request

 

 

[Etaoin Shrdlu 3]

On 07/12/2016 at 5:58 PM, DTLow said:

As was mentioned in the posts you referenced, the desktop platforms allow you to open a note in a separate  window.  This will provide two instances of the note.

The iPad Pro allows for two windows, also allowing two views

I agree that opening notes in a separate window is possible, so that you have the main Evernote window plus a separate window open, both displaying different parts of the same note. However, if you then try to edit in either window, the other one snaps back to the top of the note. So you can't refer back to your notes while working on the latest "page", that is, having one window scrolled to one point while the other window is scrolled to a different point for editing.

This makes using an Evernote note like a lab book pretty awkward. It's good for recording experiment output quickly so is better than nothing, but being able to refer back to other "pages" while also writing on the latest "page" would be a big improvement.

Also, it's nice that an iPad pro allows for two views, but I don't have one, and it's not clear from your description if it doesn't also suffer from the "snap back" issue above.

 

[Etaoin Shrdlu 3]

I've found that writing the next instalment of the note in a separate temporary evernote file, then copying/pasting it into the master file at the end of the day, is a workaround that works. It's not ideal, but it's better than nothing.

[DTLow 5,736]

25 minutes ago, Etaoin Shrdlu said:

then copying/pasting it into the master file at the end of the day

That would be Notes; not files

Is there a reason you want a huge master note
Why not just paste a link to the new note

[Etaoin Shrdlu 3]

On 02/02/2017 at 3:27 PM, DTLow said:

That would be Notes; not files

Sorry, yes I meant Note

On 02/02/2017 at 3:27 PM, DTLow said:

Is there a reason you want a huge master note
Why not just paste a link to the new note

Well I guess I'm trying to treat a Note like a lab book, writing daily observations & pasting results (graphs & charts) into it as I go along. Going up one level in the hierarchy, the encompassing Notebook contains everything to do with a particular project: the "lab book" (i.e. master Note) itself plus clipped web articles, PDFs etc.

Basically trying to replicate real life: one folder (Notebook) per project, each containing a lab book (Note) to track daily activities on that project, and any other clippings etc that are useful.

I understand that having one huge Note as a lab book would eventually make it unwieldy, necessitating switching to new Notes now and then (effectively "book 2", "book 3", etc). But a Note containing the equivalent of say 50 pages of text and diagrams, that can be scanned through using a split screen, would be extremely useful.