Feature request: Nested Shortcuts

[Frank.dg 1,385]

I did a forum/ Google search for "nested shortcuts", of which there is no mention.

 

From an IT perspective, I have no idea how feasible or smart it might be to implement a "Nested Shortcuts" feature... i.e. being able to nest our shortcuts just as one would with tags in our tag list. 

 

Although it might seem contradictory to have an extensive nested hierarchy in a shortcuts list, this might serve 2 purposes:

1. To group like shortcuts together for specific workflows or similar use cases (whether saved searches, tags, notes, notebooks or stacks) and having the ability to expand/ collapse any part of the hierarchy. 
2. Have a nested hierarchy therein which would give people the ability to arrange notebooks as they want, except that one wouldn't be able to search/ filter all notebooks nested under a "parent" notebook.
   • One could, however, include saved searches (using a tagging strategy) within a predominantly notebook-based hierarchy and place those saved searches at the top of a nested group to indicate one can search for all notes contained within the notebooks represented from that parent node down.  

Caveats (related to point 2):

• More options than we need, since point 2 can be achieved through a tagging convention/ nested tags.
• This may not fit into Evernote's vision in general, by inadvertently encouraging a "nested notebooks" dynamic (and a 250-notebook limit)
• This might create confusion/ frustration between the consequent and potential disparate notebook hierarchies in both the notebook list and nested shortcuts list - and how one would consolidate a "flatter" notebook list beyond notebooks nested within stacks.
  • One solution might be to hide the notebook and tags list and depend solely on a nested shortcuts list, which would enable dragging and dropping into any arbitrary order with total freedom to organize one's tag's, notebooks and saved searches. One could even have a discrete "shortcuts" list within a "nested shortcuts list".
• Things might get messy if one didn't have the policing of the "restrictions" we currently have. 
• May be restrictive on iOS, for whatever reasons we do not currently have nested tags on iOS. 

 

Come to think of it, this might be more trouble than it's worth, even to think through  ... anyways, just getting the topic out there. 

[CalS 5,307]

Playing the semantics game, nesting can be a dangerous term, it can imply inheritance.  I think you are simply recommending grouping like contexts (searches at the end of the day) in a way meaningful to the user, hierarchically.  The dark side will rise if it wants to rise Luke.

[DTLow 5,744]

>>Feature request: Nested Shortcuts

Moved to the Feature Request Forum
Please indicate your support for this request using the voting buttons in the upper left corner    

 

[Graham Gott 17]

Just found this thread myself after coming back to Evernote (a quick skirmish with OneNote - don't ask) to find out if nested shortcuts was now possible.

Just to add my thoughts, I personally would really like to see the ability to save searches in a note - like a link to a page.  This would give a dynamic aspect to a Table of Contents which, by it's design, is out of date as soon as additions are made.  I have played around with saving the search syntax in a note and using copy/paste to the search bar but it's not ideal...  

[Marcelo Scofano Diniz 0]

I'm in need of Nested Shortcuts too.
I use shortcuts a lot for several different tasks on professional and personal "lifes" and now I have to organize 200 shortcuts up and down to group them by 
subject matter - they may be of different notebooks, probably have same tags, but not always...

TIA

[CalS 5,307]

@DutchPete,

 

Heartily agree with the minimalist notebook approach.  A use case in addition to note sharing can be what notes do you want to have offline on a phone/tablet.  I ended up splitting my prime notebook to accomplish that.  When I get a new phone I will up the storage and go back to one prime notebook.  FWIW.

 

On the other had I am a tagger.  

[DutchPete 247]

Frank, I am not convinced of the usefulness (for myself in any case) of nested shortcuts. When I was still using tags (more about that below) I actually set up a system of nested tags & felt quite proud of it, to be honest. However, after a few months & an objective evaluation I came to the conclusion that I did not get anything extra out of it. Furthermore, I had to keep referring to the tag page all the time, which also got on my nerves.

 

I also had a number of notebooks clustered in notebook stacks, but realised that they did not offer any added value either because with a search it does not matter where the relevant notes are located. This applies as a general rule. Of course, if you need to share certain notes with others, then you need a dedicated notebook. But that is a specific use case.

 

So, apart from having a notebook to receive things like forwarded mails & web clippings, I realised that all my notes could be in 1 notebook. Furthermore, if the notes have very good titles + 1 or 2 keywords, then I could find my notes very efficiently. Instead of keywords I use what I call short code title tags (sctt). They are not tags in the Evernote sense, so e.g. they cannot be manipulated all at once, but they allow me to group notes together. For example, all notes related to my apartment have the sctt "ap" in the title.

 

And as for the titles themselves, I don't have a fancy system like "what, when, where" like Jamie Todd Rubin has because I believe, with time, you still end up getting a lot of "noise" as output from a search. Instead, I try to define a title that is intuitive by trying to imagine that if at some point in the distant future I look for a a note about a certain issue, particularly one that does not have an sctt, what word would I put in the search bar. That is the word I would in any case have in the title, usually 2-3 "hot" words. These are not keywords in that they are not for standard use in all notes, only sctt's are used for that, although, like I said, not all notes carry an sctt.

 

So far, I have found my system of sctt's and good, intuitive titles to work very well for my use case.

 

1 other minor "tag" type I use is to add an "x" to the end of a word if I want to follow that particular word (or issue) for a while. It mostly serves short term usage.

That's it.

[Frank.dg 1,385]

BTW, I am now fascinated with your foregoing tagging and notebooks... Especially tagging. Have you employed a hashtag/ keyword system in your note title/ note body similar to @GM? If not, your saved searches must be a patchwork of some complex search syntax strings, which might often bring up a number of false positives... and therefore necessitate a lot of cleanup/ pruning from time to time. You've got my attention :-)

[Frank.dg 1,385]

@DutchPete, if anything, you would be the prime benefactor of nested shortcuts and/ or nested saved searches in a drop-down menu or nested folder toolbar similar to what @JMichael proposed.

I had to chuckle to myself. Your screenshot made my day.... Because although you have created a decent system of headers for your different sections, under which you have grouped associated shortcuts, this illustrates perfectly why (some) might appreciate nested shortcuts.

[DutchPete 247]

Having done away with notebook & tag organisation I make extensive use of saved searches & shortcuts to notes. Although they cannot be nested, I have found a way to organise them within the constraints of what Evernote offers.

 

I have a number of saved searches & shortcuts to notes in the left hand (= shortcuts) pane. For ease of use I have simulated folder organisation by creating a number of "headline saved searches" (e.g. General, Health, ....) under each of which I have clustered saved searches and/or shortcuts that are similar to each other - see screenshot.

 

Of course this could be used in addition to whatever stack/notebook/tag organisation one chooses to.

[Frank.dg 1,385]

Yep... you're right. There is an implied inheritance thing when it comes to searching nested notebooks... as in Dropbox, WorkFlowy, etc. 

Better put, the idea of nesting notebooks in the Shortcut list would be an imitation of the nested tag dynamic. 

[CalS 5,307]

My bad, I should have been specific and wrote nesting notebooks.  I don't know why, but that has inheritance implications for me, Stacks I suppose.

[Frank.dg 1,385]

Well... nesting tags on the Evernote interface is just a visual thing which does not affect inheritance or afford any trickle-down-effect when searching a "parent" tag context (which may even just be a placeholder tag), unless all children tags are tagged with the parent tag. I'm simply using the same terminology that we use for tags in Evernote... and the same visual arrangement. If I'm not mistaken, the nesting of tags is purely a visual device that helps to group/ organize tags. Same with the idea of nested shortcuts. I don't know that we use any other term to describe the nesting of tags in hierarchies in Evernote. 

 

But yes... that's what I'm talking about... the grouping of searches/ favorites in a logical way with the ability to expand/ collapse in outliner style, exactly as one does in the tag list on Android and Desktop. 

[Frank.dg 1,385]

@Frank,

 

Notebooks could kludge up perhaps, but think in terms of searches.  Say you scan all your statements in and tag/keyword them all Statement and Company.Name.  What better than a Statements drop down to pick your poison.  That and any other context you might want.  

 

Don't think I would want to get too many levels though, the deeper you dig the more worms you find.

 

I was thinking along similar lines. My point 2 in the original post was an afterthought, which is an unavoidable predicament to work through. People would catch on immediately that they could essentially "nest" notebooks. Tags are way more flexible in terms of nesting and general searching... but enabling the ability to nest honest-to-goodness shortcuts would bring the unavoidable possibility of making one's life more complicated by dabbling in a nested notebook dynamic. Perhaps like the ** Android Data's "evil twin brother", Lore. Data only came into existence because his "brother", Lore, was so terrifying that they had to shut him down. But unlike Lore, how would one shut down one possibility while simply implementing the nesting of shortcuts?

 

** Star Trek - The Next Generation reference 

[Frank.dg 1,385]

I don't see any relation to the web clipper.  My use of Google Chrome was just an example of UI -- had nothing to do with the web.

 

 

OK... I thought you were talking about a bookmark toolbar for arranging URLs in Evernote. 

[CalS 5,307]

@Frank,

 

Notebooks could kludge up perhaps, but think in terms of searches.  Say you scan all your statements in and tag/keyword them all Statement and Company.Name.  What better than a Statements drop down to pick your poison.  That and any other context you might want.  

 

Don't think I would want to get too many levels though, the deeper you dig the more worms you find.

[JMichaelTX 4,118]

Interesting train of thought @JMichael. Maybe an integration with the Web clipper.

 

I don't see any relation to the web clipper.  My use of Google Chrome was just an example of UI -- had nothing to do with the web.

 

IMO, the Left Panel is already overcrowded if you have many Notebooks and/or Tags.  With a tree structure, you would spend a lot of time expanding/collapsing nodes on the tree, and/or do a lot of scrolling.  With the Toolbar/Folder setup, it is out of the way until you need it.  When you do just one or two clicks to the shortcut, and then it auto-collapses.

 

My use of Shortcuts is quite different from NB and Tags.  While I might like to have open my list of NB or Tags (or a node thereof), I don't usually need to continually see my Shortcuts.

 

But all of this might just be a matter of personal preference.  

[Frank.dg 1,385]

I'm still not convinced it might be a good idea. Just for the record. It opens up a whole can of worms - most noticeably getting oneself into a mental maze... as well as unwittingly proliferating the use of notebooks as opposed to tags (which are not as flexible as tags search-wise)... and consequently hitting the 250-notebook limit with spectacular ease 

[CalS 5,307]

Same page.

[Frank.dg 1,385]

@Frank,

 

Kind of like creating your own Menu Bar of searches/contexts if I read you right?  

 

We may or may not be on the same page here. Not sure... What I mean, quite simply, is to have the Shortcuts List, exactly as is, but with the added feature of nesting our list of shortcuts exactly the way we can in the Tags list. 

[CalS 5,307]

@Frank,

 

Kind of like creating your own Menu Bar of searches/contexts if I read you right?  

[Frank.dg 1,385]

Interesting train of thought @JMichael. Maybe an integration with the Web clipper.

[JMichaelTX 4,118]

Google Chrome has a similar concept they call Bookmark Toolbar/folders.

 

Basically it is a user-defined set of folders that are on the horizontal toolbar, just under the main toolbar with the URL and buttons.

I love it, and make extensive use of it.  It really helps me keep my extensive set of bookmarks well organized and easy access.

 

For example, I have top-level BM folders for:  Financial, Freq, Travel, Support, etc

 

Each of the BM folders can contain bookmarks and sub-folders, which I do us in some cases.

 

And with Google Chrome Sync, all of my bookmarks are available on all machines that I own.

 

So, If Evernote would implement this as an optional horizontal toolbar, I would find it very useful to organize my Shortcuts, and would probably have more of them because they are out of the way until I need them, but then are easy/quick to access.

 

Oh, and a big fringe benefit is that with Google the order can be alphanumeric, or user set, just by drag/drop.