New Note Button behavior change request

Recently the behavior was changed to automatically anchor the note to the current reference when hitting the New Note button. This is preferable to never doing it automatically, but it does tend to create anchored notes where that wasn't the intention and doesn't make sense. I would like to see this respect the most recent note per notebook. For instance, I have certain notebooks that inherently tend to have unanchored notes. When adding a note to these notebooks, it makes sense to add an unanchored note.

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Adam Borries (Logos)

Recently the behavior was changed to automatically anchor the note to the current reference when hitting the New Note button.

Yes, the New Note button now defaults to anchoring the note to the active reference or selected text range. This was introduced in 8.5 beta 1, and shipped to stable today.

Much of the value of the new notes tool is in the facets that are created when a note is anchored. However, the default was previously to create an unanchored note, while creating an anchored note required two clicks: first click the split button dropdown, then "new note on reference/selection."

This change simply inverts the default (which serves the more common use case), but you can still create unanchored notes via the dropdown.

I would like to see this respect the most recent note per notebook.

I could see how it would be useful to make this a sticky setting, like your last-used note icon. However, I think it could be easy to set it to "unanchored," forget it, and come back to take notes in the session without realizing new notes weren't anchored. It's a lot uneasier to remove an anchor than add one. "Per notebook" is an interesting way to solve that problem, but it adds even more UX complexity that could be even more confusing to the novice user.

Thanks for the feedback and the suggestion.

Reuben Helmuth

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1050652#Comment_1050652

Thanks for the response, Adam.

I could see how it would be useful to make this a sticky setting, like your last-used note icon. ... "Per notebook" is an interesting way to solve that problem,

In this thread, I asked for the note icon to be remembered per notebook as well.

it adds even more UX complexity that could be even more confusing to the novice user.

I understand this concern... If, however, note icons and such were also remembered per notebook, I think the consistency would effectively alleviate this problem. If not, perhaps a "sticky per notebook" setting could be added in program settings (with, of course, its own diagnostic challenges!). The current implementation is challenging/frustrating enough that IMO it warrants some tweaking. Thanks for considering!