...I always have a little trouble building my macros, not being a programmer. So I got into the habit of documenting my macros with indications and notes; They are very useful to me, especially when I have to come back to a macro after several days.
I find the “Comment” Action really very practical. But in my uses, I just need a simple and unique text field, readable in its entirety once folded and easily editable, all with as few Clicks as possible.
With this animation, I propose a solution... hoping it arouses interest.
Your point is well illustrated, other than giving an example of the style of comments you leave yourself (rather than lorem ipsum). To me, it seems quite natural to always use the Title field of the Comment action for a very concise summary, and then add any further explanation to the Comment field.
What you suggest with the "quick note" idea is surely the equivalent of suggesting that the KM editor should display any long Title field in a Comment as multiline wrapped text, without any truncation. Or we might think of it as an uncollapsed Comment action with the Title field hidden? Either way, I don't see why the existing action isn't adequate.
Hi KevinB,
...in fact, my proposal came from a reflection made when I have to (desire) to post comments and be able to consult them (or even modify them) as quickly as possible, with a minimum of clicking or manipulation.
With the “Comment” Action currently available in KM v11, there are 2 fields: a Title field and a Content field.
The first is restricted to displaying only a single line of text even if there are many more characters and to read this “hidden” text, you must then scroll with the mouse to the right in the field itself to access it (hell). In addition, there are always the two apostrophes at the beginning and at the end, which can visually disrupt any code entered here. And if there is no text, this field takes up too much space to have nothing to display... except the two apostrophes!...
The second field offers no limit on the number of characters, but the “Comment” Action must then be expanded in order to be able to read the entire text.
My suggestion (this is just an idea...) is to not have to unfold the Action and to simply display the entire Quick Note entered.
Once again, I am happy with the current “How” Action (I have no alternative at my disposal), but if my idea, which should not be that difficult to implement, is implemented, I would be delighted...
Yes, that's what I was getting at when I was talking about truncation of the text. I would reach for keyboard shortcuts rather than the mouse, e.g. command-right-arrow (or control-E) to move to the end of the text.
I don't see those..?
Yes, I'm curious why that is a significant problem.
Oo, never presume that with any piece of software. It does seem to me that this would be tampering with a fundamental design decision about how text fields work in the Editor.
Hi, @tempo. I like your proposal. Nice job with the video demonstration.
I'd would also like a similar comment region at the top of the Group action. Groups can be very useful for documentation purposes, but the built-in documentation capability is limited to the single (non-wrapping) Title that can be changed using Actions > Rename.... Due to this limitation, I often insert a Comment action at the top of a Group action.
If, say, you make a lot of long notes, I wonder if you might be happy storing them outside the Editor. For example, I personally would store any long notes in Obsidian and reference them as necessary in (the title of) the Comment action. I appreciate that some sort of plan along those lines might not appeal or be suitable for your needs. There is though the general point that KM is not a note-taking application, so extensive documentation would be better handled elsewhere – anything from a folder of README.txt files to your choice of a knowledge management system. That's just a thought from my perspective, anyhow.
...and also, if I propose this kind of addition, it's for fun!... And I have the feeling that KM is fully mature. Besides, I can't remember a single crash of the application... in more than 10 years that I have owned one of its licenses.
So, and perhaps, the time has come to make surface adjustments, to the right or to the left, such as removing the impossibility of being able to resize the Preferences window or even better managing the vertical scroll bar which hides keyboard shortcuts while scrolling through the macro list...
I am well aware that my proposal is not fundamental, but you never know, Peter could implement it during a future update (my little Christmas present?...)...
@_jims “I'd would also like a similar comment region at the top of the Group action. Groups can be very useful for documentation purposes, but the built-in documentation capability is limited to the single (non-wrapping) Title that can be changed using Actions > Rename.... Due to this limitation, I often insert a Comment action at the top of a Group action.”
