[Closed] Inconsistent behaviour switching from a tag selection to the all notes view

[ale]

Background: I always use the reverse order and I was testing the improved paste command in CN 10.4. One of the fears for the feature was to assign unwanted tags to a note while pasting with a tag selection active. I said to myself it was nice that after pasting with a tag selection and then switching to the All view, the pasted note was still selected, and there in front of the eyes ready for modifications. The problem is that without the reverse order the same is not true so the potential bug is...

Bug: switching from a tag selection to the all tags view with the reverse order jumps and selects the "newest" note at the top of the list. The same switch without the reverse order jumps to the "oldest" note again to the top of the list instead of the "newest" now at the bottom.

As said I never use the list without the reverse order so sometimes it's not easy for me to say if it's a bug, a request for enanchement or actually the intended behaviour.

[CintaNotes Developer]

it's not easy for me to say if it's a bug, a request for enanchement or actually the intended behaviour.

Well, I guess that here there's no clear saying if it is a bug. It all depends on how you define views and the ordering
within them. I'd say that auto-selecting the first note in a view after changing them seems logical to me.
The point is, if you're not done with your selection, why would you want to reset the view to "All"?

The other point of view could be, that CN should always try to keep the current selection in view. In this case you wouldn't lose track of the pasted note.
Even if that's what you'd like to do. I must say I like that my view is reset when I switch to All, that's what I expect. Having to always press Home or End
to go to the latest note would irritate me.

One thing that I can suggest is to redefine the notion of view ordering. Now a view always auto-selects the first note, regardless of it's age.
It is possible that not the first, but the latest one is auto-selected - even if it is in the very bottom.

But unfortunately this approach doesn't scale well in the light of the upcoming advanced sorting feature. If notes are sorted by title, would you still want the
latest note to be auto-selected even if it's somewhere in the middle of the list? I guess not.

[ale]

Thanks for your reply Alex, always very interesting and enlighting, of course this kind of bug (or not a bug) report is not something that impact me directly as a user, but more something like let's talk about it and exchange ideas.

Reading your reply, I think I made a bad choice using the adjectives "old" and "new". This choice came from the fact that I thought now the list is generally almost sorted by date unless the user rearranged notes or more exotic things happened, like emailing the notebook back and forth and editing it in different time zones

I'll try to be precise and reformulate now technically the list is unsorted (because as said maybe the user rearranged notes). We have two meanings of first and last, a relative meaning tied to the view, where first means the note at the top and last the note at the bottom of the view. I say relative because if we swap the order ticking or unticking "reverse order", notes are rearranged upside down and we have a new first and last note.

We have also a first and last note in absolute terms. Where first is the very first note being created in a notebook (well unless later rearranged) and last is the note one position before the place where a fresh created note will go. If I'm not mistaken (but please correct me if I'm wrong) this absolute definition is meaningful in fact if we create a note it doesn't follow the top or bottom logic but it goes after the last note (last in absolute terms).

After saying all this, the observation about focus after switching to "all" was as follow: now as you said it selects the first note (first is relative), I was wondering if last was better, meaning the last note in absolute terms, and thus would be the first (top) in the reversed order and the last (bottom) in the not reversed order. The rationale being that the last is probably closer to the notes we're working with and creating a new note is one note away from where we are and not at the other side of the list (only with reversed order unticked).

The other point of view could be, that CN should always try to keep the current selection in view. In this case you wouldn't lose track of the pasted note.
Even if that's what you'd like to do. I must say I like that my view is reset when I switch to All, that's what I expect. Having to always press Home or End
to go to the latest note would irritate me.

Yes I agree, the fact that the current selection was in view after switching to "all" was not because being selected in filtered view but it was a nice side effect of being the last created note and having reverse order ticked.

One thing that I can suggest is to redefine the notion of view ordering. Now a view always auto-selects the first note, regardless of it's age.
It is possible that not the first, but the latest one is auto-selected - even if it is in the very bottom.

But unfortunately this approach doesn't scale well in the light of the upcoming advanced sorting feature. If notes are sorted by title, would you still want the
latest note to be auto-selected even if it's somewhere in the middle of the list? I guess not.

Mhmhm, you're right, I don't want auto-select a note in the middle of somewhere, well I'll think later about the upcoming sorting feature because with all this english my head is burning but to say something now and transposing the long reasoning... ok we'll have a proper sorting. For example by date or an alphabetical A-Z sorting.

Let's think to the A-Z sorting with the all view. Notes in the list are A, B, C, ..., Z. We pick a tag and then again the all view, the focus resets and A is selected, it seems fine. Now let's reverse the order, list becomes Z, Y, X, ..., A. Let's pick a tag and go back to all, list resets and Z is selected. But is it better Z or A at the bottom? yes maybe now it's better Z but also A may have a meaning if we follow a logical and not a visual order.

But sorting with dates where the natural order between items is less strong and freshly created notes are going to be all at the "newer" side of the list, I don't know what's the better way to handle this, as is now or as I tried to explain it the first part of my post. I want to say again I'm not asking for changes, but it's just a collective thinking and exchanging ideas.

[CintaNotes Developer]

Ale, thanks a lot for such exhaustive analysis! Having such discussion is really a pleasure.

Now, let's first sort out some terminology that I used but forgot to define.
The terms "first" and "last" I address to the note's visible position in the list, just like you do. For the "first" and "last" in the time order sense, I use "earliest" and "latest". Note that by this definition, "latest" does not always equal "last".

Now returning to the subject matter... I've given it a bit more thought, and I think that I've come to a nice solution to our consistency problems

The default order of notes is "earliest first". That means, that if the user leaves this mode, it is as if he was saying "i want to see the oldest notes first". If we implement autofocusing to the latest note (which is in the case also the last one), we will be in a way ignoring user's wishes.

Yes, I noticed that almost everyone (me included) is using reverse order mode. Hm, maybe, then, this order is not that reverse. And I think maybe then this order should really be the default one. Then the currently default "earliest-first" order will become the reverse one. Now, if you switch to the "earliest first" mode, it becomes very natural that the first note is selected, because that's exactly what you've ordered

[ale]

I have to say that now the topic is clearer, what I called inconsistency, is not really inconsistent. I think everything came from the observation that the two modes have a different level of convenience for the user and then the desire to find a way to achieve the same convenience. But I understand it's not possible because while maybe more convenient it would break the principle to respect the wishes and the expectations of the user. Reversed as a better default, yes maybe. If you see it better and there's agreement in the community it's ok for me. But of course also leaving everything as it is would be fine in the end as it doesn't need a lot to tick an option...

Alex or for the moderators... if needed feel free to change the title of the topic or anything or tag it ([Closed], [Talk], [Not-a-bug], whatever ) as I see each topic is tagged here.