@ should nest a new document by default

Feedback
1

I frequently use the @ symbol to create a placeholder document while I’m typing. E.g.:

Decide on @Productboard Portal Structure

I would say that 90% of the time, my intent when using the @ symbol to generate a new document is to create a file nested in the current document. But the @ symbol doesn’t nest by default, so I always end up either:

  1. Clicking or pressing L on the new file dialog and then having to search for the document that I’m already in
  2. Creating the doc and the moving it, with about the same number of steps
  3. Navigating to the sidebar to create a file nested in the current document

I would say that all three of these are a bit clumsy, and I would have less friction if nesting were the default behavior.

Also, it took me a while to realize that nesting was not the default behavior, so I lost track of a few documents.

2

Hey Fred,

thanks for feedback! The main reason we don’t support creating nested docs via @ yet is because currently we only support nested docs as standalone blocks (as opposed to inline elements). The rationale is that we wanted nested docs to feel more substantial and different from simple links, because removing a nested doc from it’s container doc also deletes the nested doc.

To support nesting with @ we could potentially do two things:

  1. insert the inline link as we do already but instead of adding the new doc to parent, append it as nested doc to current doc. The tradeoff is that this way you would have two links to the doc - one inline and one as standalone block at the end of doc, something like this:

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    image1590×282 17 KB

  2. Support “inline nested docs”. This wouldn’t duplicate the link to the nested doc as above. If you delete a text with the link, it would also delete the nested doc. I’m not totally sure what should happen if you restored such deleted doc - since original context (ie. text around it) will likely no longer exist, there’s no obvious place to insert the link back. I guess in this case we could restore it as a block-level nested doc.

Let us know if one of these is what you would expect.

Kaspars