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  1. Let user press a letter or number to 'jump' the focus to the NEXT task beginning with that character

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    3 comments  ·  General  ·  Admin →
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    Gabriel Crossan commented  · 

    Ahh every few years I check in on MLO's development to see if this has been resolved, and it looks like it never will be. Guess I'm stuck with my ancient version from 2006 then, since that uses the far more logical (Windows Explorer-style) behaviour.

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    Gabriel Crossan commented  · 

    I agree with this suggestion, and would like to expand upon it: the beauty of an outliner like MLO is that you only see what you need to, but this is not the case when keyboard navigation behaves in this way.

    When the user repeatedly presses a key to cycle through tasks that start with that character, the program should also ignore any tasks that aren't visible, i.e. ones that are nested within collapsed branches (if you want to cycle through all tasks starting with a certain character, just press F7 first). This is exactly how the old MLO Light behaves, so alas that's what I'm still using after all these years.

    I'll make an analogy with Windows Explorer - if I were to press A in the Folders pane, it would only cycle through visible folders that started with A, not subfolders that were buried within other collapsed folders, as there would be far too many to cycle through. The same is true when dealing with a very large outline; it quickly becomes utterly unmanageable to navigate in this way.

    For example:
    * Some task
    * A task starting with A
    * Collapsed branch
    .... * Some concealed subtask
    ..........* Some other concealed subtask
    .............. * Some other concealed subtask
    ....................* Another subtask starting with A, that I don't need to see because its tree is collapsed.
    * Another task starting with A

    Let's say I press the A key repeatedly to navigate through the above outline. MLO cycles through all tasks that starts with the letter A, but it also drills down through collapsed subtasks that also start with A, causing a lot of completely irrelevant subtasks to be revealed, when I'm only pressing A to be able to quickly jump to another task that I already know is there because I can see it, not some other deeply nested task.

    So in this example, I would expect that pressing A twice would jump me first to "A task starting with A" and then to "Another task starting with A". But instead the second keypress expands an irrelevant branch that I have deliberately collapsed, and drills all the way down because there is a task buried within it which starts with A. So my nice, compact manageable outline has suddenly been expanded to show a bunch of distracting tasks that I don't need to see, simply because they start with the same character. I can't see any advantage to this, as I would just use the search box if I wanted to locate a specific string in a concealed subtask.

    Gabriel Crossan supported this idea  ·