Option to Maintain Indention after line overflow/word wrap, and Indention Guidelines

[jatoran]

What

Maintain Indention after line overflow, and Indention Guidelines

Why

These 2 changes will greatly improve the readability of notes, especially for people who maintain lots of different topic'd notes within one note document (such as an inbox of notes that has not been sorted yet)

Maintaining Indention: This will improve readability of notes, especially when multiple different notes are near eachother. When indenting, if you are writing a few sentences, the new line will lose indention after word wrapping, which makes the notes look very jumbled.

Indention Guidelines: Due in part to the empty space before the writing area, it is difficult to see where the indentions end and as such multiple nested indentions within a single note topic can become hard to read or discriminate from other indention levels.

How

Sublime text Indention Guidelines:

Maintaining Indentions after new lines/word wrap:

[d-walsh]

This is really important and it was requested here also: https://forums.simplenote.com/forums/topic/feature-request-option-to-preserve-indent-when-text-wrapping/#post-78

[michaeltrollan]

This would be a huge improvement. Would love to see it implemented.

[erricgunawan]

Might be related:

It appears that in all of my notes, indenting a paragraph does not work any more. It has been this way for a while and I have made sure everything is up to date but the issue persists.

Any notes that existed prior to this issue are appear indented properly upon first opening the note for just a split second and then flash to being all aligned. If I try to indent a paragraph now, it indents the entire block rather than just the first line as it is supposed to.

Note, I use Simplenote through the online browser version

It seems like this is the view provided by the Simplenote web app. In the iOS app, a paragraph created with a leading tab only indents the first line. When I view this note in the web app, all lines of the paragraph appear indented. Changing the text in the web, and switching back to iOS, and the text is back to normal. It works the same with leading spaces on the first line.

https://forums.simplenote.com/forums/topic/paragraph-indenting-not-working/?view=all#post-2678

[codebykat]

Hmm. Well, I do agree we should fix the hanging indent issue - I have a fix for that in #3216.

As for indentation guides, we have tried to avoid enabling the options that make Simplenote look or act like a code editor. I think for organizing topics and sections, you'd be better off using the existing Markdown syntax for readability. You can use headers, lists, checklists and so on.

I did discover in testing this that using an initial indent on paragraphs is rendered in the Markdown preview as a code block, so that's something to be aware of, as I haven't found an easy fix for that yet (the indents are important for determining the level of sub-lists).

[michaeltrollan]

Great to see the fix for paragraphs!

For outlines, unfortunately many of us don't use markdown in Simplenote, and it wouldn't fit with our workflow.

A nice middle ground, to avoid any issues with it looking or acting like a code editor, would be to limit outline indenting to lines that start with hyphens (-) or asterisks (*). There's already code attached to lines that start with those characters (e.g. hitting return at the end of one of those lines generates another line starting with the same character).

Then it's the best of both worlds. Let us know if that sounds like a possible solution!

[Ph0t0nX]

Hmm. Well, I do agree we should fix the hanging indent issue - I have a fix for that in #3216.

As for indentation guides, we have tried to avoid enabling the options that make Simplenote look or act like a code editor. I think for organizing topics and sections, you'd be better off using the existing Markdown syntax for readability. You can use headers, lists, checklists and so on.

I did discover in testing this that using an initial indent on paragraphs is rendered in the Markdown preview as a code block, so that's something to be aware of, as I haven't found an easy fix for that yet (the indents are important for determining the level of sub-lists).

I don't think the markdown solves the proper indentation for lists that have long word-wrapped lines. Here is an example with markdown enabled:

Here is the equivalent in MS word, where it is much easier to see the list structure:

The same problem crops up on the Android version as well.

I'm willing to take a crack at fixing this issue, though it seems like I need to jump through some hoops to get an account on the test server.

EDIT: I updated the Windows app from 2.21 to 2.22.1 and the indentation is completely fixed!! Not only that, but the left-to-right text also stays left in English documents. Those two things are still broken on Android, but Windows was the most important one for me to have fixed. Thank you 1000x Simplenote team!! You guys rock!!

[Ph0t0nX]

NOOOOOO! Updated to 2.22.2 and ya'll broke it again!!!!!!! WHY???!!!

[codebykat]

@Ph0t0nX That's so odd, the changes that fixed it in 2.22.1 were also included in 2.22.2, and 2.22.2 had very few changes in it. 🤔 If you have a chance, can you try a few of the 2.22.2 betas from the release page and see if the issue was present from the very first beta or if it was introduced along the way?

[Ph0t0nX]

@Ph0t0nX That's so odd, the changes that fixed it in 2.22.1 were also included in 2.22.2, and 2.22.2 had very few changes in it. 🤔 If you have a chance, can you try a few of the 2.22.2 betas from the release page and see if the issue was present from the very first beta or if it was introduced along the way?

I just tested some versions from the release page link you sent and here are the results (Windows x64):

2.23.0 - indentation is broken
2.22.1-beta.5 - indentation is broken
2.22.1-beta.4 - indentation is broken
2.22.1-beta.3 - indentation works great
2.22.1-beta.2 - indentation works great
2.22.1-beta.1 - indentation works great

As far as I know, I've NEVER seen the Android or Web version have proper indentation, but I haven't tested many versions of those.

So as you can see, whatever happened between 2.22.1 beta 3 and beta 4 re-broke the indentation. Here is the dif:
v2.22.2-beta.3...v2.22.2-beta.4

Just skimming through the differences, I don't see anything in there related to indentation. I don't know enough about the codebase to make more than a wild guess. I saw that there were some changes related to dependency installation - maybe one of the dependencies changed something related to the indentation?

[codebykat]

Thanks so much for coming back with that research, @Ph0t0nX. I haven't had a chance to look into this, but have to admit I'm a bit baffled, I found the same as you - the changes between the good and broken versions are minimal, and completely unrelated to indentation.

Is the way it's broken now identical to the original problem?

[Ph0t0nX]

Is the way it's broken now identical to the original problem?

Yeah it's the identical problem that 2.21 had. You can easily check it yourself by downloading beta 3 and viewing a paragraph of text with a dash/bullet in front of it to indent like in my screenshots above. Then try it with beta 4. You'll see that the broken indentation wraps around to the first column of the line, whereas the working one starts the wrapping at the same indentation of the bullet.

Because there is nothing in the code dif between the two, it almost has to be an external package, external repo, or dll that changed. It would likely be something that isn't part of the simplenote-electron repo. That's just my guess though.