Ability to make Comments, then show/hide them

Agenda is a powerful ‘thinking tool’ for me. When I’m trying to make sense of something I’m struggling with it’s relative lack of structure makes it a great place to write my thoughts down, organise them and find some meaning.

In particular when I’m working on the very first draft of an article, blog, lesson plan etc. It’s really the stage before the first draft - scoping, deciding what to include, etc.

I do this by writing down the ideas that are floating around in my head - and these generally fall into two categories:

  1. Content - i.e. the topics I want to include, headings, main points to get across etc.
  2. Comments - i.e. my thoughts about what I’m putting down. E.g. “this might fit better in section 2”, or “make reference to model X”

These comments are generally inline, i.e. in the same paragraph as the content, because at this stage I’m almost writing in stream of consciousness style to get stuff out of my head.

It would be wonderful to be able to easily and quickly distinguish content from comments, for examply by putting comments inside <>, and then the comment being visually distinguished in some way, perhaps slightly greyed out? lighter font?

And for a real bonus:

  • to be able to double click on the comment to collapse it, so that changes to <>. Double clicking on <> will then expand the commnent
  • right clicking would give the option to show/hide all comments
  • and Copy As would give the option to copy without comments, ie so I can copy the 'clean’ content to another app to create the actual document.

As you say, there’s really two different types of functionality here. One would be something that could mark up more easily comments, the other the collapsing. If I’m not mistaken you already requested this before, I remember having seen a post like this already?

Anyway, I think the next updates adds some more options in this first realm, we plan to add a block quote style that could work well to highlight your comments, or alternatively it will also bring highlighting and text color options, which could help you markup things too.

The first is probably a better choice as down the line we would also want to introduce the collapsible sections feature, and this would work with block quotes but not highlighting and/or textcolor per se.

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Thanks! Can’t remember if I posted on this before - sorry, if so.

Forthcoming features will certainly help, but I’d love to see the ability to make (and hide) inline comments some day!

Re the forthcoming blockquote style:

It would be great if it could be evoked with a simple keystroke at the start of the paragraph, like "-“ turns the para into a checklist. > would be an obvious choice!

I’m currently writing some notes in preparation for a meeting - basically a list of questions I have. It would be really helpful to use blockquote to distinguish notes I back in the meeting - ie the answers to my questions! Simply moving the cursor to a new line and start with > would work smoothly I think!

Yes, this is definitely the idea.

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A quick update that in Agenda 15 it’s now possible to mark paragraphs as a block quote, which also work well as a visual indicator of a comment inside your notes. Other ideas you could use:

  • Use highlights or text color to mark comments in your notes and make them visually stand out

  • Create a comment template with either block quote, bold, and/or text highlights/colored text to make your ideal visual comment, you can then at any point in your notes use the \template(MyCommentTemplateTitle) action to insert the comment placeholder in the style you want.

  • You can even set up a text expansion so writing something like ccomment expands to the above template action to make inserting the comment template even faster

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So cool! I’m very happy, thank you!

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OK, I’ve just used this in the wild!

Brilliant - apart from one thing. I can’t find an easy way to ‘escape’ from Blockquote, it doesn’t behave like bullets or checklist. I seem to have to use the pop up format menu - would be much smoother with simple keyboard method.

It behaves the same as pre-formatted text in that, it doesn’t auto-revert to body text. The easiest is to just use the command-control-0 shortcut.

Thanks for the explanation. I never use body text, so didn’t think of that. I don’t find the keyboard commands involving three keys very convenient to operate.

I love the way I can easily revert to paragraph text from indents etc using delete and returns. Really intuitive.

How about an easy and obvious way to escape from block quote, like

<

?

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The reason why we didn’t go for the same approach as lists is that both pre-formatted and quotes are typically intended for mutli-line, and multi-paragraph pieces of text, so I don’t think they should behave like lists.

Thanks for the explanation. I never use body text, so didn’t think of that.

You use it all the time, it’s basically the default if you don’t have a list, heading or preformatted paragraph style enabled :smiley:

An alternative to revert is by using actions, \body or even better it’s shorthand \p (from the html paragraph tag) can be a quick way to get the same result as the keyboard shortcut

Oops - I meant I never use preformatted!

Just tried \p - but it’s FIVE keyboard actions! \ then p then down arrow 3 times, then return!

If I’m trying to type notes of a meeting, it’s great being able to include a quote of what someone says, but I want to be able to switch quickly back to body text, checklist or dashed list.

Neither typing a dash, nor for checklist change blockquote text to the relevant format.

I’ve only just started using block quote (obviously!) but think these niggles will make less seamless than I expected.

You can just type \p followed by a space

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