New sort features

[jonhastings53]

Hi I have updated to 18 but can’t see how the new sort features work. When I tap the project title I just get the up and down arrows.

Am I looking in the wrong place?

Same thing on phone and iPad

[mekentosj]

The sort options only work in overviews, in projects you can only flip the sort order using the arrows as they only support date based sorting at the moment.

[ErikMH]

How to sort within a project?

This is a crucial feature, it seems to me. AFAICT, Agenda seems to sort first by assigned date, and then by creation date-time. This would be (barely) acceptable if I managed always to create notes in the order that I want them displayed in. But I’m not that perfect. I’ll often remember to add a new note several hours after its proper slotted time. And there’s currently no way at all to get it “right,” other than deleting and re-adding each subsequent note in order. Please enable the grayed-ou…

[drewmccormack]

I think you missed the point of Agenda a bit. This sorting in chronological order is one of the major features of the app. It makes total sense that you want to keep some projects in chronological order, and Agenda gives you all the tools you need for that, with assigned dates that most apps don’t have.

We are thinking about ways of supporting other types of projects where dates are not important. Will see what we can do.

[ErikMH]

Hi, @drewmccormack!

I’m a little confused here. Chronological sorting is exactly what I’m asking for, and is why I’m really excited about Agenda. Agenda does this sorting automatically and brilliantly — but not if I screw up.

Agenda does give me the ability to assign a note to a different date — so if I want to retcon a new note to yesterday, or last month, or last year, it handles it with aplomb.

But if I create a note now (at 09:23) that really should have been created two hours earlier (at 07:23), it will sort to its creation date/time (09:23), and I have no way of telling it that it really “belongs” to 07:23.

@mekentosj followed up with me about this yesterday here:

How to sort within a project?

It’s very important to realise that notes are not sorted in projects on creation date but on assigned date, the date you assign to the note, you can quickly (re)assign notes to today (using cmd-return or by typing \today), yesterday (by typing \yesterday), etc and it will adjust the sorting accordingly. Similarly, you can also after the fact link a note to a calendar date (by clicking the calendar icon next to the title) and have the note be sorted correctly. Finally, undated notes and notes …

and I responded with an example situation which may make it clearer to you:

How to sort within a project?

Yup! I grok all this; the problem lies in assigned date not including time: items within the project are being sorted beautifully by assigned date, which is basically what I want about 98% of the time. It’s just that I want them then to be sorted by the specific relevant time. Let’s say I was keeping track of bird sightings. I see an Eastern Bluebird, and create a note in my “Bird log” project for 2023-07-27: 13:03 | Sialia sialis I then see an American Kestrel at 13:10, but get distracted b…

@mekentosj pointed out that notes are manually sortable within a project, and I see that this does work. I haven’t experimented enough with this to know yet how well this manual sorting “sticks” across synced platforms and multiple launchings and quittings of Agenda. If that manual sort is retained permanently, this is a perfectly acceptable work-around. But I would suggest that letting us assign a date/time rather than just a date is both more intuitive and easier for the user than having us assign a date and then using the completely different approach of clicking and dragging in order to simulate an assigned time.

Does this make more sense? For to me it almost feels like I’ve embraced the point of Agenda too much, rather than missing its point.

[mekentosj]

Yes, the manual sorting will be synced across all devices.

Regarding the possibility to set a date and time, we have currently on purposely only reserved setting a specific time to a note if you link the note with a calendar event. If you manually assign a date you can only set it to a day. We feel that the number of people that really need the granularity of date + time is very limited and doesn’t warrant the extra complexity that the UI would require.

It also brings up a thing I noticed in the example you gave here, you seem to make a single note for each entry for a bird you observed. Of course I’m not sure how much info you add for each bird you observe. If it’s significant the hierarchy you pick might be the right one:

Project (per day / trip)
Note for sighting 1
Note for sighting 2
etc

However, in case each of these notes contains very little information (and that’s the question), it might be better to switch to a different hierarchy

Project
Note for trip / day 1 (date assigned for the day)
Paragraph for sighting 1
Paragraph for sighting 2
Note for trip / day 2

Agenda’s performance becomes less great if you add >100 small notes (1-2 paragraphs of text) to a single project. It can then be better to have fewer notes and use headings inside those for example:

So instead of:

You could try:

Of course it all depends on the number of items, amount of text etc, so there’s no single “right” way of doing things, but sometimes it can help to rethink the hierarchy if you hit certain limits of the app / find that you are “fighting the system”.

[ErikMH]

@mekentosj

Agenda’s performance becomes less great if you add >100 small notes (1-2 paragraphs of text) to a single project. It can then be better to have fewer notes and use headings inside those

This is very good to know. I don’t yet have any projects with more than a couple of dozen notes, so hadn’t seen this yet – but you’re quite right that my approach will lead quickly to that situation, and that the notes don’t have all that much text. (Usually a sentence or two.)

So thank you for the timely warning. I will rethink my strategy!

[drewmccormack]

Note also that you can very quickly add the date/time to the text, using \date \time

Hope that helps!