New sort features

[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.