Confused by "highlight matched to the main filter"

[Christoph Zwerschke]

One thing I find confusing in MLO is the seemingly arbitrary display of
some tasks in boldface which are not my most important ones.

Today I tried to get to the bottom of this. First, I found that there
was an auto formatting rule activated that put tasks in boldface which
were modified less than 15 minutes. After deactivating this rule, I
still got a lot of boldfaced tasks. Then I found that this was caused by
a very hidden option: Current View -> Filter -> General -> Show
Hierarchy -> Config -> "Highlight matched to the main filter". After
deactivating this, finally all boldfaced tasks were back to normal.

Now I still wonder what is meant with "main filter". The help file is
not very helpful, let me quote:

"Highlight matched to the main filter - highlight the tasks in the list
which match the main filter."

What a great explanation /s

Please, what is the "main filter"?

Moreover, I had two tasks with exactly the same properties, one was
highlighted, the other not. I have the impression that there is a bug
here, and the highlighting happens more or less randomly.

Anybody else confused by this?

-- Christoph

[Dwight]

Hi, Christoph.

First let me say that I doubt that you are seeing a bug. Everything you described sounds pretty normal.

What is the main filter

I believe that the "main filter" is another name for the contents of the Current View->Filter->General box. In other words, it's your selections for Action, Hierarchy and Completed. I don't know, maybe it's just Action. Anyhow:

How would anything be showing that does not match the main filter?

Because of hierarchy. Suppose that you have set the hierarchy filter to show parents of items that pass the filters. So once MLO has picked out all of the tasks that pass the filter, it then adds the parent items to the view. The tasks that passed the filter will be bold. Any parents, if they also passed the filter, will also be bold. Any parents that did not pass the filter will not be bold. Note that if your action filter is "All" then everything should be bold.

How can a task be bold while an identical task is not?

If one passes the filter and the other does not. Suppose that you have set the action filter to show active tasks and you are showing parents. Create a task that will be active and will be displayed in your view. Make a duplicate task and make it a subtask to the first task. The subtask will be active but the original task is not, because a task cannot be active if it has uncompleted subtasks. But the original (parent) task will still be in the view, because it is the parent of a task that's in the view and we are showing parents. So the subtask will be bold and the identical parent will not be bold.

-Dwight

[Christoph Zwerschke]

Hi Dwight, thanks for your reply.

Your explanations regarding the hierarchy were helpful and correct,
however they did not apply to my case as I saw differences in *leaf*
nodes with same properties.

It turned out that some of them were not bold, because higher up in the
hierarchy I had set (and forgotten about it) a custom format with bold
switched off and "subtasks inherit customg formatting". It seems this
custom format took precedence over the bold highlighting. After I
removed the "subtasks inherit custom formatting", all the leaf nodes
were highlited bold as expected.

So you're right, this was not a bug, but my not taking into account all
the different factors that influence formatting in MLO.

Regarding the term "main filter" I now believe it means the actual
filter (everything in it, not only "General"), but without the indirect
filtering by including parents or children. Also, I found that you can
set additional "parent filter" and "child filter" if you switch on the
hierarchy and the term "main filter" is probably also meant to
distinguish from these parent and child filters.

So, everything is fine except maybe MLO is just too complicated and the
help file is not helpful here as it neither explains what "highlighting"
means (putting in boldface) nor what "main filter" means.

-- Christoph