Request for Comment - Universal Selector

[TonyM]

Folks,

I am keen to solicit information from the community on a concept I am working on. A Universal selector.

I am keep to obtain you views naive or expert. Please try and keep this conceptual, but if you must you can get detailed or technical.

Many of you would realise I am totally committed to tiddlywiki, both personally and professionally. I am also a conceptual thinker who tries and maximises the benefits and usability of everything I do in tiddlywiki.  I also believe strongly on obtaining feedback from the community when developing a concept rather that relying only my own world view. Diversity of ideas is valuable. I also see the value in brainstorming in the early phase of solution development.

The truth be said, be it out community of the clumsy nature of Google Forums such attempts by me in the past have only generated a little feedback, but I will open this up again and see.

It seems to me that one of the more time consuming parts of tiddlywiki is the process of selecting items, be it tags to use, to tiddlers to tag, a fieldname or value to assign to a field, or building a list of tiddlers or possible values. Don't get me wrong, tiddlywiki already handles this very well, but I wonder if it was able to handle this extremely well, would tiddlywiki be even more powerful?

I have a conceptual idea of a way to do this, I am currently in the initial design phase of this project. However I intentionally do not want to share any details yet, incase it may color peoples ideas or expectations. 

Hence this post. Please comment with any ideas you have and no idea is a bad idea. A little or a lot is fine.

The subject I would like your feedback on is;

What do you find you need to select in tiddlywiki, what problems, or enhancements to the selection process would you like to see, what is your most common selection methods like searches, filters, tagging and which are less common because they are more difficult such as selecting a value to assign to a field. What do you select most often, tags, tiddler titles, other text or lists, html or css other other information? Do you use radio, checkboxes, edifields or searches, do you like to drag and drop to select and reorder items. Do you select text and copy it to the clipboard, or is selecting dates your biggest issue? What are the best selection methods you are aware of?

What to I mean universal selector

With the information you provide me I am looking to make an interface that will allow easy selection of almost anything within tiddlywiki, this is what I consider a universal selector. The tiddlyverse is the universe in which it applies, but of course this extends to text, html, urls and domains or css.

Thanks in advance

Tony

[Mat]

I'm sure we all appreciate your enthusiasm and commitment for our shared little baby.

I find it unclear what you mean with "to select". I suspect you have some more specific thing in mind than what can be understood from your question. At first I thought you were referring to what one does with the SelectWidget or similar drop downs but then you mention selecting "text" which makes me think of marking out a portion with the mouse cursor, e.g for right clicking, and selecting in/from "lists, html or css" seems to be about targeting. In some sense, even searching for a specific tiddler is to select it. Or "to select" can be "to set focus" on something.

For tag selection, I've modified the dropdown to show a three column list with a) existin titles used as tags b) the rest of titles c) system tags

I've also modified the custom field dropdowns to show all previous values used

One frustration with the custom fields is "selecting" the next field, i.e one has to mouse click on it instead of just jumping to it via e.g tab button

"Selecting" an element for CSS (i.e by means of selectors) is also iffy, i.e to target it.

Do these aspects at all touch on what you mean?

<:-)

[@TiddlyTweeter]

A big issue in TW is what "level" you at.

I'd like to be able to select text in TW and have it copied as plain text, or wikitext, or full render html.

That would be useful to me.

TT

[TonyM]

Mat

I have kept it intentionally vague and you and
TTs answers are a good start. I expect many to focus on tags and tiddler titles but there is a lot more. To be selectable something will most likely already be present, possibly in small or large numbers and then the selection saved. Often we also want to reduce or filter a set of items available for selection, sometime select from a few specific values, then such selections used to do something or saved for later.

I really are after peoples selection needs without prejudice.

Regards
Tony

[Mat]

OK, another one: "Selecting" the right syntax for widgets etc. I constantly need to go over to tw.com to look up stuff. 

I also need to reference my over sized list of TW creations/experiments/f*ckups/halfbakes/... to locate and select "that thing that did that little bit..."

And I need to select the right GG post when scanning through the search results when looking for Foo.

<:-)

[TonyM]

Mat

Your so true. Only on you saying this, I realised these are my issues as well. Good stuff.

Tony

[TonyM]

Tt

Thanks for your suggestion. Have you looked at the editor preview modes because this is an avenue for this along with some great browser add-ons.

I am not so much trying to provide a solution here but some tips you can explore to inform you of the possibilities. I don't see why the existing previews could be leveraged to provide something like you are asking.

Regards
Tony

[TonyM]

Here is a selection process I would like to improve.

When tagging a tiddler to be able to do so from a curated list of tags not from all available tags. Idealy presented in an organised view.

Regards
Tony

[David Gifford]

I would like to, from reading mode, select a color from a dropdown color picker with more default options than the current one, for a tiddler that does not have a color field, and have it not only create the color field but add the color. The current process is:

1) Edit tiddler

2) Click new field

3) Type color

4) Click add

5) Click the field to activate the picker

6a) Click one of the default colors, many of which are either ugly, make the tag text too hard to read, or are too similar to each other.

6b) Or fiddle with the color picker tools

[possible extra step of adding to custom colors, but knowing that they will be gone the next time I open the file]

7) Click OK

8) Close tiddler

[Watt]

Interesting question TonyM, and maybe a great opportunity to fill a missing gap in TW.

In my opinion there is a missing top layer in TW. It never received the final buttons translating the dark wikitext incantations into a new-user friendly UI.

Consider MS Word - do I type at the command line an elaborate, syntactically arcane text instruction to tell it to create a bullet point list? No, I click a button. The instructions are then inserted into the document correctly. I don't even need to see them or learn them or remember to use the correct bracket combo. I just get a bullet point list! TW never took it all the way with its GUI imo.

The Stamp tool does have some functionality in this direction. An extensive list of common TW code snippets can be added to it, but I think a whole new button set is needed which will do the work for beginners.

The roll your own option would still be available for the adept but an edition with off the shelf code buttons, maybe grouped by common programming functions might help many new TW users.

[Mark S.]

Yes, I've been thinking about this. I guess for some use you could duplicate the tag entry field, and set up a 2nd one to show only a particular subset of tags.

Tags are useful and the core accommodates them in ways it doesn't for user defined fields, but if you use them everywhere you end up with tag "pollution".

Frequently you are forced to choose between tags meant to indicate structure and tags meant to add semantics.

[Mat]

Watt wrote:

In my opinion there is a missing top layer in TW. It never received the final buttons translating the dark wikitext incantations into a new-user friendly UI.

I agree with this - but the very example you give (bullet lists) is not a very good one considering we basically have bullet list in the rich editor toolbar. I started to shape a more visual UI called TidBitz but it got halted when I realized DnD can't be made to work as freely as I thought which was a showstopper for the concept.

<:-)

[Watt]

Yes, the top of the head the example came from was a little too close to the ground at the time. ;)
I've only just twigged how useful the stamp tool can be.

[Mat]

Mark S. wrote:

Yes, I've been thinking about this. I guess for some use you could duplicate the tag entry field, and set up a 2nd one to show only a particular subset of tags. [...] Frequently you are forced to choose between tags meant to indicate structure and tags meant to add semantics.

I've requested tag categories for many years. One use case is for when working on a certain topic, I only want a limited set of tags. Another, more important use for tag categories, would be for filtering... get tiddlers where the, say, "author" tags - but not the "character" tags match "Potter". 

Tobias' request is probably the most structured request for this. And Jeds GenTags is an actual implementation - but if I recall it has some critical limitations that were never solved. (Maybe the limitation was that you couldn't use filter operations or search on them... something like that....?) 

<:-)

[Watt]

Wow - you've already done it! http://tidbitz.tiddlyspot.com/ is almost exactly what I was thinking of. Could the buttons be made available to the editor instead of the sidebar? Clickable instead of dragdropable? I think tidbitz needs reviving - anything that lowers the bar for beginners has my vote.

[Mat]

Watt wrote:

Wow - you've already done it! http://tidbitz.tiddlyspot.com/ is almost exactly what I was thinking of.  Could the buttons be made available to the editor instead of the sidebar? Clickable instead of dragdropable?

 Happy to find someone who also sees the light in this :-) I'm pretty sure those things would possible.

I think tidbitz needs reviving - anything that lowers the bar for beginners has my vote.

When I have time to engage more deeply in something it will have to be with TWederation which is once again on halt from my side. This is the most important project I can think of in TiddlyVerse. But anyone, please feel free to pick up on TidBitz. I think it could (will?) be a really valuable thing.

<:-)

[TonyM]

Folks,

Thanks so far for the feedback. It is productively moving around a range of subjects. TidBitz is a great example of taking universal selector to another level. Please keep the lateral thinking rolling. The idea of drag an drop as a selector was in my original post, what other methods may be available?

For example inspired by this thread imagine a set of drop down filters on the tag edit. For example you may select a filter called status, and the only tags visible would be those also tagged status. This would be away to select tags according to a whole new level of organisation with little or no impact.

The advantage of improved selectors is they add functionality but have little effect on any underlying mechanism.

Regards

Tony

[David Gifford]

Wow, TidBitz is COOL! I added it to the toolmap

Dave