Notebook Manual

[Victoria Steigerwald]

Welcometo the Project Jupyter documentation site. Jupyter is a large umbrellaproject that covers many different software offerings and tools, including thepopular Jupyter Notebookand JupyterLab web-basednotebook authoring and editing applications. The Jupyter project and itssubprojects all center around providing tools (and standards)for interactive computing with computational notebooks.

A notebook is a shareable document that combines computer code, plain languagedescriptions, data, rich visualizations like 3D models, charts, graphs andfigures, and interactive controls. A notebook, along with an editor (likeJupyterLab), provides a fast interactive environment for prototyping andexplaining code, exploring and visualizing data, and sharing ideas withothers.

Individual sub-projects are typically organized around a key feature of theJupyter ecosystem, and have their own community, documentation and governance.Below is a list of documentation for major parts of the Jupyter ecosystem.

I should be able to sort notes in a notebook manually, and Evernote should remember each notebook's manual sort order if I later select an alphabetic sort and then want to go back to viewing my manual sort order. (New notes added after my manual sort could be added to either the top or the bottom of the lists in the manual sort view.) I'm using Evernote 2.0 on OS X.

The ability to have the manual sorting of notes in particular has been requested over several threads in the last 8 years and does not seem to be high on the agenda for Evernote for some reason. All competitor products, OneNote, Google Keep, Simple Note all have the ability to do this.

I agree, I have seen people post good enhancement requests but get questioned why they would need this or be given several work arounds. In general, I think its just the community trying to contribute and help a fellow user. In fact, with regards to this manual sorting, I was given a work around of using number prefix like 10, 20, 30 etc and sort by title. I do use reminders but find it messy and too much thinking to use as a sort method. ie. having to pick random date/times that match the order you are thinking about then getting reminders pop up, that are not real reminders just put there to help you sort. Also the deal breaker for me is that on the Android app, you can't sort by Reminders so you can't get a consistent view on Windows and Android.

Seems like a very natural basic build block thing to do with lots of applications - scrum board, gtd, writing a term paper, helping to decide which patern I like best - this something I have been itching for for a while. The idea that you can already do this by tagging or changing the title to affect sort just seems silly to me. 50 notes and I want to change the order of 1 note in the middle?

I don't think you need a field to show the priority, just let me drag them around and remember what order they are in the next time I open evernote. If I move a note to a new notebook, just drop it to the bottom.

I didn't even know this thread existed. I have been wanting the same thing, but I haven't been able to express it very clearly, and here we are with a simple solution: a manual sort order. Yes. This is what I want.

I do a lot of writing, amongst other things, and I would appreciate the ability to arrange and re-arrange notes freely. Once you have more than a handful of notes, the renaming process to change the sort (using sort by title) or re-dating process (using sort by created date) becomes quite laborious, and on some platforms (the iOS), the re-dating option isn't available.

My current workaround is to create a note full of note links. Then, it is a relatively simple matter to cut/paste in order to change the order. This works well enough, but it isn't quite the same, because you are jumping from note to note instead of seeing them all lined up conveniently in the center pane. We cannot make note links on mobile platforms yet, so this is only an option if you are using desktops.

It isn't a deal-breaker or anything, but the ability to manually determine the search order could potentially affect a lot of users. Complaints about the inability to pin notes to the top, GTD folks, writers, users preparing a kind of "slide show" of notes with photographs, and people sharing notebooks (multiple users with multiple naming conventions make things a bit messy).

Yeah this thread is a bit funny in the sense that some people are arguing against a feature that wouldn't get in their way, one very vocal person here going so far as to repeatedly say our work method must be wrong. How can you be so sure?

For things where manual sorting is a must, I now use and I would have liked to do everything in Evernote, but the TOC workaround is not workable for me. So if you stumble upon this thread and realise that manual sorting in Evernote just isn't going to happen, have a look at those alternatives and see if you can use them parallel to Evernote.

Interesting suggestion - Have you tried sorting by selecting the topic at the top of each column? Can you offer an example of what you want to sort? There are several work-around solutions that might address your need.

We've had this suggestion before, back a couple of months ago. Basically means having a separate field (or index) that tracks manual order, which changes when you move notes around, possibly cascading into other notes (e.g. I have notes in order 1, 2 and 3, I move 3 above 2 and so must change both 2 and 3's sort order index -- swaps them in this case). Also gets a little messy and possible confusing if I am viewing a filtered list (via notebook or tag or saved search), and start moving things around: how does it affect other notes not currently being viewed?

Not necessarily. The simplest solution (practically zero storage overhead) is to attach a map/dictionary to each user's account called "Sorted Notebooks": a dictionary where each key is the Globally Unique ID of a Notebook and each value is a comma delimited string of sorted Note GUIDs. When I opt to sort a Notebook manually, the string of Note GUIDs is re-hydrated into a linked list of Note GUIDs. (Inserting into a linked list only ever requires updating two list items.) This linked list determines the order of the Notes, and Notes added after the last manual sort can be added to the end of the linked list.

"This list is currently being sorted by search or tag criteria. If you want to manually re-sort this particular set of notes, click *here* to create a new 'Scrapbook' based on this list. Otherwise, select a Notebook to re-order its contents.

(A Scrapbook, which would really be just a list of note GUIDs, would be very handy if you cared to implement it. E.g. If I, as a Dungeon Master, had a Notebook of Drow NPCs and a Notebook of Dwarf NPCs, I could select notes from each Notebook to make a Scrapbook called "possible encounters for the Underground Campaign"-- I wouldn't want to clutter up my tag namespace with such an arbitrary tag.)

My use case happens to be GTD, where each Notebook is a "project" and each Note is a "next action". Another use case might be a writer or journalist needing to manually organize a story. Numbering the title of each Note in a notebook might work, and then using fractions (e.g. 1.25) when I need to squeeze a Note in between whole numbers, but I think Evernote can make this happen.

It is my experience that there are many ways to skin a cat with Evernote. (sorry for the poor choice of words PETA). I use the create date to track my GTD items in the future. But once the Due Date becomes available, watch out. There will be a flurry of new ways to work your GTD items.

I could envision the new "Due Date" field being helpful for a journalist who wants to add chapters to his story and keep them in order. Another fellow in this forum was looking for a way to sort his Biblical notes based on the books of the bible. Kind of puts a different meaning to the End of Days. Using the Due Date as a sort method is not perfect, but it could be a nice step forward. And the "Due Date" field will allow for integration with third party reminder apps.

I don't see this as a GTD feature request-- If I know that a notebook is sorted just the way I like it, I can scroll to the middle or the end of the notebook to find the note I need without having to remember the title of the note. It seems technically fairly do-able; if I'm wrong, let me know.

I'm sure I can make Evernote work as my GTD system as-is. I don't even particularly want a 'due date' field for notes at this time, because if you're doing GTD right (which I rarely am) you're looking at your lists often enough that you have a sense of when things are due, and you're looking at an actual calender (which is only for things with hard deadlines) as well.

Sorry if I misunderstood you. Your first sentence started out with "My use case happens to be GTD", so I expanded on it. I also mentioned the variety of uses that a due date will offer and why so many people are asking for it. One of them could be the ability to manually sort notes in a sequence that is important to the user. To sort notebooks into a user-specific sequence, just use a prefix in front of the notebook's name. The drawback is you don't get the ability to easily re-sort the notebooks in a different fashion.

The only people who can address that are those who work at EN. But as has been pointed out a few times, now, this doesn't seem to be anything EN is interested in adding. But if they were, it would be a good long while, so it's best to learn to use the tools already in EN.

I wrote that "My use case happens to be GTD..." in response to jbenson2's request for an example of how a manual sort might be used. I did not mention GTD in my original feature request because I see this feature as something anyone might use constantly once they clicked on a note and realized they could drag it up or down within a notebook.

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