Discussion: Unify pages and blocks

[alex0]

@venture-comp

This may feel natural to you, but is not my exact workflow.
Natural is to have freedom of choice how to organize things, without surprises.

I recognized your usecase as legitimate since my first reply in this thread.

I tried to help you in multiple ways and I just shared my workflow where this issue is not prominent.

Logseq doesn’t support your use case with Simple Queries but it would be nice if it did. This has been my position for the whole thread.

Logseq supports your use case with Advanced Queries. I can’t find your request for help on Discord#queries as I just suggested to do.

@venture-comp

(Edit) Regarding example: At one point in the future, you’d like to find out content about PKM features and search for {{query (and [[PKM]] [[Features]])}}. Nothing found, if you can’t remember, that PKM is a page tag - ouch.

I understood your point from the beginning and we discussed it for a while, no need to reply in a prickly way like I didn’t understand the issue at all.

You hit the second strike of being mannerless (first one here).

You even refused to rename this thread despite I said many times “unify” is the wrong term in a polite way.

I won’t waste another minute with you. Bye!

[venture-comp]

@alex0

no need to reply in a prickly way

Again: Not any intention to be rude from my side. I am sorry, if you perceived the discussion in a different way.

@alex0

You hit the second strike of being mannerless (first one here).

Sorry, but simply no. Read again before and after the post, as well the comments from others users.

@alex0

You even refused to rename this thread

By chance: Have you overread that I intent to close this post? After discussion, my expression was this post is either
a) too broad for a specific feature request
b) rather a bug report.
(still not sure about this)

The whole post has been about making page and block behave like one common unit, so just renaming the title would confuse future readers more than help.

Thanks for your time anyway.

[cldwalker]

Hi. In the upcoming db version, blocks and pages are being unified. Blocks can have linked references. See docs/db-version.md at feat/db · logseq/docs · GitHub for more details

[alex0]

@cldwalker

blocks and pages are being unified

But the main issue discussed here as not been addressed yet i.e. now in DB version we have a menu entry named “Node reference” that let the user pick a page or a block and it appears as a [[wikilink]] using the title of a page or the content of a block. But when you manually type the same wikilink somewhere else it creates the classic page.

So we have wikilinks that looks exactly the same but point to different things:

There is this fundamental issue of how to reference a block with [[unique name]] and on Discord I have suggested the following:

1. The blocks could have an optional name: property set manually by the user or automatically (more later)

2. [[name]] could display the unique name given to the block

3. ![[name]] could display the content of the block when used inline with other text…

4. …and embed the whole block with children when used on its own line

For example:

- content of the block
  Name: short unique name
  - child block

- This is a reference to [[short unique name]]
- This is an inline embed of ![[short unique name]]
- ![[short unique name]]

Rendered as:

- This is a reference to short unique name
- This is an inline embed of content of the block
- content of the block
  - child block

The same would happen with pages and their titles.

“Short unique name” could be set manually by the user or by a ML algorithm (for faster workflows when using the current Node reference menu selecting blocks with no name) and it doesn’t matter the format as long as it’s unique. For example the algorithm could use parent and children blocks to infer that a proper name could be The Title (book) and assign it if there isn’t another block with that name. The user could change that later.

What do you think?