This is an outstanding writeup and captures most of the ideas I would have asked for. It is high level enough to allow for finer details to be added later. I think capturing many of the “multi-page” functions that Scrivener and Ulysses do would make Logseq much more of a complete tool.
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If this was implemented, it’s likely that I could eliminate 1 or 2 of the other tools that I currently need to use. I love Zettlr and would love Obsidian (if it were open source) but Logseq going in this direction would make my whole note-taking/thinking/writing process more complete and simple.
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This is a brilliant idea.
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Plus 1 for this. It would be great if Logseq could handle folding headers with text below the the way Obsidian does.
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Another interesting thought is that this expands the modularity of logseq. so it can be used as an outliner, a task manager, a markdown editor and a longform writing tool (with the ability to breakdown writing projects into chunks like Scrivener/Ulysses)…
Exciting stuff!
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I’m a heavy-duty Logseq user; I use it all day, every day as Product Manager at a fintech company in the UK. It’s used to capture my ideas, record notes from interviews and conversations, correlate concepts and topics, document research notes, prepare product roadmaps, perform competitor analyses, plan my day ahead etc. The back/cross linking functionality works exactly like my mind works. Logseq is the only app that’s done this for me, and I’ve tried many over the decades.
It’s literally the only app I have open all the time. Everything of importance is recorded in Logseq (if it’s not in Logseq it didn’t happen 
)
I came across this thread because I subscribe to the Logseq Weekly RSS feed (thanks @Ed_Nico ) and it struck a chord with me.
I have all these notes, with all the rich context provided through linked references, embedded blocks etc. but I then have to dick about getting that info into something that can be easily summarised and circulated to colleagues for comment, review etc.
I’ve tried workarounds like working with quote blocks, but that breaks really easily.
If Logseq were to go for an MVP in this area, I’d suggest
- the ability to create a page where you can set Outliner-Mode-Off, which means I could write paragraphs of text that aren’t prefixed or automatically indented
- retain the ability to embed blocks so that I can, for example, write my paragraphs of long form text at the top of the page and include embedded blocks of related content further down the page which only serve as transient notes/reminders of what needs to be included in the non-outlined text I’m writing about.
If I had the above, I’d be able to:
- Set up a new page to compose a document that summarises my thoughts and research on a specific topic
- have access to all the notes that I need to write the long form text about
- copy and paste the final output of the long form text to whatever corporate system/app I need to use to share the information
- … without breaking the integrity and linkages of my source material
@Luhmann Thanks for posting your suggestion, and your rationale. It inspired me to write this.
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Thank you for this very interesting discussion. I would also be very very very interested in this functionality. It seems to me that there should be an integration with Pandoc via YAML headers like Zettlr does for example. That would allow to export and to parameterize the exports finely.
For the composition, we could imagine a block selector based on keywords that would allow to extract all the necessary pieces for a long document.
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Exactly what I would have ask ! Thank for this post !
The reply of RXA is also perfect !
Really hope that it will come to this soon!
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Meantime, I discovered the pluging doc viewer that can let you manage a page in a approx long form format.
This could be used until getting a pure long form.
You may find the advanced command <verse to be useful. Allows the enter key to create new lines in a block.
This doesn’t provide a solution to everything, but until you find some plugins that work for you or the functionality is added to the beta, hopefully this is helpful.
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Just type < and it should bring up a menu similar to the slash menu.
Sorry, I deleted my reply when I found out how to do it (the light bulb lit right after I typed my reply). Thank you very much!
Like most of you, I am mentally in outline mode the VAST majority of the time, so logseq is ideal. But there are times when I want to add a non-outline type of note to an item, but not for it to be an attachment of something “non-logseq”.
Workflowy seems to handle this intuitively, and I think logseq could use the concept as a starting point.
In Workflowy, shift-enter creates a note under the current bullet, that’s ENTIRELY intuitive.
- ENTER for a new bullet item
- SHIFT+ENTER for a new note under the bullet item
For the internal workings…that new note could be treated like a separate markdown document, no special outline treatment, just standard markdown so it could be a huge longform document, or just a little note that allows markdown styling.
Back many years ago, there was an app called The Outliner of Giants that did something similar. The note under a bullet item could even end up being an entire blog post, it was all handled quite beautifully via the interface, and made intuitive sense.
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This already exists in logseq. You can enable it from config.edn
I
;; By default, pressingEnterin the document mode will create a new line. ;; Set this totrue so that it's the same behaviour as the usual outliner mode. :shortcut/doc-mode-enter-for-new-block? false
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I wasn’t clear, sorry. I was thinking more of an enhancement/alternative of that ability. To have shift+enter put us into “note mode” (if we want it to). Or maybe alt+enter would take us into “note mode”. Something different.
In logseq, it’s beautiful today that shift+enter is newline inside the same bullet item, and enter closes that item and takes us to the next one, that’s great and good for formatting that bullet item with intentional line length
In workflowy, shift+enter adds a note entity to the bullet item, which is a whole different thing entirely. It’s kind of confused me multiple times because it’s difficult to get out of that note item and back to the outline, but I appreciate the possibilities here as well. I would love for logseq to take the good/possible and leave out the bad/confusing.
Now that I’m thinking about it more:
- I love the way logseq is now for the casual need to format the bullet item with intentional newline, shift+enter is perfect as is
- I’d like to have “note mode” activated perhaps by alt+enter or some other key combo. “Note mode” would let us create non-outline typical markdown content that is contained within it’s parent. Kind of a code-fence with plain markdown content
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@Leslie_P Notes are a feature of OPML so all classical outliners tend to support them. Logseq is not based on OPML but on text files and there’s no natural way of doing that. However, you could add notes as a special property if you want, something like note:: Whatever your note is.
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Converting between OPML and markdown makes bullets equivalent to headers (with the h1-h6 hierarchy) and lines below the bullet into text. So there is a natural way of doing this, so long as you maintain awareness of the difference between paragraphs/bullets and lines.
My problem was with the shortcuts. I wanted to make the behaviour the same in document and outline mode, but changing shortcuts always gave the inverse action in the other mode. I found this very irritating because toggling document mode accurately switches bullets on in paragraphs, and not lines, but the keyboard behaviour was different. Now solved by editing config.edn as advised above.
Thank you for this. Solved my problem. Though I am a bit surprised that there wasn’t a more visible toggle.
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I don’t know if it’s worth a separate feature request, but without asking for a full freeform text mode, I also wish that headers at least behaved as everywhere else (i.e. as an outline). Right now, they are just a weird formatting option, as the indent level is the absolute outline level.
Headers could be useful as a loose structure that doesn’t waste screen space with indents.
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