Adding Hybrid Short Mode in Layout - to allow a few requested fields to be displayed even in short mode

jingwangsg commented 1 year ago

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🔖 Feature description

Thank you for your efforts in developing obsidian-tasks. Short mode is great for a concise layout. However, some important element should be displayed such as ddl. For other information such as backlink, emoji is good enough.

I wonder whether it is possible to develop a hybrid short mode layout, so that we can display / show icon only / turn off specific elements.

✔️ Solution

develop a hybrid short mode layout, so that we can display / show icon only / turn off specific elements.

❓ Alternatives

No response

📝 Additional Context

No response

claremacrae commented 1 year ago

Hi @K-Nick - in short mode, you can hover over the task to see the detail. Or you can not use short mode, and hide individual elements.

Could you please explain the benefit of this work? What actual problem is it solving? Thank you.

Also, what is ddl?

jingwangsg commented 1 year ago

Hi @K-Nick - in short mode, you can hover over the task to see the detail. Or you can not use short mode, and hide individual elements.

Could you please explain the benefit of this work? What actual problem is it solving? Thank you.

Also, what is ddl?

Hi @claremacrae. ddl refers to deadline. In some cases, I care more about deadlines so it should be displayed directly without hovering. But also I want to know which deadline has been scheduled already, so that I do not need to process it immediately.

Hovering is enough for most cases and short mode is great and concise, it would be better if we are able to customize the display of some important elements like deadlines.

claremacrae commented 1 year ago

Hi @K-Nick

ddl refers to deadline.

Thanks - I never would have guessed that.

So Tasks doesn't have a concept of deadline. I might guess that you use due for that, but it would be good to know for sure.

... But also I want to know which deadline has been scheduled already, so that I do not need to process it immediately.

What what does a deadline being scheduled mean?

Hovering is enough for most cases and short mode is great and concise, it would be better if we are able to customize the display of some important elements like deadlines.

claremacrae commented 1 year ago

OK thank you for the reply. I've updated the title to reflect my current understanding of the request.

This is not something the Tasks code is currently designed to do, so it's not an easy thing to implement, and the rendering code is undergoing a lot of change at the moment.

One Pull Request #1519 is merged and released, users will have a lot more control over the display of tasks, via CSS, so you might be able to get some of the desired effect by formatting of fields that you are less interested in.

monomolecular commented 1 year ago

Came here looking for basically this... this ticket overlaps entirely with my request so I'm going to add an additional thought/support. The primary thing I want out of short mode is to replace the backlink text with the icon.

I'd love to, instead of this... [ ] #🛒 #📞 Call Acme Corp and check on the 10-ton anvil's I have on back-order. 🛫 2023-02-27 📅 2023-03-30 ([Things to take out that annoying roadrunner > Really Heavy Stuff) 🖊

Have a short mode that looks more like this... (where there's still a clickable backlink, but it's not all spelled out, and maybe just shows the an icon instead: [ ] #🛒 #📞 Call Acme Corp and check on the 10-ton anvil's I have on back-order. 🛫 📅 2023-03-30 🔗🖊

Perhaps a syntax like the following would work...

'''tasks not done short backlink short start date '''

And thank you! I'm really loving Obsidian Tasks. It has addressed my biggest hurdle to PKM and organization by allowing me to combine my notes and tasks in a way that really feels natural. Great work!

claremacrae commented 1 year ago

Hi @monomolecular - have you see this page in the docs? It gives several existing options for controlling the display of backlinks, including one CSS-based one pretty much identical to your request. https://obsidian-tasks-group.github.io/obsidian-tasks/how-to/style-backlinks/

Thanks for the kind comments.

monomolecular commented 1 year ago

Oh wow @claremacrae, I had not seen that but it does 99% of what I needed. Thank you! I'd still like to have the ability to set it as part of the query but I'll try this out for a while.

I'll share the reason I'd like it both ways. I have a page where I have a whole bunch of task queries which I link to from my daily notes template. I still feel like I lose tasks occasionally, and on that page I can go and see tasks pulled into many different lists so that I hopefully don't lose anything. It's in this view that I may want to see the backlink so that I don't have to mouseover trying to remember why I created a task called "We need to talk to Bob!"... it had the context of being in the note called "Emergency Meeting on X Topic". But I'm splitting hairs I think and the CSS trick (which I just implemented, thank you) probably takes care of it.

I did think of one more use case for the way the original request was structured though... It would be nice to have a query for completed tasks that shows the dates for when they were completed, but no longer shows the other dates because they're no longer relevent once the task has been completed. But again, that's a very minor improvement over what's already working well for me.

claremacrae commented 1 year ago

@monomolecular, if you decide to go for the CSS facility because it exists, a workaround to make the location visible in a few exceptional queries would be to use group by filename - or path or backlink…

Or you could use short mode in those queries and hover over the tasks.

monomolecular commented 1 year ago

Thanks for the tip!

claremacrae commented 9 months ago

In view of this size of the backlog for this project, and the demotivating effect of a very long backlog on volunteer energy levels, I'm going through a slow process of reviewing tasks for things that are one or more of the following:

unlikely to be realistically achievable, from the design of the current code, and the planned future refactorings
not sufficiently high priority to a broad community of users, based on the feedback I receive from a variety of sources
do not fit the core purpose of the Tasks plugin
are better covered by a different plugin - to share the development and maintenance effort

So I'm marking this one as 'not planned'. This doesn't mean 'won't fix' - it means not likely to be done in the foreseeable future.

obsidian-tasks-group / obsidian-tasks