default fixed value for hierarchy order

[arlomh]

Hi!

It would be great if notes without a specified "fixed" property value were set at 0 by default, so if I wanted to move a particular note to the end of a hierarchy, I could set the value as "1" (and "2" for the note I want displayed after, "3" for the next, etc.); instead of manually setting a "fixed" value for all notes in the hierarchy to create my desired order. All notes without a set value (0) would continue be ordered alphabetically/ascending numerically, as is now if there's more than one note with the same "fixed" value.

Example: Say I have three notes: "a" (no specified fixed value), "b" (fixed:: 1)", "c" (fixed:: -1) Current order: c, b, a Proposed order: c, a, b

More info on my use case: I use the favourites tree structure feature to organize school notes. I like to sort them in order of first course unit/topic -> most recent, rather than alphabetically. To do this, I title each note with the unit number in the beginning. The issue I have run into is if a course has over 9 units, the 10th note is placed between 1 and 2, rather than at the end after 9:

Not related to this plugin, but I run into a similar issue using namespaces:

Adding the "fixed" property to all notes in the hierarchy can get a bit tedious, with this I would only need to manually set a value for notes after 9, which I typically only have one or two of. It's not that big of an inconvenience, but this would be a nice enhancement feature!

I hope this makes sense, let me know if you need any clarification or if there's something I'm missing that could solve this. Thanks!

[sethyuan]

Wow, this is a very detailed description 👍 Let me think about it, I'll report back later.

[sethyuan]

@arlomh BTW, for your specific use case, it's recommended to rename your units like this: U01 .. U10. This solves the ordering issue for all systems that do alphanumeric ordering.

Also, I'm a little concerned with the usage of negative numbers for fixed, I'm not sure if this is easy to understand for users. The current behavior just considers the case of fixing items at top of the list, not at the bottom, so numbers like 1, 2, 3 are easy to understand while -1, -2 are just not very natural.

[arlomh]

@sethyuan Thanks for the tip!

Perhaps adding a separate property type for moving a note to the bottom (fixed-bottom) would be more intuitive to users so positive numbers can be used as well.

fixed could be renamed to fixed-top, or used interchangeably (to not disrupt existing hierarchies with notes that use fixed).

[sethyuan]

I don't know, do you have any other use cases for fixing items to the bottom? I'm not sure it's worth doing it.

[arlomh]

@sethyuan Any use case I can think of would largely be for organization or aesthetics, which understandably may not be a priority for development. Thanks for your consideration anyway!