The idea here is that if a note is called "🍎 My Favorite Apples", that initial emoji character is promoted to the icon for the note. This is already done for creation rules: there is precedent, and there is already code to support it.
The chief upside I see is that it is very likely that some users are already doing this in note titles.
There are a few downsides:
Note titles now have emoji in them. That means that they live in all links and in the filesystem. I'm not a huge fan of this.
Users are limited to emoji characters and to how those characters look on a system (which can vary).
Icons Defined in Front Matter
In this implementation, a user could define a front-matter property to set the icon.
e.g. Emoji icons:
icon: 🍎
or a relative filepath:
icon: ./my_custom_icon.svg
or a wiki-linked file:
icon: [[My Cool Icon.png]]
The key advantage here is flexibility. A user can set whatever icon they like. They are not limited to Emoji characters, but they can use them. They could even use web links!
A potential disadvantage is one of accessibility. A front-matter property is somewhat more complex than just sticking an emoji at the front of the filename.
Another disadvantage is one of aesthetics. A user who wants to customize the icon of their notes may be turned off by needing to work with the relatively ugly front matter syntax.
Between the two of these, I lean towards the latter, though they aren't mutually exclusive. I would love other folks' thoughts.
Let users customize the icon shown next to the note in the title, sidebar, map, and search. This is a popular feature in systems like Notion.
Originally requested in Discord.
I see two obvious options for implementation.
First-Character Emoji Icons
The idea here is that if a note is called "🍎 My Favorite Apples", that initial emoji character is promoted to the icon for the note. This is already done for creation rules: there is precedent, and there is already code to support it.
The chief upside I see is that it is very likely that some users are already doing this in note titles.
There are a few downsides:
Icons Defined in Front Matter
In this implementation, a user could define a front-matter property to set the icon.
e.g. Emoji icons:
or a relative filepath:
or a wiki-linked file:
The key advantage here is flexibility. A user can set whatever icon they like. They are not limited to Emoji characters, but they can use them. They could even use web links!
A potential disadvantage is one of accessibility. A front-matter property is somewhat more complex than just sticking an emoji at the front of the filename.
Another disadvantage is one of aesthetics. A user who wants to customize the icon of their notes may be turned off by needing to work with the relatively ugly front matter syntax.
Between the two of these, I lean towards the latter, though they aren't mutually exclusive. I would love other folks' thoughts.