+11
Completed

Generalize the Link field into Remarks (comment, keywords) field

Thomas Lohrum 12 years ago updated by Alex Jenter 10 years ago 13
CN has a beautiful and simple GUI. The Link-field is limited to an URL though. Well, you can add any information to it, if you like, but the identifier is still limiting. I suggest to rename the field, e.g. "Comments" or "Remarks". There have been different requests in the past all trying to achieve the same thing; see the following posts Annotations (comments) in notes; User notes; Add Keywords field to the notes; Introducing Keywords, Catchwords; The drawback of these is the need for an additional field. In generalizing the "Link" field to a more flexible "Remarks" field would still allow to insert links and have them opened using the F7-key. But other information could be added to the note too. Still the GUI would not be cluttered. Technically spoken the change in the program would be a simple edit of the language file(s). The only addition to this would be to extend the search to also search "Title, Text and Remarks". The "Remarks" field could also be used to add words to the note, that help on searching, e.g. different spellings, the context why the note was added, personal coherence, annotations. This could all be done without bloating your tag-list or polluting the notes text.Having a separate field also allows to distinguish between clipped text in the notes and your own remarks to it.The remarks-field becomes a note to the notes-text itself.
editing searching complexity:easy

Answer

Answer
Completed
Released in V2.5
+1
Link recognition should be supported the same way as with the notes text. That is Ctrl+Click and Double-Click to open the link. This should be added in addition to the F7-key.
+2
Regardless of whether this feature will be implemented: Please keep in mind that there can be more than only the standard protocols known to all of us (like http:// file:// and so on). Every installed application can define its own protocol (like MS Onenote registers "onenote:///") and CN can open those links at the moment.
Please: I don't want to loose this ability (which makes link recognition a little bit harder).
Hi Chris, basically the field will be renamed only. Link recognition won't be changed. If it functions now, it should do the same in the future. My suggestion with Ctrl+Click and Double-Click is to extend the functionality to have the same behaviour as inside the note editor.
-1
I love the simplicity of this idea, however there also are some potential problems. I think the concept of the all-purpose remarks field would be more difficult to understand for the new users. Also it will make difficult introduction of additional filters: there will be no more solid information on the URL the note comes from. So for example it won't be easy to build the list of domains (like in browser history). In this way this simplification will be hindering further useful features. What do you think?
It's not always possible to come up with a solution that will satisfy all requirements without drawbacks. Over the last year i was thinking a lot about the issue. Imo it is a great idea for its simplicity and its efficiency. As for new users: don't use it until you'll automatically discover its need yourself. Even today you have the "link" field that is not necessary to use unless you grap an URL the first time using CNs built-in feature. Personally i use URLs inside the notes text only. I don't use the F7-key. I collect related links inside the text and open an URL using ctrl+click. Still F7 could be used for the remarks-field. Maybe CN would have to parse the field to check whether it contains an URL or not. Also it would be possible to save a flag to indicate the fields content. The latter would also allow to support Shift+F7 to open all URLs inside the notes-text; check my separate request for this. To me the link field can not be regarded a solid information to where the note comes from anyway. Its not important either. After the note is created the link field can be considered an information where to point to in the web. In regards to filters i don't see a problem. As said, add an additional filter for title+text+remarks, rename the "link" filter to "remarks" and enhance the search-everywhere filter to include "remarks". To complete the feature: F3 should also highlight text inside the remarks field. As a shortcut shift+ctrl+arrow-down could be used, which would correlate to ctrl+arrow-down for the tags-field.
-1
The idea is nice and I really like it, but still there also are advantages of having a separate Link field. Note that I'm not arguing about whether the Remarks field is necessary ;)
However votes are showing that the users are not concerned with this problem - alas, only 4 votes in 3 months..
Way back when i started to work out the idea, the request (from other users) was to avoid to clutter the gui by introducing new fields. So i came up with the idea of combining links with remarks. As a different approach i added a request to allow for sorting the tab order of fields in the form and to manage their visibilty. That way one user could turn of the link-field, whereas other users might want to turn of the remarks-field. Imo, the request here is great for it is the best of both requests, even though the link-field would not be an exclusive feature, it could be used this way. There could also be an option to enforce this for backward compatibility, e.g. "[X] use remark-field as link-field exclusively". As for the voting, this is not a true indicator, because it depends on various factors. Sometimes a request gets added, but gets flushed away quickly from other requests added contemporary. I have also noticed, that complexity and wording has a big influence on whether users will show interest on the topic or not. My conclusion from this is, that features of low/medium voting might still be of intereset for many users. 
I generally agree with your conclusion. However we also need some kind of threshold, otherwise there will be too many features to be implemented right away. Right now I consider ideas with score less than 10 as not ready for implementation (this obviously doesn't apply to bugs)  .

I also think that we need to take into consideration the percentage of downvotes. E.g. if we have two ideas both having score of 15, but one has 20 upvotes and 5 downvotes, and other has just 15 upvotes, I think it is clear that the second one should be implemented first, because the votes are more unanimous.
The three posts i try to combine with this request count 14+4+8 together, which adds up to a total of 26 votes. Even if you consider them not unique, the least would be 14 votes for your Annotations request.
Ok let's do the following:
1) Let's combine all Keyword-related ideas into one "Add Remarks (comments, keywords) field."
The annotations idea is a bit different because it implies possibility to annotate blocks of text and not the note as a whole.
2) Let's rename this idea to: Generalize the Link field into Remarks (comment, keywords) field
OK, let's do that.
Please check the discussion and the mockups here.

Fully agree, because for I use this filed also for any "source" of information. Than it's very easy to take "proof" later. For example I have more podcats titles (or titles of tv programs) in this field, than urls :) And when I need this piece of information later and if the source was journalist, i always search in other places, because they very often lie in tv programs :D

Answer
Completed
Released in V2.5