I definitely think an option for lines to distinguish bullet level should be able to be toggled on.
I don’t quite get the pushback - Obsidian supports multiple bullet levels currently - and can even fold them.
Why avoid encouraging potential improvements to UI because Roam (or other outliners) have them? I mean Reddit and other forums even use this UI technique to assist in readability - outliners apps don’t have a monopoly over the design option.
Obsidian is about extensibility and being a personal notetaking tool to suit your needs - if it doesn’t break the values of Obsidian I don’t see the problem. Plus this is a plugin request (which might even be achievable with CSS, I dunno) so it’s not something the devs need to tackle.
Whats the actual constraint to adding this UI polish option to make a feature that currently exists better? So far I haven’t seen one actual rebuttal in the thread.
The only argument I could see is if, as a business, Obsidian want to activity discourage features & plugins that could compromise sales for Dynalist. However I get the impression that’s not a major concern.
From the FAQ:
"Plain text and Markdown means portability, but it also means that Obsidian cannot uniquely identify each block of text like outliners do.
We’ll try to approximate as many outliner features as possible though, as long as it does not conflict with our other core values."
The values being:
- notes in plain text markdown, local, control
- connections between ideas
- robust plugin system to “support people’s drastically different note-taking and knowledge management workflows.”
Those are the constraints to explore the idea. That’s it. (maybe add the techstack). From what I see, this suggestion doesn’t have a obvious conflicts or limitations. But I’m all ears & accept there could be, I just haven’t seen any argued yet.
I lay this out because I see this as a fairly minor suggestion, yet it seems like people get caught up with other thoughts that influence from honest discourse on the actual limitation & constraints of what can or should be done, simply because Roam or Obsidian’s outliner was mentioned and loose sight on what values/constraints that the devs have laid out for us to explore ideas.
This is a beta after all, and the community has a lot of great minds & ideas which can really get into the meat of an idea. But getting distracted with what appears to be irrelevant or weak points bogs down the novel, relevant insights to the actual concept/question.