Dangerzone (FlowState-like plugin prototype)

[macedotavares]

Thank you very much for the kind mention. It’s a great honor, although my contribution barely qualifies as moral support.

I’ll be using it heavily this week and I’ll let you know how it goes.

Cheers!

[alehandrof]

How does one activate this plugin? I wasn’t able to find a relevant command.

[akaalias]

Hi @alehandrof, great question.

First, as with any new plugin, you’ll have to make sure it’s activated:

Then, but it’s not very obvious, there’s a button in the ribbon to the left:

Hope this helps!

[alehandrof]

Ah, right! I tend to navigate Obsidian with the keyboard as much as possible, and it didn’t even occur to me to look for a button. Thanks!

[akaalias]

You got it! Hotkey is on the horizon, too.

[akaalias]

Hey @AutonomyGaps, I’ve added the hotkey (Alt+Shift+1) to the latest release!

You can use it either to

• Start a new session from scratch
• Extend a running session by resetting the countdown

I couldn’t set the Command-Key (⌘) programmatically, but you should be able to re-assign it in your hotkey settings.

[crisscrossed]

This looks great, but it does not work for me or I do something wrong. However fast I type the 5 second “alarm” starts counting and my text is erased. I cannot get the text to persist by any speed or amounts of words.

[akaalias]

Thank you for reporting this and the animation really helps understand what you mean.

I wonder if it’s a weird interaction with another plugin (the word-count), in which only one plugin gets to capture the “keydown” event.

Could you please try disabling the word-count plugin and try again?

[akaalias]

Here’s something I’ve wanted for a while: Fading text (now available in v0.0.7)

[crisscrossed]

No the word count is not the reason. I turned off all other third party plugins, but the problem persists.

[crisscrossed]

I found the issue. It was Text Expander. now it works. That’s where the conflict was.

[akaalias]

Holy moly, that’s good to know! How did that cross your mind? I think I had an issue like this with Espanso months ago.

PS: I’m working on an Obsidian-based text expander at the moment: https://github.com/akaalias/text-expander-plugin

[macedotavares]

Hey, @akaalias!

I’ve been playing with Dangerzone (I can’t help but think of this every time I write the plugin’s name) and I’m having LOADS of fun.

I can only think of a couple of things that might improve it:

1. Only deleting the text that was entered after the timer started. Let’s say that I want to use Dangerzone while writing a journal entry in my daily note. I know that fairness doesn’t have a place in a plugin like this one, but losing my entire days’ records just because I couldn’t handle my evening thoughts seems too disproportionate.

2. On the other hand, I could recover deleted text by Cmd+Z’ing. And while trashing the whole note seems too severe, allowing us to recover everything feels too soft. “No undos”, I say.

Anyway, the plugin is working great and it’s
so
much
fun.

Thank you very much this.

Cheers!

[akaalias]

@crisscrossed - I think I found another reason this may not have worked.

For me,

• when i had a note open
• then installed the plugin
• then went back to the already-open note and
• then started a session

the key-down event (which is used to keep the red countdown from happening) isn’t registered. That leads me to think the event-capture is only attached to newly-opened notes.

[crisscrossed]

Yes, you are right. And it is not about Text Expander. It somehow works now, but I am not sure why.

[akaalias]

@macedotavares I’m so happy to hear you’re enjoying it. Same for me with the song by the way. Every. Single. Time.

I hear you regarding the “checkpoint” feature. I personally don’t use the Dangerzone within my daily notes but in a separate, dangerzone note. But you’re the second person to describe something similar. I 100% agree that “losing my entire days’ records just because I couldn’t handle my evening thoughts seems too disproportionate.”

About the Cmd-Z’ing, I’m still looking into history and persistence and all that and keep you posted.

[AutonomyGaps]

Breathtaking speed of development! Thanks so much.

With that shortcut and shortcuts for the “Note Refactor” plug-in (to split the text to a new note) and the “Workbench” plug (to toss the text there for later processing), I’ve got a great workflow that just has me keep using the note entitled “DangerZone” as where I enter stuff. With a repeating tasks in OmniFocus that contains a Hook link to my DangerZone file, I’m all set! Now just the writing…. Thanks again for creating this!

[AutonomyGaps]

One further thought. I love the fact that the text starts to fade. Really effective touch. But I have the sense that it kicks in too soon. My preference would be to have the default be a 5 second delay before the text starts to fade, and then 10 seconds as the cutoff for deletion. So, you get an alert at 5 second, but then there is a grace period before the text disappears.

[akaalias]

Ooohh… I was racking my brain what you meant. You mean at the beginning of a session, correct? Because it kicks in right away but a few seconds to get settled would help. Am I correct?

[AutonomyGaps]

Sorry I wasn’t clear. I didn’t mean the start of session.

What I meant is that I’d like to have the text start fading only in the last 5 seconds before the text is deleted (as set in “Dangerzone seconds”). Currently, the text starts fading immediately, which makes it harder to read. (Especially with a color background, which is another of your terrific touches!)

A 5-second “fade zone” before delete seems about right. Of course, if someone set the “Dangerzone seconds” to 5 seconds or less, then the fading should start immediately.

The added advantage of this is that the degree of fading would always occur at a consistent pace.

Personally, if you were to implement this, I would probably set “Dangerzone seconds” to 8, which would allow me to pause typing for up to 3 seconds without the text starting to fade. After that, the fading text is usually enough to kick me back into gear, but I’d always know that there is also another 5 seconds of fuse left on the delete-bomb.