Loving the new Footnotes View! It gets us closer than ever before to having functional margin notes/marginalia for annotating and thinking about existing text. I very much hope the team is planning to actively develop this into the powerful footnote management tool it could be.
Use case or problem
Footnotes View is currently limited in that it doesn’t reflect the footnotes’ actual numberings or names, as described below.
Numbered Footnotes
If I make an initial footnote and call it [^1] and then make a [^2] later on, it appears to be fine. But if I make [^2] somewhere above [^1] in the text instead, the Footnotes View sidebar presents it as footnote #1 despite it still being footnote #2. The numbers reflect the footnotes’ order from the top of the document, not the number in their identifier.
Named Footnotes
If I use a name in the identifier instead—e.g., [^idea1]—then the identifier is not reflected anywhere in the Footnotes View sidebar.
So essentially, Footnotes View applies its own auto-ordered numbers independent of the identifiers and does not offer a way to see (or edit) the identifiers.
Proposed solution
Add an option to toggle the true footnote identifiers in Footnotes View. I like the current ability to show the footnotes with a clean/simple in-order numbering, but being able to switch to reveal the identifiers (almost like switching between source and live views) would be very handy. (I would recommend retaining the top-to-bottom auto-ordering for that view, since matching the flow of the document is valuable.)
As a bonus feature, it would be great to also be able to edit that reference name there in the sidebar and have it update both in the footnote itself and in any/all locations it’s referenced in the body of the text.
Current workaround (optional)
Opening a second copy of the note, placing it in the sidebar, and keeping it scrolled down to the footnotes is the only way I know of to simulate this appearance.
Related feature requests (optional)
Other Footnotes View feature requests: