Preview Mode Text Box to accept input (Forms)

I understand that Preview Mode is intended to be a Publishing preview for essentially a webpage, but I think its clear that most people are not publishing.

Therefore, the Preview Mode become more of a GUI.

A big missing feature then is the ability to Enter information into a Text Box while in Preview Mode and for that info to be saved into the Edit Mode in the proper syntax, or to extend the concept, to a Form.

I know the WYSIWYG editors are coming, but that is only half the issue. People are going to want non-edit mode input options.

Think of Edit Mode as HTML and Preview Mode as your Web Page. You need text fields to enter information while in the web page mode. Its a GUI.

This is the reason why I submitted another request for Preview Mode LOCK on a Note Level, as I think people are using Obsidian for far more than it was intended. Its becoming more of a personal web page, or personal App, that you take notes within. We are quickly moving beyond the command line.

Think how great it would be if you were creating a Note for a Book, but the Note was a Preview Mode FORM with nice fields and text boxes and Save and Edit buttons. Edit Mode is for suckas!

This is all optional of course.

If that isn’t the direction Obsidian wants to go, I understand, but Dataview is just the beginning of this can of worms. I’m sure you have considered these ideas. Just putting it out there for discussion.

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I think this is a great idea. Having the ability to sort large dataview tables based on a text input field that can be edited in preview mode is a game-changer. Is there any good work around or dataviewjs snippet for this yet? I think this would be a great feature to implement. A few applications could be:

  • Setting up a dataview table to sort based on a tag or collection of tags, then to filter based on the text input field. One might have a large database of meeting notes for example. Dynamically sorting based on the filter would make it easier to find a specific meeting note without having to go through the global search. This essentially adds a second layer editable filter over a first fixed one.

  • Any dataview(js) variable could be updated without having to search for it in edit mode. This is all the more useful given the fact that there is no DV/JS code highlighting for easy readability in edit mode. One could for example directly change the tag that a dataview table is filtering on without having to dive into the code snippet.

I’m not sure if this is best implemented at a core plugin or community plugin level given that it’s utility might be mostly applicable to dataview(js), which itself is a plugin. I’d be interested to hear what other people think of this, and if there is any useful applications to the ‘vanilla’ obsidian experience. If so, it would certainly be worth implementing it at a core level (like the admonitions once were).

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