Imagining the Potential of Bookmarks in Text Notes

[SiriusXT]

In the latest develop branch, Trilium has gained a humble yet powerful new ability: you can now insert bookmarks into text notes!

These bookmarks are actually HTML anchors that can assign a unique ID to any block or heading within a note.

This provides more possibilities for plugin development in Trilium’s text notes. Some of the things we can do include, but are not limited to:

1. Link to specific blocks (or heading) in other notes: Instead of linking to an entire note, you can jump directly to a precise block via its bookmark.

2. Block(or heading) -level folding: Add something like "fold" to the ID, sprinkle in some CSS/JS magic, and you’ve got collapsible blocks.

3. Scroll position tracking: By detecting which bookmark is currently visible, it becomes possible to restore reading position automatically.

🧪 Disclaimer: All of the above is purely speculative. It might not work, might conflict with other features, or might just be a bad idea from the start.

[eliandoran]

In my opinion, (1) is the most important topic we should focus on. The only problem is that we need to figure out an easy way to do it.

The easiest I can think of is to add a new button to the toolbar that appears when you focus on a bookmark to copy a reference. Then you can just paste the reference in any other note.

We can't simply use the link to note feature (at least yet), since we'd have to store the bookmarks per page somewhere.

For (2), I see the collapse more at heading level. Bookmarks don't have a start-end, so we wouldn't know for much to collapse. If we do it for only a single block / paragraph, I think it might be confusing.

For (3), I guess we can do scroll position tracking regardless of bookmarks, since we can store the scroll offset in pixels.

[SiriusXT]

(1) Perhaps when including a note, after selecting the note, fetch and display bookmarks below for selection.

Then, in the include note section, scroll the selected bookmark into view, or add a button to scroll it into view. The bookmark can be stored in the include note section.

(2) Hide content under a heading until a higher-level heading is encountered, then stop. This seems impossible with CSS and likely requires JS.
It may only be possible to collapse the outermost heading. Headings within quotes or similar may need special handling (e.g., ignored).

Block-level collapsing is rare, or block-level collapsing could set a max-height to show only one line of content.

(3) Using pixels as an offset can cause scrolling to the wrong position on screens with different resolutions.

[maphew]

Link to specific blocks (or heading) in other notes: Instead of linking to an entire note, you can jump directly to a precise block via its bookmark.

This is the core idea behind systems that create a new block for every paragraph. In the backend each has a UUID and possibility of adding an alias, or in this context, a bookmark name. Is it joplin that does this? Or Obsidian? Something I've looked at in the past at any rate. A lot of management overhead it seems to me, but does come with power.

What about a simplistic heuristic that is just "first 'matching text' ", where 'matching text' is literally anything a person could type? combined with css style inheritance?

So a link like {this page}#a simplistic heuristic would leap to the paragraph just before this one, while {this page}#Lorem#heuristic would skip these two and head for the one down below.

Lorem ipsum

Another and third simplistic heuristic, for the win perhaps?

It'd have a bunch of the problems regular expressions do, but regex has done and continues to do a lot of successful heavy lifting.

[CobriMediaJulien]

Can we safe the anchors in the note attachment? Or is this even a problem?