desire to toggle/disable autocomplete/IDE-features in description fields?

[jzacsh]

tl;dr a "don't autoedit user content" set of toggles? Like disabling autocompleters and disabling storage-time modifiers

Part of what makes markdown and plaintext powerful is that it's so simple. When it gets complicated is when it can get in the way. I feel like I'm often fighting the autocompleter in Mindwtr's android description textareas and it's frustrating and kind of a shame because it's such a simple text interface that doesn't need to be trying to help to work well—it'll work well and succeed even by doing nothing! Right now I'm just constantly fighting re-injection of parenthesis symbols and other strange things of the sort that I'm tempted to write my notes in markor or somewhere else reliable first and paste them over... which is a silly amount of friction.

Anyway, anyone else have an appetite to let users disable this or am I the only such user?

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Edit: I had a related issue where the plaintext title of a task was being edited without my realizing: I put a URL into the title and some of the symbols in rhe URL were being detected as having special meaning and then cut out and placed elsewhere in the task's fields. This is similarly the kind of thing I'd want to be able to opt out of so I can trust that I can type and paste and not lose content or have it mangled as I type. That is: just trust it as a plaintext storage field. It's okay to readonly-scrape it for things — but I'd want to disable any live-storage or during-storage mutations of content in said fields.

[dongdongbh]

@Onxr, can you drop your thought here?

[Onxr]

I can agree with this. Some do like plain and raw format. I myself also like to have control over many things.
I proposed those auto complete features because more or less everywhere if there's MD I had the options of auto completion. That's why my muscle memory adapted to that.

But we can have the option for disabling this (as toggle). For example I also requested a feature for disabling nofication for tasks that are added to the Calendar to avoid duplicate which is toggeable for individual tasks.

[jzacsh]

Edited to add a note about mangled task titles too

[dongdongbh]

Two separate things here, and both are fair.

The parenthesis re-injection isn't your keyboard — it's a Markdown auto-pairing helper we added in #537/#544. I'm going to stop it pairing quotes, angle brackets and braces (those aren't really Markdown and cause most of the friction), and add a toggle to turn the editing helpers off entirely so the description acts as a plain-text field. @Onxr since you asked for the pairing originally — it stays on by default, the toggle just lets people opt out.

The mangled title is a different mechanism: the quick-add box parses dates, @contexts and #tags out of what you type, and a date-like or @/# chunk inside a URL gets caught and moved to another field. I'll make it leave URLs alone and show what it detected before the task is saved, so nothing changes silently.

One thing to confirm: did the title get mangled as you typed/pasted into the capture box, or while editing a task you'd already created? As far as I can tell only the capture box does this parsing, but I want to be sure before scoping the fix.

[jzacsh]

I'll make it leave URLs alone and show what it detected before the task is saved, so nothing changes silently.

While that works for this one particular case with URLs, I worry that we're missing a more robust approach here, for example, just never editing the user's content and instead just copying the content out instead. This is a common pattern I've seen work well elsewhere (I remember some CRMs' WYSWIGs I used to work on that did this): choose to play it safe and always preserve the original user-input, as that's the high-value-laboriously made item. I realize that's not as slick, but I wonder if there's just a general opt-out toggle we can have like "don't auto-remove extracted fields (like tags, dates, contexts)" or something so that your fix will work no matter what I paste; eg: if I paste a short snippet of code (I'm a programmer), a copied text from somewhere else, or a weird proper name of the thing, etc.

My point is: you can make the argument that being able to always trust the input box is far more important than auto-deleting technically duplicated content. Why trust is more key to GTD than perfect normalization: think of the user in a hurry, when trust matters: we dont want people thinking "eh, I'll just paste and type all this into a real notes app first and port it over later" thus accidentally causing a new inbox, eroding the core GTD premise of trustworthy input system.

One thing to confirm: did the title get mangled as you typed/pasted into the capture box, or while editing a task you'd already created? As far as I can tell only the capture box does this parsing, but I want to be sure before scoping the fix.

Silently. I went back later and was surprised to find the title was no longer what it was when I saved/last looked.

[dongdongbh]

You've changed my mind on the default. The hurried-user point is the crux — an opt-out only protects people who already noticed the problem and went looking for a setting, which isn't the person most at risk. So I'll flip it: by default the box keeps your text exactly as typed. Anything it recognizes (a date, a #tag, an @context) still gets detected, it just won't be removed from your text automatically. The old auto-clean behavior becomes a toggle for people who want it.

That also covers the change you saw after the fact: this parsing runs in more than one place — when you capture the task, and on desktop again when you process it through inbox or weekly review — so a title can get rewritten at processing time, not only on entry. Preserving by default stops it in all of them. I'm assuming your case was mobile-only since that's the surface you're on, but if you also ran it through inbox or weekly review on desktop, that's where the re-parse would have hit.

[dongdongbh]

Update on both fronts.

Quick-add: your text is now kept exactly as typed by default — dates, #tags and @contexts are still detected and applied, they just aren't cut out of the title anymore. That covers capture and the inbox/weekly-review steps (the "changed after the fact" path). There's also a "Clean up quick add text" toggle under GTD → Capture if you ever want the old auto-stripping back.

Editor: I trimmed the auto-pairing so quotes, angle brackets and braces no longer inject a closing character. Parentheses still pair by default (it's useful for Markdown links), so the full "turn editing helpers off" switch — for a plain-text field with nothing injected — is the remaining piece, coming in a separate change.

The quick-add fixes and the pairing trim land in the next release (which may be in two weeks); the editor off-switch follows after. Let me know how it feels once it's out.

[dongdongbh]

The editor off-switch is in. There's an Editor typing help toggle under GTD → Capture — turn it off and the description and project-notes fields stop auto-pairing brackets, continuing lists, turning pasted URLs into links, and suggesting [[references]]. They become plain text: what you type is what's saved, nothing inserted. It stays on by default, so the bracket-pairing @Onxr wanted is unchanged unless you opt out, and the toolbar and bold/italic shortcuts still work when you do want formatting.

Ships in the next release with the quick-add changes — give the plain-text fields a try once it's out and let me know.