Add an option to store fold/unfold state of list items

[aeshna-cyanea]

see title. folding/unfolding of child nodes can be important for the flow of a doc, and it would be nice if it could persist. When some nodes are pre-folded, the user can skim and go into detail as desired instead of getting overwhelmed.

however there is an issue with sync- most fold/unfold alterations by the user are meant to be temporary as the user reads the doc, it would be nice to have a separate button that explicitly saves them to the doc for future users.

[bschlagel]

Thanks! I'd definitely find this useful as well. I think a bit tricky to implement but my ideal would be something like:

• no setting/option, to keep it simple
• save fold state per-user, so if I'm working in an outline and reload the doc it maintains the state
• either default to all folded, or maybe to last edited state

Least sure about that last point…simplest to have same default for all (folded) but I can see wanting to have different defaults depending if a doc is primarily for, say, collaborative notes vs. something published for a larger audience of viewers.

[aeshna-cyanea]

I really think having a separate action is optimal here. If ui complexity is a concern, you could make the action only visible in a list of keyboard shortcuts instead of showing it in the interface- so power users can discover it but new users don't get overwhelmed with too many buttons

[bschlagel]

We can think about it! Likely not a thing we'll get to soon but curious if others have thoughts here. As probably the biggest power user of foldable outlines I'm in favor of keyboard shortcuts but I don't love an explicit 'save' action b/c everything else in a doc is live updating. And haven't seen it work like this elsewhere, feel like it could get confusing.

Testing Notion and their toggle list seems to default collapsed for other viewers. Not sure how it shows for other editors but that seems like a good default, easy to expand and can function kind of like a table of contents but a per-user view state could persist. Not sure when I'd care about having a different default e.g. with only certain items expanded.

I also realize right now the fold/unfold all shortcut works for readers, but not per-block fold/unfold (only clicking the bullets, since there's no focused block state for view-only, though we could add…)

[aeshna-cyanea]

ok what about a new approach, maybe it could just be a property per-block, e.g. "this block prefers to be open/closed on initial render", with a per-document setting for the default value for that property.

This block-specific "folded" state is present in some other block-based writing systems, such as documents in logseq or dynalist