6.99.43 — Categories stay where you put them

Categories stay in the order you put them in.

Until now the sidebar sorted them by name and there was no way to change it.
That is also what made dragging one dishonest: a drop between two rows drew
the horizontal line every list uses to mean "it lands here", and then the tree
re-sorted and put the category somewhere else entirely. Giving categories a
real order is what lets that line tell the truth, so the two are one change.

Arranging them

Drag a category to a slot and it lands in that slot. Nothing else moves. A
category with children travels as a unit — the parent lands where you dropped
it and its children keep their order among themselves.

The arrangement is stored per user on the server, so it follows you between
devices and survives a reload. A category you make appears at the top of its
group, where you will see it. One the arrangement has no place for yet — a
folder you made in the Files app, or anything from before this release —
appears at the top of its group too, sorted by name among the others, until
you drag it somewhere.

Smart categories are arranged alongside the real ones and can go anywhere
among them.

There are no sorting controls. The order is whatever you arranged.

Saying where a drop will land

Each row has three bands rather than the old quarter-at-each-edge split, which
left about eleven pixels to aim at and was why the line flickered in and out.

• The middle nests: the row and its children shade, because what you are
  aiming at is the group, not the row.
• The top and bottom place it beside, at that row's own level: a line, in
  the slot it will take.

Never both at once. Smart categories take a drop beside them now — they
refused every drop before, which left the slots above and below them
unreachable. They still refuse notes.

Two things that were quietly wrong

A category you emptied was destroyed. Moving or deleting its last note
took the category with it, and every empty parent above it. That made sense
when a category was only ever a side effect of where a note sat; it is wrong
when you made the category on purpose. Nothing removes a category now except
being asked to.

A category nested inside another was never reported to the browser at all.
Clients/Client1 could not be filed into, chosen, or brought back by a
reload, while Clients could — the listing merged each folder's categories
with its subfolders' in a way that silently dropped the deeper ones. It only
ever bit a category with no notes directly inside it, which is exactly what
this release makes possible.

Elsewhere

The note menu no longer invents categories. Its category field took
anything typed into it and filed the note under whatever that was, creating
the folder on the way. A path typed with a slip in it — Clients/Client1/Porjects
— made exactly that and said nothing. It offers the categories that exist now.
Typing still narrows the list, which is how you reach a deep one. The REST API
is unchanged: filing a note into a category that does not exist still creates
it, which is how the mobile clients work.

The app opens where you left it, and on all your notes when there is
nothing to remember — rather than guessing a category and hiding the rest.

A collapsed category stays collapsed. Opening the app on a note filed deep
in the tree used to open every category above it and remember that, undoing a
collapse you had made.

Worth knowing

Nothing about the file format changes and nothing already written is altered.
If you have never arranged anything, the sidebar looks exactly as it did.