4 features that would make AFFiNE feel unbeatable

[Tiritibambix]

Hey team,

I'm a fairly new AFFiNE user, still in the "trying it out" phase, and I wanted to share some thoughts. I'm not a developer either, I just like to tinker with self-hosted stuff on the side. Most of what I understand about code comes from patiently asking AI to walk me through things line by line. So take the following with the right grain of salt, but I think the ideas themselves hold up.

Here's the thing. I really like what I'm seeing so far, enough that I'm seriously considering making AFFiNE my daily driver (with team and family). But there are a handful of features I'm used to from Joplin, which I've relied on for years, and their absence is the main thing still holding me back from fully switching over. None of these feel like huge asks, and I think they'd genuinely finish winning me over:

1. Collapse or expand all folders in one click. Right now folding works node by node, which gets old fast once your tree grows. A single button to fold or unfold the whole sidebar at once would be a small change that people would feel every single day.

2. Sort a list alphabetically. Think a grocery list, or honestly any bullet list. Select the lines, hit "sort," done. Joplin has a small command that does exactly this. I'd love to select a few list items in AFFiNE and have them snap into alphabetical order instead of sorting everything by hand.

3. Reminders and notifications on notes and tasks. Being able to set a date and time on a note and actually get notified, even when the app isn't open, is something I miss a lot coming from Joplin. I know this is probably the trickiest of the four to pull off well across web, desktop, and mobile, but even a version limited to desktop (when opened) and mobile would already be huge.

4. A middle "notebook contents" panel, like Joplin. In Joplin, clicking a notebook shows its notes in a middle column, and you pick one to open in the editor. In AFFiNE right now, clicking a folder just expands the tree, there's no quick way to just browse what's inside without going through a Collection view instead. An optional Joplin-style panel (a toggle in settings, so it doesn't disrupt anyone happy with the current layout) would make the sidebar so much more useful.

I actually poked around the AFFiNE source with some AI help, just to sanity-check that none of this is crazy. Everything looked feasible from what I could tell, which I found pretty encouraging. I'm happy to share what I dug up if anyone's curious or already working on something similar. To be clear though, I'd never disrespect the team by dropping a PR that's entirely AI-generated. If any of this is worth pursuing, I'd rather just compare notes and let someone who actually knows the codebase take it from there, with the AI as a research aid on my end if that's useful, not as a shortcut around actually understanding the change.

Mostly just wanted to put this out there in case it sparks a discussion, or in case some of it is already on a roadmap I've missed. Thanks for building such a great tool.