Believe me I have no love for Word, but having used it’s outliner for years prior to Workflowy, the one thing I miss is the ability to collapse (or expand) everything below a specified ‘level’.
So, I could only show top level bullets with everything below collapsed. Or show two levels down - top level + one child. Etc.
Ideally I’d like actual buttons I could click but I’d settle for keyboard shortcuts - Cmd+1 Cmd+2, etc.
Using the collapse command at any parent should collapse everything underneath that parent. I think you can do that via the command palette or the menu to the left of the node.
No, I get that. I want to collapse EVERYTHING on the page to a certain depth. Like, if I’m writing a book and have it broken down to chapters I may have some chapters open, some sub-sections open, etc. I’d want to go to the top level of that hierarchy and press a button to only show the actual Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc. bullets with everything below collapsed. Or, for my personal journal, sometimes I want to collapse to the level of months so I can quickly see where ‘July’ is.
Best I know you can only collapse to all children on a page. You can’t collapse/expand to x levels deep, child/grandchild for example.
Keep everything collapsed in your main/top level document. This is tidy and easy to navigate. Keep your content collapsed.
Then create a new bullet which will be the parent to a number of mirrored bullets. Use mirrors to bring in content and set the preferred viewing depth once inside that new “viewing bullet”. Your content is updated everywhere and if you want to change views you just navigate to a different “viewing bullet” where things are collapsed or expanded as you desire. This is not dynamic, but it will be quick to navigate if you use shortcuts and the jump menu.
gawd. Should I sacrifice a chicken too? 
@ronbnosp Please add the tag “idea” to this post. It would be very useful.
I love WF dearly and how the team are carefully adding features without junking up the interface. That said, I hope that they will eventually add outline navigating features like this, and focus first/last sibling, which the great outliners of the past (like Grandview and Ecco) had. But I must acknowledge that these features did not suffice to keep those outliners in business, so…
@ronbnosp If I’ve understood correctly, you can collapse everything on a page to certain depth using CMD+UP and CMD+DOWN, whilst the cursor is on the parent node
If we assume you start with all nodes collapsed, hit CMD+DOWN once, with the cursor on the title, and the child nodes will expand to level 1. Hit CMD+DOWN again and any nodes that have level 2 hierarchy will expand. Rinse and repeat.
Thanks, @yemi_a , I had completely forgotten this.
Yes! This is brilliant. I tend to use Ctrl+Space to expand/collapse, so it wouldn’t have occurred to me to try this.
Ah, this is super helpful. Sometimes takes a lot of clicks to get to where I wanted so not quite as nice as just choosing a level with a button, but it’s way better than what I’ve been doing up to this point. Thank you!
(But for the WF dev team… don’t think this means I don’t still want the more specific feature! . Honestly, since I know not everybody would use this, the more correct feature request would probably be for the ability to add custom buttons in the toolbar and a bunch of view- and data-manipulation tools that can hook into them).
Meanwhile, maybe a keyboard macro for each level that you want to reach at one stroke?
Does Workflowy support keyboard macros like this directly, or are you suggesting something using external tool like MacOS tools or Karabiner or BetterTouchTool?
External tool. I use AHK on Windows. I don’t note the Mac options, but I feel like I’ve heard Keyboard Maestro a lot.
“Expand the first layer of the entire focused pane”:
“duplicate the third” will be the “expand the second layer of the entire focused pane”.
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Nice. I (well, Claude) was able to get it working using BetterTouchTool. I used CMD+1 and CMD+2 and CMD+3 to get the levels desired. MacOS app only - doesn’t work in the web view of course.
And guys, it’s quite nice. Recommended
Here’s the Applescript it’s using:
tell application “System Events”
key code 115 using command down – ⌘Home: cursor to the page title
repeat 15 times
key code 126 using command down – ⌘↑: collapse one level
end repeat
end tell
I support this idea…
In Sublime Text editor there is “Code Folding” and you have up to 9 levels. For programming it’s very useful. I can see his use on WF too…
I’m pretty sure people would love this if they just use it for a few days - it’s just super handy to pop into a section you haven’t visited in a while and then progressively reveal things from the top level down.
Exactly…
You can go from less to more detailed info, one level at a time, on each subtopic…
On GTD (Get Things Done) method of productivity there are The 6 Horizons of Focus, but you can use this principle to everything!
