Three things that all came from chapters being thought through too late.
A note put into a chapter came back out of it a few seconds later. The
server had it right the whole time; every sync rebuilds the local copy
from the server's answer, and the function doing that never carried
chapter_id — so each sync handed back a note belonging to no chapter and
the notebook took it in again. The bin's query left the column out too,
which would have unfiled anything restored from it.
A separator drawn in a notebook vanished when a chapter was opened.
"Which chapter is open" and "which list is on screen" were one value.
Opened beside or below, the list still shows the notebook — but
everything around it had switched to the chapter, so the notebook's own
separators were filtered away and a drag among its rows was measured
against the chapter's notes, found nothing, and did nothing.
And where a new note lands is now visible and yours to choose: pressing
in either place makes it the one being worked in, marked with a line
along its top and the word "here", and the + button names it.
Rearranging becomes a mode, switched on beside the sort menu — until
then no row wears a grip and none can be dragged. Filing a note is back
in the row's own menu, where starring and exporting already are; the
button that had appeared in every row is gone with its dialog. The
account panel closes with Escape.
Thirteen suites green: 335 browser checks, 241 unit tests.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three things Marc asked for, and one of them turned out to be the hinge
the other two hang from.
**A chapter is a row like any other.** Same grip, same drag, same place
in a hand-made arrangement as a note or a separator. That needed notes
and chapters numbered from *one* counter: numbered separately they are
two sequences that cannot be interleaved again, and a chapter dragged
between two notes springs back to the top. Positions therefore have to be
named rather than read off an array index, so POST /notes/reorder now
takes `positions: [{id, order}]` beside the older `ids`, and chapters
have a reorder route of their own.
**Two ways for a chapter to open**, chosen per account beside the
typeface, for the same reason that one lives there: it is a choice about
how your own notes are laid out and it should follow you to the phone.
Beside the list, its notes in a further column the way OneNote lays out
pages — the notebook's own list carrying on to the left, chapter rows and
all. Or unfolded under the chapter's own row, indented against a rule in
its colour. A phone has room for neither and fills the list instead, with
a way back, which is what it did before there was a choice.
**Its own colour**, from eight named ones rather than the full palette:
the point of chapters is that they are different places, and twenty
near-identical blues do not help anyone tell them apart.
The colour is validated on the way in — it is written by a browser, so
only a plain #rrggbb gets through and anything else becomes no colour.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Moving lived under a right-click, behind a submenu: two steps before the
list of places appeared at all, and on a phone a long press followed by a
flyout. There is a button on the row now, and it opens one screen with
the chapters of this notebook and the other notebooks together, marking
where the note already is.
The spare sheet in Draw mode was drawn as solid paper, so pressing Draw
on a one-page note made a second page appear from nowhere while the count
still said "of 1". It exists for a good reason — pages otherwise come
only from how far the writing runs, so drawing on page two would mean
writing two pages first — but it should look like the offer it is. Dashed
outline, half opacity, and it says what it is for. It counts once
something is on it.
And the two buttons above the list did not match: the one I added last
round was larger and bolder than the one it sat beside, and the older
one's target was nineteen pixels tall, which a finger misses. Both are
one shape now. A separator's label matches a chapter's name in size for
the same reason — two type treatments in one list is noise, and the
difference was not saying anything.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A note is in exactly one chapter, or in none — which means the notebook
itself. Chapters sit above the loose notes; tapping one opens its own
list and the menu button becomes the way back out, which on a phone is
the only way, since the list fills the screen.
A chapter is not a wastebasket. Removing one never removes what it held:
the notes come back to the notebook, where they can be seen and filed
again. That is ON DELETE SET NULL, and it is also written out in the
delete route, because it is the promise the whole thing rests on and
should be visible where it happens rather than inferred from a schema.
The dialog says so too, with the number of notes affected, and the suite
removes a chapter holding three notes and asks the server for all three.
Three rules keep the two levels honest. A note filed into a chapter
leaves the notebook's own list, or filing it would appear to do nothing.
A chapter belongs to its notebook, so the server refuses to file a note
into a chapter of a book it is not in, and moving a note to another
notebook clears its chapter. And separators belong to the list they were
drawn in: a separator's order counts the notes before it, which means
nothing across lists.
Two bugs found while building it, both a day old and both affecting the
desktop rather than the phone they were written for:
- A submenu was clipped away. The context menu had been given
`overflow-y: auto`, which cuts off anything flying out sideways — so
the notebooks under "Move to..." were invisible and every click on them
landed on the note list behind. The side was inverted too:
`right: 100%` places a panel on the left.
- A separator was a one-pixel hairline in the border colour with faint
grey text on near-black. Present, and on a phone effectively invisible.
And one test that never measured what it claimed. It asked whether a
dragged note had become "the most recently changed" by reading the order
on screen — but three notes made seconds apart share an `updated_at`
second, so that order is a tie broken arbitrarily. It passed on luck for
weeks and fell over on a run a fraction faster. It now compares the
timestamps themselves, before and after the drag.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
