nextcloud / nextcloud/notes-android
Relative links to other notes
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Description
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Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
My problem is that currently there's no way to link notes to one another that is consistent between Nextcloud Notes for Android and QOwnNotes. Currently the android app uses an ID of a note to link to it. There are two problems with:
- There's no way to check an ID of a note in the android client. You have to go to your Nextcloud instance's website to get the ID from a URL, and paste it to a markdown link. It's slow, it's frustrating, all around not a great experience
- QON (QOwnNotes) doesn't support that. It does, however, have a better way to handle internal links, which I describe below.
Describe the solution you'd like
In QON when you want to link to a note in the same folder, you simply have to paste it's filename along with the file extension. If you want to link to note located in a different folder, you do the same, but using relative path to the file.
Lets say, you have a directory structure like this
Notes
│
├── folder1
│ ├── note-1.1.md
│ └── note-1.2.md
└── folder2
└── note-2.1.md
and this this is the content of folder1/note-1.1.md
[Link to note 2 in folder 1](note-1.2.md)
[Link to note 1 in folder 2](../folder2/note-2.1.md)
and if you click on any of those links, the program opens their respective notes.
Why is this better?
Because you only need to know you directory structure (which you probably made yourself and organised it in a way that's intuitive for you) and the filename (which is the name of a note with .md or .txt extension whichever you have set in you settings), and while editing you can easily see what the target note is.
Describe alternatives you've considered
- Sure, I could use Nextcloud Notes web client on desktop, but the thing is..... it kinda sucks. You can't really change its behaviour, the only choices you have is where the notes are stored and the file extension new files notes are created in. There's no preference to display notes in preview mode by default, and it doesn't even render some things properly (see issues #680 and #325 on nextcloud/notes repo. According to issue 325 it's been a problem since at least 2019.).
- There also aren't many desktop clients I could find and those NC note clients I could find on GitHub seem to no longer be maintained.
- For the android side, I am not aware of any other decent Nextcloud notes client, and aside from lack of an easy way to link notes, this one is pretty much perfect for me.
Additional context
You may wander why I'm talking so much about how QON handles internal links, but I believe that it's simply one of the best and most popular note clients compatible with Nextcloud, it's really customizable and is actively maintained.
It seems that this app, and QON are the most popular Nextloud note clients for mobile and PC. It's not really easy to make complex notes with multiple files and references in the android app and I really believe that the compatibility between those two apps could make for a viable self-hosted, open-source alternative for something like Obsidian (which is closed-source and paid to sync).
Sorry for such a long issue, I wanted to make sure I won't skip anything important.
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
No files, tests, or entry points are named in the issue. Start by tracing how the Android client currently handles note links, then compare the requested same-folder and relative-path examples; done means those links open the corresponding notes while remaining compatible with the described note clients.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- android, java
- Domain
- mobile
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 35/100