5 seconds I lose every single day

General
1

Hey SilverBullet community,

I've been using, configuring, customising, and contributing to SilverBullet almost since the beginning, and I genuinely love it. So this isn't a rant or a "I'm leaving" post. It's a "can we talk about something?" post.

I keep running into the same friction, and I wanted to ask: is it just me?

Somehow it feels like when using Silverbullet, you always need these 5 extra seconds to achieve what you want to do. Let me give you some examples:

Example: Mobile Usage
When I'm on the go using my mobile phone and want to quickly add or edit a note, SilverBullet costs me a bit more effort than it should. There's no share sheet integration on iOS, no Shortcuts support.
So I fire up the PWA, it loads for some seconds. Navigating to the correct note takes another few seconds, since it doesn't feel anywhere close to a native iOS app. Editing the note on the right spot e.g. in the middle of a text block also often feels hard. Especially in notes that contain pictures above the section, which will complete loading while I am already editing. So the text keeps jumping until all images are loaded.

Example: Feature discovery
Feature discoverability is harder than it needs to be. This is subtle but I often struggle with it.
In SilverBullet, I often only discover a powerful feature exists after reading the docs. In tools with richer UIs, I stumble across features visually. I see a new button or a widget and think "oh, that's a thing I didn't know existed." With SilverBullet, the knowledge lives in the docs, not the interface.

Example: Code vs. UI
The "hacker's notebook" experience sometimes cuts both ways. Writing queries in raw syntax, building frontmatter in plain YAML, no optional visual query builder or anything visualising my carefully crafted frontmatter schema.
This is fine for people who live in the terminal (as I do!). But even as a terminal junkie, I'd love the option to have a GUI when I just casually want to achieve something very simple, in a lean way. UI richer tools let me click together a query or write the code. SilverBullet doesn't yet offer that choice. So I am browsing once more the docs with questions like "what was the syntax for sorting a query again?"

I want to be clear: this is a high-class problem. SilverBullet does things nothing else does. But these 5 extra seconds, multiple times a day sum up to a significant number. This number is so significant, that it keeps tempting me to run other tools in parallel just for the rough edges - and I'd rather not split my setup.

Has anyone else felt this? And are there aspects of the UX you've found workarounds for, or plugins I might be missing?

2

Fully agree with the mobile app, this is primarily a place for me to quickly drop a note and it could definitely work more natively and easier. Sharing text towards to Silverbullet would improve my life.

Regarding your point of code versus ui, I also struggle to remember to query language and selecting the right fields for my query. I'm not necessarily looking for a UI, but I am looking for more 'contextual support' when writing a query.

These two would save my quite some time indeed.

3

Thanks for this!

Yes, I agree the mobile version is not the best possible experience. I fear that deeper OS integration will require a native app, something I hope I'll get to in the context of SilverBullet+. Feedback like this mentally pushes the priority of that project up a bit :slight_smile:

Feature discovery: yes I'm open to ideas of what to do here. I do really want to stick to a minimal UI and not add too many distracting "LOOK AT ME" type of UX that annoys me in other products.

Code vs UI: this is is very much top of mind. The way I look at it is that the code is the underlying fundamentals and now we (I) can build better experiences/UI on top. Step one was introducing the Configuration Manager, which can still be further expanded to cover more feature area.

Another one I'm considering is a visual query builder, which in the end would produce SLIQ, but then at least the creation/editing of queries would be more intuitive.

4

I agree that a real mobile version would be very nice. In the meantime if I want to quickly add a note to my Inbox/ folder I use the solution discussed here: Android share target - alternative implementation - #6 by schroederc
I create a icon on the home screen which pops up a textarea which I can type or speak into. Or it also creates a share target in Android which I can use say in Firefox to save a web page, etc. Not sure how this would be done on iOS.

5

Thanks for linking to this post and sharing the idea. It seems it needs an extra App to work.

What i have is an icon only in mobile on the top bar.
I type constantly random stuff that i need to handle later and I heavily use the Quick Note feature from Silverbullet.
(I try not to add many external features and rely more on what silverbullet provides)

All i need is the following in the CONFIG.md file

```space-lua
actionButton.define {
  icon = "zap", 
  description = "New Quick Note",  
  command = "Quick Note",  
  mobile = true 
}
```