Nested folders for organisation

Hi TextBlaze Team,
A feature request: For organisational purposes, it would be nice to be able to nest the folders of snippets underneath each other several levels. This way I could have one folder with "Roam Snippets" and another with "Rest of Web". Under the former folder I could then have a series of folders relevant to certain aspects of Roam such as "Template Snippets" and "Organisational Snippets".

Thanks!

@scott - Is there anything planned along these lines?

1 Like

This would be useful, but no plans for it at the moment. The primary issue is that nesting would complicate the sharing model and how folder settings are applied

For example, if you had folder "ABC" that was shared with a@example.com and b@example.com, and it contained folder "XYZ" that was shared with "c@example.com", what would you expect the permissions to be for snippets in folder XYZ?

Just c@example.com? Or should it be all three users? Or maybe just the permissions of the top level folder and any sub-folder permissions are ignored?

Reasoning about hierarchical permissions like this is quite confusing and there is no default mental model people have for it.

Fair. Tbh, I would prefer tags over folders (showing my Roam stripes here :wink: ), but I imagine that would make the permissions model more complicated rather than simpler. And I get this isn't a priority. I'm sure you have a long laundry list of other items which are higher priority! :slight_smile:

@yet-another-tim

I know it's not what you're asking for, but here's one way I keep my snippets organized, maybe you'll find it useful.

I set up my shortcuts to start with a specific character, based on their "affiliation". For instance:

Snippets starting with + will be Roam
Snippets starting with / are for emails

And so on.

1 Like

@Cedric_Debono_Blaze Great advice on using different starting charters for snippet triggers! We adopted the same practice early last year. We currently use the the characters /, *, -, and + to trigger shortcuts. Initially the team was intimidated at the thought if having to memorize the trigger shortcuts for such a large number of snippets. We took it a step further by being intentional about naming conventions for snippet names and their corresponding trigger shortcuts where the trigger shortcuts are logical abbreviations of the snippet name. We use a " / " for creating new cases in Salesforce, a " * " for updating already existing cases in Salesforce, and a " + " for testing and error resolving. Examples:

Case Creation: Change of Enrollment. Trigger shortcut: /coe
Case Update: Change of Enrollment. Trigger shortcut: *coe
Test & Error: Change of Enrollment. Trigger shortcut: +coe

Makes it pretty easy from there on out to keep things organized!

2 Likes

Cool stuff :slight_smile:

A main frustration I have is with sorting. My snippets are personal use, so I don't share (I'm selfish that way I guess). It'd be great to have sub-folders, from just a visual open/close perspective.

While I'm not into sharing my own, for sharing, I'd imagine baby steps. Just make it initially if the root folder is shared is everything inside (subfolders included).

Naming conventions only go so far. We also use right-click a lot, then select the message. A drill-down folder -> subfolder approach would help there too.

3 Likes

Hi @Scotus

Thank you for your feedback. By any chance, have you tried the shortcut method for inserting snippets? You might find it more practical than the right-click menu.

Here's a video of how that works:

Let me know if you have any questions :slight_smile:

1 Like

It really does need sub folders for any user who has years' worth of snippets to bring over.
I have 3 primary folders with about 10 to 20 topic specific sub folders inside them.
I hope you can re look at over coming the issue

1 Like

Hi @anon30495567

Thanks for your input. I'll forward it to our engineers.

I also would really like a way to be able to organize things better.
Currently have close to 1000 snippets, where most of them is shared with others.

The sharing only working/being tied to the top/root folder is more than enough for my/our usage at least :slight_smile:

1 Like

I use text blaze for my work in recruiting to personalize candidate submission almost like filling out a google form. Would be great to organize a work folder with subcategories for email/applicant/job opportunity templates.

4 Likes

I think is natural that the person who has permission for the folder at root to have permission of any child folder but not vice versa but the most important thing is, your users continue to stress the usefulness of having child folders regardless of permission. Perhaps that piece can be develope later after the child folder function perhaps much easily later when decided

Just now setting this up.. :joy: Works great!

Bumping this. Definitely would like nested folders. Having permissions only on the parent folder would even be fine for me. The sub folders for most would probably be more for organizational purposes anyways so some complex permission structure probably isn't needed. Or even what Felix mentioned above, a top down permission ruleset. Hope it's something still being considered.

Would love an option to have subsections/subfolders with a folder.
For example, I'm in healthcare and I have separate snippets for writing a prescription, sending a prescription, documenting a prescription. So as you can see, three different folders just for one topic can very quickly clog up my folders column. Thank you!

Hi @Phuong_Quynh_Nguyen I moved your post to this feature request topic. Until we have nested folders, please note that you can do the following to save space on the left sidebar:

  1. Collapse/uncollapse the folders using the small arrow on the left side,
  2. Right click on a folder and disable it (when you temporarily do not need its snippets)
1 Like

I understand this has been discussed before. I have upvoted the Nested folders feature idea. We are involved in customer service for our product. We need agents working on our Live chat to find snippets easily. We would like nested/subfolders eg Live Chat folder has currently a huge amount of snippets available to agents. If we could subfolder/ categorize folder these main folders ie Main Folder "Live Chat" >"Topic" > "snippets for that topic". This would direct the agents to find what they need quickly when under the pressure of a phone call/ live chat. Instead of searching through more than a 100 snippets - they could be giving 6 key snippets under the subfolder. We have tried adding more keywords to the labels to help us but we seem to be really growing fast with Textblaze and this will keep us organised.

1 Like

Hi Andrea! Thanks for the suggestion.

In the meantime, I suggest giving our {if command} a try. You can use it to create decision trees and quickly get the right message for different scenarios all within one snippet.

Here's a video guide and a snippet you can check out/copy.

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions :slight_smile: