I’ve started dreaming of Tinderbox-like prototypes for DT.
In Tinderbox, one can mark a note A as a prototype and then mark other notes as “following the prototype A”. B can be a prototype, and follow A = an inheritance scheme. What it does is that it provides a very intuitive way to configure (mostly appearance and behaviour of) different categories of items. Like the notion of classes in object-oriented programming, but very pragmatically built: a class is an object that serves as a live template for the others.
I find myself having more and more different “categories of groups” in DT: I have groups that represent books, or articles and which store the original document along text and illustration excerpts, thoughts, reading notes, etc. If we abstract a bit, some of the categories of groups are stacks, some are not. Aka building a hierarchy of prototypes.
I would like to be able to specify: “book groups” have such an icon, run such a script every time this and that, have such “smart rules” targeting them specifically, have such list view configuration, And book groups could inherit from “stack groups” some properties.
The same applies to the different text-document categories I have: questions, thoughts, discussion notes, …
So it would be more than templates, because there’s concepts of dynamic inheritance and overriding: changing a prototype cascades onto its “followers”, (unless they’ve overriden some properties).
And it would allow to save quite some smart rules: I know that I can code it in all smart rules, with a custom metadata field for the category, but I would be lost in heaps of unmanageable rules.
Just an(other) idea …