List of Eliezer's current most desired fixes and features

[summary: A place for Eliezer to note down his current list of personally-wanted features for editing and writing.]

Lower numbers are higher priorities.

Bugfixes:

• (1) Prevent editor slowdown.
• The editor currently often becomes very slow, I think when invoking some particular features. This has caused me to need to cut out most text not being actively worked on, paste it offline, and put that text back when I'm done editing the current section.
• I hypothesize this must involve talking to Arbital in a loop that interrupts accepting keystrokes, because it is causing text entry to slow down on a fast computer.
• I hypothesize this happens when greenlinking a page that corresponds to a poll, even if the preview is not active.
• I hypothesize this happens when adding notes (\%note: whatever\%) to text.
• I hypothesize that even when a preview is not shown, the preview is still being generated. This means that causing the preview to actually not generate, when not being shown, would get say 60% of the benefit of a full fix.
• (2) Prevent 'new page' button from disappearing.
• If working within a narrow window, the 'new page' button disappears before all other button do, even when there's plenty of whitespace left in the editor bar.
• Making the window wider does not make the 'new page' button come back without reloading the page.
• At one point, the greenlink button was also vanishing if the window was made even smaller.
• (1) Make greenlinks in mobile popups followable.
• There's no reasonable way for a user to guess that they need to click on the original text while the seemingly modal popup is there. At present, Arbital in effect does not have followable links on mobile, since the needed action is not discoverable. Clicking on the big title greenlink of the popup would be expected to go to the page, and that's what it should do.
• (3) I seem to not have an option to leave Editor Comments if I own the page, or my window is too small, or something? I didn't see the clickable box while leaving my last comment.

Features:

• (2) [X] to dismiss greenlink popup on mobile.
• You can keep the swipe to dismiss, if you want, but this clever UI action should be supplemented by the simple X that people will automatically look for. I also usually need to try swiping a couple of times before I get it horizontal enough for the system, since a vertical swipe is merely a scroll. Don't make the minimum necessary UI action this complicated or sensitive, just include the grey X in the upper-right corner that people will automatically look for.
• (2) Do something other than quietly making the domain of every page I create be 'Eliezer Yudkowsky' by default.
• Suggested solution: There's a 'default' or 'blank' option for the domain in Settings, and if this is selected, the page belongs to the same domain as its (first) parent if I have editing rights over that domain, and otherwise it belongs to me.
• Right now I seem to have a huge number of stranded pages. Every new page I create ends up stranded unless I remember to visit a Settings page I had no previous reason to visit, and manually change the domain every time.
• There also doesn't seem to be any way to list all pages in a domain. So I have no idea what has been orphaned to Eliezer Yudkowsky until I just, e.g., randomly run across a sublens of Logical decision theories that happens to be in the Eliezer Yudkowsky domain instead of the Decision Theory domain.
• I'd like it if you could apply this retroactively. There shouldn't be anything in the Eliezer Yudkowsky domain that isn't a child of the Eliezer Yudkowsky page.
• (2) Simple paragraph editing.
• Selecting (or clicking) within a paragraph, among other buttons shown, shows me a button that will pop up an editor for just that paragraph's underlying Markdown. This editor needs the greenlink button, but few other frills. It's okay if this editor only figures out the correct paragraph 80% of the time, so long as it doesn't destroy data.
• The desired behavior is to identify some text associated with a selection, pop up only that text within something that permits editing it and saving the edit, and then substitute the edited text for whatever text was originally identified within the document.
• If, when I try to save the changes, the original document has changed and the original paragraph text is no longer present in the document exactly as before, give me an error message when I try to save my changes (while preserving my new, edited text in the resulting window!) and tell me to edit the document in long form.
• When I'm done saving and the popup goes away, if you reload the document, I should end up looking at the same paragraph I just edited. The whole point here is to let me edit the document without losing my place in reading it.
• The 80/20 of this feature would be very valuable. It doesn't have to be perfect.
• Letting me edit or create summaries, starting from the popup window for greenlinks, would likewise be helpful.
• (3) A markdown marker that means 'When automatically generating the summary, show up until this point in the text'.
• Sometimes when I'm editing a stub, I don't want to write a separate summary containing a lot of duplicated text, and I do want more than one line / paragraph to show in the summary. At present the system forces me to either write one huge paragraph, or duplicate all the text.
• (3) Give me the ability to switch the preview on and off deliberately.
• I sometimes want a preview even when I'm working on a narrow screen. I sometimes want the preview to go away after I happened to open up a large window.
• (3) Allow "arbital.com/search?whatever" as a search query that will open a page of results for 'whatever'.
• This will enable me to search Arbital from the location bar using a keyword. Opening up Arbital, then entering text into the search field, then clicking on a result, is surprisingly annoying when you're used to being able to search on things from the location bar.
• (3) Be able to pop up summaries when moving over results from the Arbital search bar.
• Sometimes the clickbait isn't enough for me to remember which page is about what.
• (3) When I accidentally link to the wrong page, as in "arbital.com/p/doesnotexist", show me results as if "doesnotexist" had been typed into a search bar, rather than giving me a Web error.
• This is important for trying to link things online, because otherwise I have to be very certain I'm remembering the page stub correctly.
• (3) When I change a page's stub, e.g. from "arbital.com/p/old" to "arbital.com/p/new", while no new page has yet been created at "arbital.com/p/old", have links to "arbital.com/p/old" forward to "arbital.com/p/new" possibly with a notification that the link has changed.
• This is important for changing page stubs after other links to them have been passed around anywhere.
• Make sure /p/old keeps on forwarding if somebody changes /p/new to /p/newnew.
• Do not try to prevent anyone from claiming /p/old.
• (4) Changes to alternative text using \%if: Potentially visible switches, some knowledges set by default.
• I'm still trying to figure out how to use the potential for alternative text. Since users don't want to explicitly mark what they understand, this implies some changes required for the feature to again be useful.
• Switched text is visible by default. E.g. there's a little switch off to the left whitespace, and when you hover on it (or click, in mobile) it pops up something saying, "You're seeing this version because Arbital thinks you know / don't know / want to know / don't want to know about -Requisite-." If the user then changes the switch, they see a further checkbox, unchecked by default, saying "Always show text as if I -knowledge-state- -Requisite-."
• Give me a setting to override this visible switch, e.g. if I want to abuse Arbital to write "choose your own adventure" stories.
• Let me set some pages (or better yet, particular paragraphs) to set a requisite to known after the user finishes reading that part, in the sense of having scrolled to the bottom of the main text (or better yet, having scrolled over and past that particular paragraph); if the user hasn't yet manually set that requisite's state.
• This lets me assume by default that some things have been taught to the reader and condition other text accordingly, while still letting the reader switch things back if the default guess is wrong.
• (4) Anonymous requisites, maybe just with titles and one-line summary-clickbait, createable from inside the editor with a couple of clicks. I'd use a lot more of these if I didn't need to Create A Page every time I wanted to introduce a conditional dependency.
• (4) Anonymous probability and approval bars.