My thoughts after over a year on Checkvist

Hey all, I’ve been using Checkvist for over a year now and thought I’d share my feedback. As this post is mostly going to be focused on negatives - I’ll preface it by saying I love checkvist and couldn’t organise my head without it. I have pretty severe ADHD with a touch of OCD so making lists is a good way to channel my disorders into productivity.

  • The ability to share a pinned portion of a list would be nice. I keep all my notes on a ‘master list’, but I often need to copy large chunks out to make public for other people. If I could link to a pinned section this would cut down a lot of superflous list making
  • If you’re pasting code into the cell. It shouldn’t prompt you to ask if you want to make it multi-lined.
  • The ability to use tab for 4 spaces would be appreciated. I normally end up having to copy 4 spaces and use them throughout when pasting code
  • Searching is a bit clunky. I’ve realised I need to pin the result I’m after and then use the breadcrumbs to get to the heirarchy I need. But this took me a while to figure out.
  • Self-hosted! I realise you guys need to make money. But I’d rather pay a one-off payment which let me self-host my checkvist and do regular commits to prevent me overwriting stuff.
    My current implementation;
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Hi,

I read your thoughts with interest, thanks for taking the time.

You can disable the Offer multi-line paste option on your settings page.

I don’t think I can comment on the rest.

Very best regards,

Jim

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Hello,

First of all, thanks for sharing your feedback! I’ll try to answer your points, below :slight_smile:

Do I understand correctly that you want to share a branch of the list but make sure that the other parts of the list won’t be available to the recipient? This is a bit tough. It is easier to implement in read-only mode, but still not easy. Please vote for this issue in uservoice, unless you did not yet.

Do I understand correctly that you are pasting a code fragment, and then you want to make sure it is rendered as code in Checkvist? To render code as code you need to wrap code fragment with “```”, then you don’t need 4 spaces.

I’m afraid I don’t quite understand you here. What is the scenario, why clunky?

Self-hosted version would cost thousands. We were seriously considering implementing such a version at some point, but being a small shop, we probably cannot afford supporting a non-SaaS version (including upgrades etc.).

Thanks a lot for your feedback,
KIR

Do I understand correctly that you are pasting a code fragment, and then you want to make sure it is rendered as code in Checkvist? To render code as code you need to wrap code fragment with “```”, then you don’t need 4 spaces.

I’m using the backquotes, I mean that when you’re entering a code fragment Checkvist should never ask you if you want it multi-line, as using the code snippet indicates you’d never want multi-line. Also the 4-spaces was reference to when you’re in fixing the code fragment. Tab doesn’t work then when trying to sort the spacing.

I’m afraid I don’t quite understand you here. What is the scenario, why clunky?

On complex lists it jumps to the found position and puts you in a restrictive navigation view. I’ve solved the issue by using the hoist feature at this point but I imagine new users will similarly be confused by this aspect.

Self-hosted version would cost thousands. We were seriously considering implementing such a version at some point, but being a small shop, we probably cannot afford supporting a non-SaaS version (including upgrades etc.).

Thousands? Why? There’s a clone here which I’ll probably pick up and start using once I have some free time to code again

https://reidgould.github.io/tiddlywiki-nn-plugin/

Additionally, how can I turn off the autotag thing? I’m having to delete them manually because after your last update trying to use the arrow keys is a nightmare with them constantly popping up and auto-filling

Also, is there anyway to ‘merge’ rows? I’ve attached a before/after to clarify

You’re right, we should not ask for it in such situations. Could you please check how it works on https://beta.checkvist.com - I hope I’ve fixed it.

This is how filtering works - it keeps only items which are relevant and chooses the first match. How would it work better, on your opinion?

This is how we measure efforts for providing such a version. I would not go into the details, but providing full Checkvist functionality on-premises is harder than it seems.

We have a separate feature request for that. As a workaround, you can select multiple items, export them into Markdown format, and add the exported text as a single item. Hope this would work for you.

Thanks for the feedback!

Sorry for the late response - this was saved as a draft, must have forgotten to submit

You’re right, we should not ask for it in such situations. Could you please check how it works on https://beta.checkvist.com - I hope I’ve fixed it.

Thanks! Works great, I’ve noticed that when pasting big chunks in which may have indentation - it’ll always place it as a block, however using ctrl+v outside edit mode pastes them as individual entries as desired.

This is how filtering works - it keeps only items which are relevant and chooses the first match. How would it work better, on your opinion?

An easy fix would be line numbers that could be toggled on/off. The issue is that it’s not intuitive whereabouts exactly in the list the results appear. So you need to hoist it, unfilter it, and then follow the branch up.

Text formatting tools would also be appreciated! When pasting from PDF, or websites, etc. I’ll usually need to import pdf->markdown using https://pdf2md.morethan.io/ then remove linebreaks using Remove Line Breaks Online Tool and then paste it into vscode and use find&replace to fix some common bugs. Seems most of this could be automated fairly simply

Hi,

Thanks for the feedback. Text formatting might be a tricky thing. We have a request about markdown import into Checkvist, but it is not very popular so far comparing to other requests.

I’d appreciate if you share your ‘common bugs’ so we could test specific patterns when we’ll be implementing this.

I admit, I still don’t get it :(. Could you probably record a short video which illustrates the problem?

Best,

Screenshot 2020-04-30 at 20.40.28

Small bug, when you search &, it displays as &amp

I’d appreciate if you share your ‘common bugs’ so we could test specific patterns when we’ll be implementing this.

Recognising bullet points, sometimes they come in as ‘-foo’ instead of ’ - foo’, sometimes as ‘•’, lists will come in squashed together - bit of regex to pick up <1.,2.,3.,..,1),2),..(1),(2),i.,ii.,ii..,(i),(ii),..,a.,b.,a),b),etc> and correctly position it would help. Lots of other wee things, like recognising italic and bold (At the moment, it removes the spaces around the word instead which then needs to be fixed manually)

Most importantly, tab and shift-tab support please + find and replace! Would make things a lot easier!

So when searching, if you end up deep into the search before you find what you’re looking for. Knowing where exactly it appears in a big checkvist is hard. Suggestion would be for line-numbers to appear when you search

Thanks for the video! Unfortunately, I cannot hear your comments, but I suppose the ideal solution might be to show breadcrumbs context for the currently selected item somewhere. In this case, you’ll understand the current location in the list rather well, correct?