Too many clicks to create an inline entity mention

[Yuri_BC]

In a rich text field, converting words into a new entity and link it as mention, requires 5 user actions:

1. Select the words
2. Click Create Entity
3. Type the database name (by default this is set to ‘Common: Document’ ← WFT?! ). Anyway, this requires hitting multiple keyboard keys to type the database name before it shows up, so actually a number of actions more than 5 for the user.
4. Click to select.
5. Click the ‘Create’ button.

Suggestion: create a way to use only two actions, for example:

1. Select the words
2. Keyboard shortcut to auto-create an entity and link it as mention, using the most recently mentioned database.

I see in the roadmap that the fibery team is currently working on a new highlighting feature. Will that maybe improve the click efficiency for the users, in this case?

I’m about to create a workaround with a script that converts strikethrough words (strikethrough is one click less than the editor highlight feature) into inline entity mentions of a database selected in the entity, but if anything similar is upcoming, please let me know.

[Chr1sG]

1. Select the words
2. Ctrl-E
3. Start typing letters of database name until you can see highlighted the one you want
4. Ctrl-Enter

We haven’t had much feedback for a shortcut for automatically using the most recent db, but let’s see if this is popular.

[Chr1sG]

Or if you want to do it as you type:

1. type # followed by entity name
2. choose the db from the drop down
3. click on Create

[Yuri_BC]

Thank you. However, let me explain the purpose and reason for the need for reducing clicks to the minimum.

Quick bulk-highlighting text, to process later.
The way this is often done, is first a quick review of important words or sections of the text, by highlighting them. These words and sections are substracted from the main text, then analyzed and processed in different ways. Examples of my own daily use cases:

• Research papers
• Project descriptions
• Meeting notes
• Train of thoughts
• Team discussion threads

So the speed of processing these texts requires the created entities to be set as default somewhere.
What is acceptible, is that after highlighting mutliple sections, one button click would convert them.

[Chr1sG]

Your use case description is interesting, since on first inspection, the items you would be wanting to create would be different types of things (Papers, Descriptions, Meeting notes, Thoughts, Discussions). It would seem likely to me that you wouldn’t want to use the same db for all of these, in which case there needs to be a way of telling Fibery what type it should be in each case (or maybe using AI to guess I suppose )

Of course, from your previous posts, you might be using Fibery in an unusual way that means that all these things are stored in one single db

[Yuri_BC]

What I meant is that the highlighting is happening in these Research papers, project descriptions, etc but the highlight entities created indeed can be a generic type, since they will be processed afterwards in differen ways.

I realize now that what I’m asking is actually very close to the hypothes.is app, which is the most popular open source highlighting tool for academics. It even has an API
https://h.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api/

Here is an example of the highlighting and annotation features:

Does the upcoming highlighting feature of Fibery come close to this? I rather not use hypothes.is but Fibery for this.

Note: highlighting text using hypothes.is does not work in Fibery.

And all hypothes.is highlights/annotations of fibery pages are lost as ‘orphans’:

[Chr1sG]

I think the upcoming Highlights feature might be interesting for you. It specifically has the concept of ‘open-ended’ highlights, whereby you are identifying that some snippet of text is important, but not processing/linking it straightaway to a specific target.
Let’s see what you make of it when it’s released, and we can revisit these thoughts…