A proposal for an index file alternative

[adsilcott]

I've had some frustration with having to re-add scenes to the project, but this isn't about that. I'd like to humbly offer an alternative way that longform could be organizing projects that I think would be a nice improvement.

Right now longform stores project data in a YAML index file. I propose that the scene list could be stored in a plain markup file that longform generates with the scenes represented as links to the files. Additional project information could be stored in properties. The longform side-panel would just be a "view" of this document, much like the kanban plugin is just a view of a normal markdown file that uses headers to give it structure. Much like the kanban plugin you could drag to rearrange the order.

I see a few reasons why this would be great:

• It creates a useful summary of the project that can be used as a table of contents, printed out, or embedded in other notes.
• It continues to work without longform, which fits with the Obsidian philosophy.
• If there's an option to prepend ! to the links then the page could serve as a way to skim through the entire project at once.

[kevboh]

I've thought about it, for sure. The difficulty is really in parsing something like that—the more editable you make the index file seem, the more people will edit it, the more surface area there is for bugs caused by malformed indices.