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Bike Board#

Experimental

The Bike Board is new and still finding its shape. It works, and it is safe to use, but it may change or be withdrawn between builds — and it edits your .bike outlines directly. It says so the first time you open it.

Hide it entirely with Settings ▸ Experimental ▸ Show experimental features. It is on by default during the beta, because feedback is the point.

Every task and attributed row from every .bike outline in your External Files folders, gathered onto one board.

That is the whole idea. Bike has no cross-file view — by design, and reasonably so, since a Bike document is a document. But once a project spans a dozen outlines, "what is still open across all of them?" has no answer inside Bike. This is that answer, without asking you to leave your outlines or convert them into anything.

Open it from Experimental ▸ Bike Board.

What you can do with it#

See every open task across your outlines. Group by status and the board shows Todo / Started / Done / Canceled columns drawn from every outline at once. Click a card's circle to cycle its status, or drag it to another column.

Triage by priority, flag or due date. The VIEW BY control regroups the same rows by whichever attribute you are thinking in. Due dates group into Overdue / Today / This Week / Later, and the calendar pane beside the board lets you drag a row onto a specific day.

Group by your own properties. Define a Single Select, Checkbox or Rating in Properties and it appears in the board's Property menu. A Single Select's options become the columns, in the order you declared them — so "Stage: Draft / Editing / Final" gives you a Kanban board over rows in your outlines. See Properties on rows below for how this is stored.

Work one project at a time. The Outline filter takes a search term to narrow the list and checkboxes to include several files — a project that spans three outlines is one tick each.

Or see each outline separately. The Outline toggle sections the board vertically, giving every outline its own set of columns — a mini-board per file, which is useful when the same status means different things in different projects.

What it writes#

Dragging a card, or clicking a checkbox, writes to the outline immediately — there is no separate save step. What it writes is Bike's own vocabulary:

You do The outline gets
Drag a task between status columns Bike's checkbox status — todo, started, done, canceled
Drag a non-task row between status columns @status on that row
Drag to Priority / Flag @priority / @flagged
Drag onto a calendar day, or the Today column @due with that date
Drag to None the attribute is removed

Nothing FoldNotes-shaped is written. Open the outline in Bike afterwards and you will find ordinary Bike attributes, showing in Bike's own attribute panel — the same ones you would get by setting them there.

If Bike has the same outline open

Both apps write whole files. Let one finish before the other starts: make a change here, then switch to Bike, rather than editing the same outline in both at once. FoldNotes always writes through the open document when it has one, so its own editor and the board never disagree.

Properties on rows#

This is the part that does something FoldNotes itself cannot.

A FoldNotes property describes a note. There is no such thing as a property on a paragraph, because only tasks carry a durable identity. But every Bike row has a permanent id, so a row can carry attributes that survive editing, moving and round-tripping — which makes a Bike outline the one place a per-paragraph property is possible.

So the board splits the job:

  • The definition is yours and lives in FoldNotes. Name, type and the ordered list of options are an ordinary property in Manage Properties, shared across the collection.
  • The value lives on the row, as a plain Bike attribute. A property called "Stage" writes @fn-stage(Draft), which you can see and edit in Bike's own attribute panel. The fn- marks it as FoldNotes' — the same prefix FoldNotes already uses for task due dates and status — so it can never be confused with one of Bike's own attributes, now or in a future Bike release. A reader who never opens FoldNotes again loses nothing but the list of options that described it.

A handful of names are already spoken for on a row — Due, Status, Priority, Done, ID, Note ID, Rev, Updated — so a property of your own with one of those names is not offered as a column. This is not a limit on due dates or status: Due, Status, Priority and Flag already have their own views in the Group by control, reading Bike's native attributes. What is refused is a second, different property competing with them. Rename yours — "Review Status", "Target Date" — and it becomes available.

Three property types can drive columns, because they are the ones with a closed set of values:

Type Columns
Single Select your declared options, in your order
Checkbox Yes / No
Rating ★ to ★★★★★

Set one on a row from the row's attributes popover (⌥⌘A, or right-click a row), which lists your properties with their values. Values that exist in a file but not in your schema get a column of their own — nothing typed in Bike is ever destroyed or silently migrated.

The Unset column is off by default

Every task has a status, so a "None" column there holds a handful of rows. A property is opt-in — the rows without it are nearly every row in every outline — so grouping by a property shows only the rows that carry it. The Unset button brings the rest back when you want to assign in bulk.

What is not there yet#

Being honest about the edges, since this is experimental:

  • Sorting within a column and a find field for row text are still to come.
  • Multi Select and Date properties are not offered as columns yet — a row in several columns changes what dragging means, and dates already have the due-date view.
  • A query view — "show me rows matching these rules" — is the direction after that.
  • The board is macOS only for now.

Tell us how it goes#

This is the feature most shaped by what people actually do with it, and the least settled. Worth knowing:

  • Does grouping by a property earn its place, or is status/due enough?
  • Is a cross-outline board the right unit, or do you always want one project at a time?
  • Anything that surprised you about what got written to an outline.

Send anything you find to support@foldnotes.io — including "I opened it and never went back", which is as useful as a bug.