Aliases

Making an alias to a note allows a note to be placed in more than one location in a Tinderbox document, just like an alias in Mac OS. The original note can be in one place in the hierarchy; the alias can be somewhere else entirely. Both the original note and the alias give access to the content of the note: the same text window, the same attributes, and so on.

A note can have many aliases, or none. Aliases are a flexible way for organising notes in ways that a simple Outline-style hierarchy doesn’t permit.

An alias will have the same name as the original. Change the name of either the alias or the original, and both will change.

• The name of an alias will appear in italics in all views.
• An alias cannot contain children.
• Opening a text window of an alias actually opens the text window of the original note.
• Editing the attributes of an alias actually edits the attributes of the original note.
• Deleting an alias removes just that alias - the original and any other aliases are unaffected.

Deleting the original note automatically deletes all its aliases; deleting an alias has no effect on the original.

To create an alias, choose Make Alias from the Edit menu, or press Cmd-L — if you are in a view window, first select the correct note with the arrow tool. Otherwise, create an agent, that will create aliases for any matching notes

The alias will be created as a sibling of the original note. You can then move it anywhere in the document that you want.

Newly-created aliases take their height and width from that of their original note. When exporting, aliases also behave as if their original note's children were their own children. In previous releases, aliases behaved as if they never possessed children.

Aliases are exported as separate pages in the appropriate location within the output. This makes it easier to use web links to alias content that point to the right place. It also helps when web output uses a hierarchical navigation system as with aTbRef.

When including children that are aliases such as when using ^children^ and ^descendants^, items than happen to be aliases are included as aliases. Previously, the original was included.

Since for most purposes the alias and its original are interchangeable, this change will seldom affect export. But intrinsic properties of the alias (Xpos, Ypos, Height, Width, SiblingOrder, and so forth) are now exportable.

Reflecting the way aliases are treated as separate entities in an export context, links to aliases 'belong to those aliases and they support their own Roadmap view and Browse Links windows. However, the links() action code cannot currently address aliases at a target so analysis of links to/from an alias is best done visually or by means of Roadmaps.

From v4.7.1, text links as well as basic links are generated from exported aliases; the target of the link is the same for the original and all alias(es).

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License
[See aTbRef CC licence Attribution/Waiver info info]