FR: Support dendron hierarchy stubs

[Kamholtz]

In Dendron there is the concept of a stub (https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/c6fd6bc4-7f75-4cbb-8f34-f7b99bfe2d50/#stubs). A stub is a note that is referenced in a hierarchy, but does not actually exist yet. It appears as a parent when viewing its descendants.

Example

Notes in vault:

• note1
• note1.note2.note3
• note1.note2.note4

In this vault, note2 is a stub. It does not exist yet, but it is referenced in the hierarchy of note1.note2.note3. When note1.note2.note3 is opened, note1.note2 should appear as a parent, and upon selecting note1.note2 it should be created (in the same way that following a link to a note that is not yet created will automatically create it).

Purpose

By not supporting stubs, it becomes difficult to ascend the hiearchy when you are at note1.note2.note3 because its parent note1.note2 does not appear in breadcrumbs. It also cannot be inferred that note1.note2.note3 and note1.note2.note4 are siblings.

It therefore becomes necessary to remember to create note1.note2 for easy traversal of the graph. This is a point of friction and error prone as the hierarchy grows.

Without stubs, existing dendron vaults will not be traversable using breadcrumbs without first creating all of the stubs.

Use case

Suppose I want to create a todo list for my projects in my brand new vault with Dendron hierarchies. It is grouped by project, then tasks, then parts. I want to jump straight in and write two notes for part1 and part2 of task1 in project1

• todo.project1.task1.part1
• todo.project1.task1.part2

In order to get breadcrumbs to recognise these two notes as siblings, I must create the entire hierarchy first by making each note in the graph. This is particularly tedious on mobile.

• todo
• todo.project1
• todo.project1.task1
• todo.project1.task1.part1
• todo.project1.task1.part2

By recognising stubs, I can start at the lowest point of the tree by writing part1 and part2 and navigate up the tree via breadcrumbs (which will automatically create the notes) to fill out the details of taska and projecta at a later time.

[SkepticMystic]

Thank you for the detailed FR @Kamholtz, always appreciated :)
I can definitely add support for this! I don't really use Dendron notes myself, but I thought stubs were already possible. I don't think it should be too hard to implement

[Kamholtz]

I (and likely many other Dendron users) eagerly await this! Thank you!

[SkepticMystic]

Can you give it a try on 2.46.0 and let me know if it works :)

[Kamholtz]

I can confirm that this is working extremely well on my Dendron vault. I think you just made this a very viable option for creating/exploring Dendron notes on mobile devices. Thank you so much for the speedy work!

[prashanth-lavinna]

@Kamholtz Hello Carl. I loved Obsidian but I miss Dendron hierarchies so bad. I'm trying to use same vault for Obsidian and Dendron to overcome this. Would you elaborate on how you are using them together?