Some UI things allow for, what I call, a tickbox (checkbox seems to be the more popular term) which can be blank, ticked or "part ticked". It cycles between a blank box, a marked box and a semi marked one. The image below doesn't really show what I was after very well, but demonstrates a 3rd option, other than true/false with the "monkey". It's more a part-done rather than 'disabled' which it actually shows.
The other thing I initially didn't make it clear that it's in the list of notes that I am hoping for.
Right, I get you. Where would you need to use this out of interest? Normally you see this kind of tickbox on software installers where it is something included within a parent selector so you tick it for something to happen rather than after something has been done.
Yes, I suppose that is the sort of thing you see them used for.
When I make a todo item, if it needs a bit more explanation than just "buy birthday card" I tend to write a a bigger explanation in the note itself. So the title might be "replace batteries in kids toys" and I'll put a list in the note, maybe with markdown tickboxes, reminding me to
find dead toys
find screwdriver
buy batteries
And i'd like to half tick the box to indicate I've done some of this
The "disabled" (greyed out) checkbox as it's represented with HTML signifies "disabled" in my mind, so I'm not sure that's ideal. Maybe what you want is the "tri-state" or "indeterminate" checkbox?
If what you're wanting to signify is "partially done," I think that's a totally pragmatic thing to want to represent in checklists. I'm not sure the "indeterminate" state is well-suited for that semantically, though. The other difficulty is, I think that state can only be set by JavaScript; last I checked there was no indeterminate attribute to represent that in the same ways as checked, although browser standards evolve, so that may not be true anymore.
Even if you used the indeterminate state for that under the hood somehow, you'd still probably want a plugin to replace the "partially done" checkboxes with a less visually ambiguous representation, such as the example below, a screenshot from an internal wiki where we use SVG images for the various checkbox states.
No promises on this whatsoever, but I'm interested enough in your proposition to go have a look at how to make a Joplin plugin (some rainy day), because I would find this feature useful as well. As mentioned, it would depart from the established Markdown spec for checklists, though, so there are lots of other instances I can think of where the "partial" checkbox might not render correctly, such as export and printing.
Yes, the example I showed probably wasn't the best, it does seem to indicate disabled which isn't what I'm after.
I think my original question didn't sum up what I was after. The part done in the note may well be useful and I'd probably use such a thing, but what I was hoping for was the part-ticked in the list of notes.
I have a to-do notebook. There might be 10 things to do, but some of them are multi-part tasks. Rather than separate the parts into different to-do's I have one main note and put a more detailed list or just more details in the note. So the titles of my notes might be
Reply to Bob's email
Take car for MoT
Make complaint to mobile phone company
Any one of those might have several things to do, so the 2nd one might have the following in the note itself:
Check oil level
Check bulbs
Book garage
And I'll tick bits off as I do them. And I'd like it if the title could be marked as "part-done".
