Problem

Many use cases require arbitrary metadata (or frontmatter) to be available on documents. Documents may be used for many use cases and sometimes users expect extra data to be attached to them using custom fields.

This is already "solved" at many layers of our stack, but the UI doesn't help the user read and write arbitrary metadata.

Solution

Design TBD, inspired by Obsidian and/or Notion frontmatter.

Proposal: Tool Tab + Sidebar

Much like Commenting, people, or citations. We can enable arbitrary metadata to show up as a full screen option within a document, and with an additional click, push into the sidebar to view alongside the content.

I don't want to clutter every document tab bar with metadata, so to open the metadata you will go into document options.

For now, the metadata will be a flat list of string values. If the user types a number, or "true/false" then we will automatically convert to a number or boolean when saving. We will not support sophisticated objects or values yet.

Maybe we will include a date editor or datetime editor when the string value is interpreted as a date(time).

Autocomplete

Pending new backend APIs, we will support autocomplete for metadata field names and values. Populated by the other documents on your node.