Ability to duplicate rems and portals

[anisha]

Title is self explanatory - the ability to duplicate rems and portals would be super useful for me although I do have a fairly specific use case.

Use case:
I’m studying a group of muscles which are innervated by the same nerve — muscle name is the concept here and innervation is one of its descriptors.

To test myself strictly and thoroughly, I would not want to find out via the breadcrumbs that X muscle belongs to Group 1 because then I would automatically know its innervation.
Therefore, I moved X muscle under its [more vague] grandparent (named for example, Muscles of the Upper Limb) + kept a portal to X muscle under Group 1 that it actually belongs to — this helps with both easier navigation + avoiding hints in the queue.

How breadcrumbs look before the move:
Muscles of Upper Limb > Group 1 > X muscle > innervation

How breadcrumbs look after the move:
Muscles of Upper Limb > X muscle > innervation

Additionally, I would also like to test myself on which muscles fall under Group 1 but not their innervation (and other descriptors).
This is where duplicating a portal would be useful - I could simply duplicate the portal already present, select all the muscles in this duplicated portal, Cmd + ↑ to hide their descriptors, and make this portal appear on the backside of the group x card.

[UMNiK]

Could you not use references and extra cards to achieve this? Just add a child to muscles of upper limb and write in Which group? [[reference to muscle]] some arbitrary character to cloze so it will show up in the queue. This way it will show up in the queue as just a reference with breadcrumbs of muscles of the upper limb, you can active recall the group and check if you were right by hovering the reference. Seems like the only way to achieve this until tags, references and portals are integrated into the flashcard part of RemNote.

[anisha]

That has more or less been my workaround occasionally but I think that this kind of referencing is ineffective. By that, I mean that referencing for the purpose above isn’t the actual goal of referencing in general. For this purpose, a portal would be much cleaner imho.

Where the referencing approach gets messy is when I later try to reference the muscle, and I end up referencing the reference to the muscle that I made solely for the group card. So it creates additional rems that are solely references to my knowledge base, which can make searching for the original rem difficult because it is distracting.

Also, it is possible to put portals into flashcards (in the backside of a multiline or list card) so why not make use of it?

[UMNiK]

Here’s another thought: use tags to create a structure and duplicate them in children descriptors to create flashcards. Here’s a sample structure:
Big Group
Medium Group #can pull in all specific items with this tag by portal
Small group #can pull in all specific items with this tag by portal
specific item #medium group #small group
what medium group::medium group
what small group::small group

Obviously, this is quite a long way to go, and it still necessitates duplicate information, but it seems like the best bet to both hide breadcrumbs and be tested on them. Apologies if I misunderstood your particular case, I abstracted as much as possible and worked from there.

[anisha]

Thanks for showing me an alternative! Might use it until this request hopefully is taken into consideration

[hannesfrank]

Apart from the described use case I would like to be able to duplicate Rem on a pure text editing level, e.g. when I want to copy a rem with mathematical formulas which I need in a few analogous cases.

Basically Ctrl + C, Ctrl + V does nothing right now. Ctrl + X, Ctrl + Shift + V pastes plain text which breaks when having formatting like formulas.

Related to: Ability to create all content via API and/or pasting

[Bruno_Miranda]

I was trying to work around it and I discover another possible way to do it, transform your rem into a document ( /tag doc) export it as markdown, and then on (settings/account) import it. It is cool cause it does not mess with the way we have it formatted.

[anisha]

Interesting! Thanks, I’ll give it a shot.

[Spondon]

Great idea! But let’s not forget the merge functionality, because that let’s me keep organized to avoid duplicates. So, when I deliberately duplicate something, we should have some sort of confirmation that we actually want the rem to have a duplicate. Maybe something like a “Duplicated” power-up tag? so that the little merge button doesn’t show up if that tag is present.

I don’t know if I’m clearly explaining.

[anisha]

You’ve explained perfectly and I agree! I think that’s a pretty sound idea. Thanks for your input to the request, I think it could be very valuable to the team if they consider making the option of duplicating rems available to us (hopefully in the near future ).

[Dante_Gaxiola]

I would love to have this feature. Especially for the editing of drafts is super important to have the original and the copy to work on.