Multiple templates for same editor?

It appears Hook only recognizes one template for any app ID. So if we put more than one Tinderbox (.tbx) document in the custom templates folder, only “Tinderbox” shows up on the “Link to New” list. So, we cannot have 2 or more Tinderbox (other other app) templates, and we don’t see what “Tinderbox” in the menu means.

I suggest that the list of Templates (at lease with regard to the custom ones) should not care what app edits that document type, but should instead list the templates regardless of how many Tinderbox or Word or Pages templates are in the “custom” folder.

Also, please consider recognizing aliases in the “custom” folder. I want to be able to point to a template that exists somewhere else in the filesystem so that I don’t have to maintain two or more instances of the same template.

Thanks as always!

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Hi Quorm,
This sounds like a great idea – I was just looking for a way to do this in the documentation. The naming convention could be slightly altered to accommodate this feature. It appears that the word “template” in the name is superfluous.

Current Form:
template[_appname].[extension] where _appname is optional and extension mandatory.

We could vary this as:
["default" | custom_identifier][_appname].[extension]
where custom_identifier indicates the purpose of a custom template, “default” is what is supplied with the Hook app or substituted by the user for a single-template customization.

I’m presuming that the optional _appname assists in differentiating different apps with the same extension – perhaps only as a human-readable assistance, as I think the default Finder associations are used for determining which app to actually launch for each template.

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Sorry for the long delay in responding to this request. We agree. We’ve added this to our todo list post official 1.0 release.

the fact that aliases couldn’t be used does not surprise me. But I was surprised to find that one can’t use a symbolic in the custom templates folder to a particular template that had been created like this example, for OmniOutliner files:

[M-3:Hook/templates/custom templates] lucb% ln -s ~/Desktop/template.ooutline .

I need to investigate this.

However, you can move the entire custom templates folder from its default location, and point to it with a symbolic link, for example, this works:

~/Documents/Hook/templates]% ln -s ~/Desktop/Hook\ builds/custom\ templates .

That’s why we have not yet made the location of the custom templates folder configurable in the UI (going lean, and keeping the UI simple).

Thank you for this. We’ll definitely consider this when we implement the multiple templates feature.

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That would be OK, but in my case – probably not unique – many apps I use have their own template folders. So I’m not sure that moving Hook’s folder somewhere else fixes the original question.

If you come up with a solution that recognizes symlinks, I think that’s the best world.

Extra credit: can we have subfolders in the custom templates folder? If so, then a symlink to some app’s own templates folder placed in the custom templates folder would be very handy.

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