This is what I've been building since June 2021. It took ~100+ pull requests with 26247 added lines, 11078 removed lines. Thanks to @jdan @toolness @zen0wu and everyone else at Notion who helped along the way 🎉
It might seem like a small thing - to let you select text in multiple blocks at once - but we had to upgrade nearly every one of Notion's features to understand the new selection model.
Take deleting a selection: Selections inside a block are easy: update that block to remove the characters. But, how should it work if you select across blocks? Only removing characters leaves behind empty blocks. Deleting a parent block makes its contents disappear too...
If you do this kind of delete in Google Docs or Pages, those trailing lines after the selection end up weirdly over-indented; your outline is broken and you need to manually correct the indentation on every line.
When you delete across blocks in @NotionHQ, we need to move the contents indented inside those deleted blocks somewhere that makes sense in your outline. Your ideas stay organized.
This is one of countless interactions we updated. My hope is that writing in @NotionHQ will feel more intuitive, more natural, and less surprising - while still letting you outline and organize in the ways that've always made it great.
On a personal note, as a student I dreamed of working on apps like @OmniOutliner and Apple's Pages that set a high bar for user experience. This year, I feel like my work is finally starting to reach that same level 📈