Sidebar and navigation redesign ideas

[DamianPereira]

Hi! I was trying this for the first time, and this is the most well designed option from the self hosted to-do apps I could find. Thanks for this! That said I feel the navigation and organizing can use some improvements. But these might be completely personal and might clash with the project's philosophy. If this is too radical let me know, I might maintain a fork for my own private use with these features, but whatever I can upstream and work with you would be awesome.

Issues

1. Getting to an area, or project, takes multiple clicks, when the sidebar is tall enough to show more items (or favorites)
2. Clicking on an area goes to project with a pre-selected filter. This is not clear enough visually, from a UX point of view it looks like I just went to project but I can only see some for some reason.
3. Project-less notes, and area-less projects get confusing to access, you can see them in the all projects/all notes sections, but they are mixed with the rest.
4. Sidebar has a bit of inconsistent language, it's All Tasks, but not All projects, there's also a padding separating tasks from the rest, as if tasks was a different category, but there's nothing inherent about tasks that separates them from notes regarding hierarchy or navigation. They fit into the same boxes.

Some proposals:

1. Have a default area, a default project per area for uncategorized content, and a default project for arealess . These can auto hide when empty, but there's always an easy consistent way to see "uncategorized or loose resources". There should never be orphaned resources without a clear hierarchy, even if the hierarchy is "empty", "default", or even just use inbox and make inbox an area with special UI, instead of it's own separate hierarchy.
2. Add a breadcrumb, and make navigation Area > Project > Notes/Tasks. This seems more disruptive, but I feel like a consistent directional nested UI ends up being easier to navigate and reason about. And if someone does not want this, they can just use the uncategorized view from 1.
3. Sidebar hierarchy for areas, areas should contain the rest of the resources. So a design like this would work better I think:

Area: Work ▽ // Has a dropdown with all areas, and allows switching

All Projects
All Tasks
Favorites
Live views

Basically I'd like to treat areas as context switch, and separate different areas of my life, it would even be nice to have different color themes for each area, but that's a stretch.

Let me know what parts of these are incompatible with the vision of tududi, which would be awesome to have, and which might need some work but are promising. Thanks!