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Mentions & links

Work refers to other work. A document explains a project. A comment asks about a task. A plan points at the rota that feeds it.

Three characters handle all of that:

You type You get
@ A person, and they get told
# A link to anything that already exists
[[ ]] A link to a tool — and it'll create one that doesn't exist yet

All three work in every comment, on every tool, and inside any text document.

@ — mentioning a person

Type @ and a few letters of somebody's name, pick them from the list, and they get a notification. It's the right way to say "can you look at this."

You're only offered people who are in the same initiative, because a mention that summons somebody to a page they can't open helps precisely nobody and mildly annoys everybody.

Names match loosely, so a spelling you're not confident about will still find the right person.

# — linking to a thing

Type # and Initiative offers you everything in the initiative: projects, tasks, documents, queues, counters, calendar events, dashboards, posts. Pick one and its name drops into your text as a link.

Already know what kind of thing you want? Say so and the list narrows: #task:, #queue:, #counter-group:, #calendar:, #dashboard:, #document:, #project:, #post:.

You never have to. # on its own searches the lot — the prefixes are just a shortcut for when half the community has named something "Planning".

Mentioning a task also notifies whoever it's assigned to.

The list reaches the work in this initiative — the document's own, if you're writing in one — so a community absolutely stuffed with matching tasks can still come back with nothing.

When that happens the picker says so, and explains that the initiative is the limit, rather than leaving you staring at an empty box slowly retyping the same word.

Links survive renames

A # link points at the thing, not at its name. Rename a task and the sentence mentioning it quietly updates itself.

[[ ]] — linking, or conjuring

[[ offers the tools in this initiative — projects, documents, queues, counter groups, calendars, dashboards, posts.

The difference from # is what happens when nothing matches. [[ ]] offers to make the thing you just named, on the spot, without you abandoning the sentence you were halfway through.

That's why it reaches tools and # reaches everything. A tool needs only a name and the initiative you're already standing in. A task needs a project, and an event needs a calendar and a time — you can't summon those out of a half-written sentence, so reach them with #.

A tool your initiative has switched off isn't offered, and can't be created this way either.

Every document also shows its backlinks — the other documents pointing at it — so you can see what refers to a page without keeping a list yourself. A # link counts, not just a [[ ]] one.

Names look after themselves

A reference points at the thing, not at its name. Rename a task and every sentence mentioning it says the new name — in every document and every comment, with nobody editing anything.

If what you pointed at gets deleted, or was never shared with you in the first place, the reference keeps the words it was written with — greyed out, no longer a link.

It never claims something you can't see doesn't exist, and it never leaves a hole in the middle of a sentence for you to puzzle over.

Exports show the words

A PDF or Word file can't keep itself current, so an export shows the name a thing had when the reference was written.

# and @ aren't allowed in names

Both already mean something when you're writing, so a name or title can't contain either. Initiative tells you rather than quietly creating a reference nobody can follow.

Inside a text document, a smart chip shows what a thing is currently doing, not just what it's called. See Documents.