Note: Colors are now on by default for all users
Hey there wonderful Workflowy folks.
We’re ready to share our implementation of 🌈 colors in beta with you. Please keep in mind that the feature is still in beta and so there are some rough edges.
We would love to get some feedback, so please feel free to play with it, start using it, and share your thoughts with us💬 .
To activate the feature, open the settings panel then toggle the ‘Colors’ feature.
Make sure you’re on beta.workflowy.com or using the beta version of the app, otherwise you won’t be able to toggle the feature on or see the latest changes.
Feedback we incorporated
We read all your comments regarding the initial visual design and have incorporated some of that into this version. For example:
- Changed color palette to better support users with color blindness
- Added neutral gray color
- Copy/paste keeps colors
- Applying color again removes the color
What can I color in Workflowy?
We’ve implemented the three main things we mentioned in the previous colors post.
To apply text highlighting, simply select some text and you’ll see the new option in the text widget.
Text color – You can apply this anywhere you like
Text background color – You can also apply this anywhere
Tags – Defaults to no color, but once you pick a color, it will sync everywhere
Keyboard shortcut – For applying the last style
Where we would like feedback
Tell us how you used colors in Workflowy
If you could change one thing about colors in Workflowy, what would it be?
A keyboard shortcut to bring up the colour palettes or make changes to the colours would be great. Ctrl+shift+H is wonderful but it only applies the last colour to the selection. Having to toggle between mouse and keyboard = 🙁
Was this feature removed? I found this post on Friday, set everything up, and it seems to be no longer available. I realize it’s still in beta.
I can confirm I’m using the beta version of the site. Thanks.
Thx for the colors. Here is my wishlist:
Hi guys,
I love native color support in workflowy.
Just did an export in formatted text this morning and was extatic to see the colors and highlights were exported as well !!!! This is what I wanted for a long time, and this is going to speed my workflow a lot.
As far as improvements goes, il repeat some of the comments below :
keep up the good work guys, this is awesome
What colors??
“…open the settings panel then toggle the ‘Colors’ feature.”
Not seeing any ‘Colors’ feature to toggle????
Hey Peter, make sure you’ve first toggled the ‘Workflowy labs toggle’, refreshed, and then you should see the Colors option in the beta version of Workflowy (beta.workflowy.com).
I am using WF Version 1.3.6-beta.756 (1.3.6-beta.756). No new updates. And I don’t see the Colors toggle switch. I see Backlinks, Inline Linking, MFA, w the LABS tag. but no Colors LABS.
Hey Raphael, please make sure you’re using the latest version.
Version 1.3.6-beta.936
Change one thing: Tags should not lose colors.
Tags currently become uncolored in shared outlines, and each user of a shared outline can set their own tag colors that others cannot see/does not affect others. A complete mess for teams relying on shared outlines.
See support request #46501
Colors are pretty, but for me the strength of workflowy is its cabability to be driven 100% from the keyboard (or very nearly) and its minimal bloat. Unless they have some semantic or workflow meaning, colors are not needed. I would prefer to see the ability to set behaviors on bullets, e.g. adding tag #sys:rota would change the behavior so that transitioning a child of this node to done would instead move it to the bottom of the children and leave it not done. Or to declare the home of a node so that mirroring it elsewhere in the document would make it easy to know where the node originated. These would provide productivity benefits for me.
[…] did the design work for colors in Workflowy, which is coming out any day now. We’re starting our next project right […]
I had an idea, don’t know if that’ll be possible: set a colour per “level” of nodes. It would help be better distinguish different layers. So, there should be a mode that can be toggled, and then you can choose which colour each level has. E.g. the main level is blue, the layer underneath red, and below that green etc.
Allow me to change the color of backlinks globally, or provide an option to set the color of back links.
All the text settings from the same pop-up, no sub-menus.
Or some clever way to expand it without clicking.
Also, live preview while hovering over options.
😊
Aiding “Meta” Workflowy
E.g. the tag coloring syncing everywhere (love that!) seems more a priority than things such as ability to style multiple nodes simultaneously.
One thought: Your community has long been “styling” Workflowy to visually group node levels—e.g. 1.1.1, 1.1.2—to aid navigation.
Visually identifying the outline levels when doing a lot of vertical traversing is HUGE for us when navigating bigger “documents” (when there’s a lot on the screen). So we use things such as ✅ and ▋and underlining/bold in “subheads” to easily find our way though larger outline sections. Particularly as we are putting notes into a meeting. We even have business rules as to how many ▋▋▋mean what.
►Hence, this suggestion: Ability to simultaneously style all first-child levels under a node. Of course, if you already have something on the roadmap to help identify node levels to aid navigation, you should stick with that.
HUGE Thanks!!
Feel kind of bad for you guys, as you of course are going to get tons of “edge case” requests (or personalities 😏) with this feature being so different from previous feature types. Hang in there!
Really, really appreciate all you do.
Add a slight ’rounding’ of the corners of text whose background has been colored. This give a softer, more professional look than the hard rectangles currently used.
If you could change one thing about colors in Workflowy, what would it be?
The color of searched tags becomes yellow. If this is the case. the searched tags get mixed up with texts that were originally applied the color yellow if such texts were in the bullets searched. This becomes confusing.
I wish the colored sections were exported as proper elements in the HTML and OPML export modes, rather than as a with a custom style as is currently the case.
Also, it would be great if the keyboard shortcut to apply color formatting (Ctrl+Shift+H) didn’t move the cursor to the start of the line. That’s quite inconvenient.
Thanks for this new possibility, it’s great!
Tags – “Defaults to no color, but once you pick a color, it will sync everywhere ” It doesn’t work on my end, too bad. Is there any special manipulation to do?
Hi Henda. what specifically doesn’t work – the tag syncing?
Hi Rodolfo, I mean that when I affect a color to a tag, for example : pink for tag Today, the other tags “Today” don’t take this color.
Tags are case sensitive so a tag like #today and #Today would be considered two different tags and the colors would not sync.
If the tags are the same but they’re not being updated and you’re on beta.workflowy.com or using the beta app then that sounds like a bug that you can report at help@workflowy.com so we can have the team look at it.
Tags shouldn’t be case sensitive, since searching for tags is not case sensitive.
Similar to Jaroslav Skuhrovec’s suggestions but even more emphatically:
Way, way, more colours and no difference in choice between background and text choices – one large palette, not two small ones
Ability to highlight whole line, not just the text part
I disagree. Too many colors would be a negative for me. I would spend too much time choosing and making sure they all match when they are supposed to. Fewer carefully chosen and nice-looking colors seems great to me.
I use the 140 colour mod and when I first started I did indeed find I spent some time to find the right harmonious colours for me and my WorkFlowy list. But that was 2 years ago and now i don’t think at all and know what works.
Look at it like decorating a room – you spend time to choose the colours that work for you and then live with them without thought for many years. Most people wouldn’t dream of telling the paint manufacturers to reduce their choice of colours to 7 for skirting/doors and 7 for walls – because choosing is difficult and takes time.
You seem to like the current WorkFlowy colour choice, but I think they are terrible and wishy-washy. And we come full-circle… which is why providers of paint and colours provide many choices.
If you could change one thing about colors in Workflowy… -> Being able to set the colors of multiple bullets at once! Currently, when I select multiple bullets the context menu which appears has Complete, Mirror, Delete, and no color options. Changing the colors of many bullets one by one is tedious.
Select multiple bullets and then use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+H to paste the highlighting to all at once
I actually like the color palette, but a few more won’t hurt I guess.
Strange request, but long notes are hard to read or print out with the soft gray don’t color. Love to have black as an option in settings, but allowing black as a font color would be a nice workaround.
I would love to use it as a long-form editor.
I was confused as to what you meant by “don’t color” until it dawned on me that you meant to write “font color”! 😅
The pastel colors are more appealing to me as text can be more easily read.
More colors please, ideally a palette where you could create your own colors
more colours particularly orange which makes me smile
if when use ctrl a to select a whole node then you get the little gadget to add the colours, not just when select with mouse
is it really hard to have both a font colour and a highlight?
If you could change one thing about colors in Workflowy, what would it be?
I have two 🙂
1 – more colors
2 – the option to highlight the whole line. Same as in the picture. It is ideal for important headers.