Line view: group notes by any attribute, not just status

Kanban boards are built around one assumption: your notes have a small, fixed set of states, and a column per state makes sense. That holds for status - todo, doing, done - but breaks down for anything with more values than comfortably fit as columns: a dozen assignees, a long list of epics, or a priority scale where you'd rather scan a list than scroll sideways through empty columns.

NoteThink's Line view is a single-lane, grouped list for exactly that case.

Same file, different lens

Line view reads the same markdown a Kanban board would - no new syntax, no separate file. Instead of columns, it renders your notes as a grouped list, sorted into lanes by whichever attribute you name:

# Backlog [](?nt_view=line&nt_group_by=assignee)

Any attribute key present on your stories works as the grouping axis - assignee, epic, priority, or one you invent yourself. Leave nt_group_by unset and Line view falls back to grouping by nt_first_level_folder, each file's first path segment - handy in Folder mode, where it becomes "group by project" for free. Line view carries the same drag-and-drop as Kanban: drag a note into a different lane and NoteThink rewrites its grouping attribute's linetag in the file. The one exception is the default nt_first_level_folder grouping, which is read-only, because moving a card between folder lanes would mean moving the file on disk.

Ordering the lanes

nt_group_order sets which order the lanes themselves appear in, the same idea as choosing column order on a Kanban board - useful when you want, say, a fixed priority ordering rather than whatever order NoteThink happens to encounter the values in.

In Folder mode

When Folder mode aggregates several files into one board, Line view's grouping axis is majority-voted across the files' own nt_group_by linetags, the same way the view type itself is - so a folder of files that all group by epic opens grouped by epic even before you touch a setting.

When to reach for it

Reach for Line view when Kanban's column count would be unwieldy, or when the attribute that actually matters for a given moment isn't status at all - triaging by assignee during a standup, or by epic when planning a release. Switch back to Kanban or Document view at any time from the same toolbar; it's the same file, read three different ways.