#76 Arguments remember inherited words and change when parent changes

[Danny Weltman]

This is a pretty trivial request, especially considering it might be a difficult thing to implement, so I mention it not because it's important but merely because in my ideal version of Hypernomicon, it would be implemented.

When I create an argument, I can use an auto-generated suggestion for the argument name. If I later change the argument (or position or whatever) the change is not reflected in child arguments. So for instance if I have an argument "the potatoe seed argument for evidentialism" and I have a counter-argument "John's carrot refutation of the potatoe seed argument for evidentialism" and I notice I misspelled "potato" as "potatoe," I have to go and fix it in the argument and the counter-argument. (If the argument chain is many arguments deep, I'll have to fix it in all of them.) Ditto if I decide to change the name of the argument and so on. Since the sub-arguments got their names automatically I'd like them to continue to get their names automatically if the parent argument changes. Perhaps to avoid issues this could be a popup whenever I edit a parent argument name (or parent position name): it could say "select the following sub-arguments which will have their names updated to reflect this new name" and I could select all, some, or none to automatically update to reflect the change.

Again, this is just a tiny quality of life fix, so, not much reason to implement it. But, I think its existence would be better than its nonexistence.

[Jason Winning]

If I were going to implement this feature, I think the way to do it would be that you can add pre-defined variables when setting the argument name. %r could represent the name of the first argument being responded to. So the argument's name in the Arguments tab would look like this:
John's carrot refutation of %r
Maybe there could be a variable for the first author (of the first source) last name, etc. And it would auto-update if those are changed. But then what if the author whose name you want associated with it becomes an author on the third work listed? You could incorporate record ID into the variable name, but that makes it brittle in a different way.

I think any implementation of this is going to be pretty messy unless we just make the argument names fully automatic. But I don't think that would be very practical either.