What are people's thoughts on "ephemeral templates" / "dynamic forms" (not sure what to call them)?

[tzsebe]

I didn't want to make this a feature request, since it needs some fleshing out. Plus, probably good to get a feeler for how many people would want/use this. I know I'd use it in a number of ways.

There are some use cases where a note might be a template to fill out and paste somewhere else (not to be confused with templates to create new notes).

For example, a support playbook. These can read like:

Step 1: Set variables

PROJECT_NAME={{your_project}}
INSTANCE_NAME={{your_instance}}
ZONE={{your_zone}}

Step 2: Run commands

gcloud --project ${PROJECT_NAME} compute instances create ${INSTANCE_NAME} -zone ${ZONE} <...>
...

---

This is fine, but it adds the annoying friction of having to paste the thing elsewhere, manually populate your fields, and then paste it into the real thing.

I think it would be beneficial down the line to support these fields dynamically in ZenNotes. So for the example above, that support playbook can be written something like this:

PROJECT_NAME=[*your_project*]
INSTANCE_NAME=[*your_instance*]
ZONE=[*your_zone?us-central1-a*] <-- could have support for default values

Then, if someone is viewing it in Preview mode, the fields can show up high contrast (like full on FF0000 red). Clicking them would allow me to enter text that gets populated everywhere on the page where I use this field name. Or they could show up in a side panel similar to "connections". Maybe it can remember values across notes, so if I go through multiple playbooks, my "instance name" variable stays set.

Then, I can just copy the block straight into my terminal without having to mess with an interstitial notepad for filling things in.

I'd find this really useful, though I know it's not a trivial thing to build.