My Favorite Feature of Walling
I think this is actually a pretty killer feature that other apps should copy.
Walling has been around for longer than we may realize and it’s gotten pretty good. I recently jumped back into it because their mobile app is really great. I also wanted to see what they’ve added since I used it later last year.
I always felt like I never gave Walling a solid try.
After playing around with it for the last week or so, I can say that I’m pretty impressed with it. I’ve always loved the idea of thoughts as cards. I feel like it’s one of the best digital representations of thoughts. The 3x5 card has always been a great place to put a single thought on. That’s what the original Zettlekasten was. A slip box cards that contained thoughts.
I started watching all the videos of Walling I could find to learn more about how it works and found a feature that I’m sort of obsessed with. I’m going to just do a quick glance at what that feature is.
Wizard Walls
In Walling you can create a “Wall” which is sort of like a new page in Notion. You can create sections and drag and drop your blocks to these walls.
But there’s a feature called “Wizard” that is exactly what I’ve been looking for in an app.
What I want to be able to do in my PKM is to tag a certain thought/sentance/block with a category and then collect those thoughts in a visually appealing way. So if I would tag a bunch of passages from books as “morning routine” then I can have a section that constantly is pulling in all my blocks that are tagged as “morning routine” and I can have them in a nice looking section. It’s a live board that is constantly updated.
Inline queries in Roam or Obsidian are pretty close, but not visually appealing. They don’t let me see all the blocks laid out next to each other.
This is where Walling shines.
You start with a dropdown menu where you can build your query for what you want to show up on this particular board. So if you are collecting all your blocks on habits, you can click on tags and choose your tag “habits”. All the blocks that you’ve tagged as ‘habits’ will now populate here as you tag them. These are copies of the original block, they are transcluded. So if you have a wall for a book like “Atomic Habits” and you’ve tagged a few summary blocks on that wall as ‘habits’ then they will also show up on your new Wizard Wall (that’s the name I am giving it for some reason).
What makes this different is how easy it is and how visually appealing it is. I have all my blocks with a certain tag in one place and it’s constantly updating.
So here’s my workflow right now: I will write down different thoughts throughout the day as I have them. I write them on the Daily Desk and then tag them. I have multiple Wizard Walls set up to grab certain tags. I also will go through my book notes and add them to Walling in a Wall just for that book. I will then tag certain highlights with a topic that will also go straight to a Wizard Wall.
This allows me to find interesting thoughts and relevant points super quickly. When I want to write about something I’m learning about or just look through some information about a specific topic, this is what I do. I can go back to my Wizard Wall and see all the thoughts and points from books and articles that I’ve tagged and now appear on a wall under that topic. It’s super simple.
Improvements
I absolutely love this, but right now there’s a few, small, limitations. Right now this feature is not available on their mobile apps. That’s not the end of the world, but I really want to view all this info on mobile. Most of my walls right now are Wizard Walls and that means I can’t view them through the app. I’m sure that’s being worked on and will roll out soon so I’m not too concerned.
There’s also no way to highlight text in a block. So if I’m scanning through some text, there’s not easy way to see the specific words or sentences that really stand out to me.
What is interesting is that you can actually tag a specific block within a card. So in a card you can have multiple blocks if you want. And you are allowed to tag a specific block. But when you tag one block as “morning routine” the entire card comes up in the Wizard Wall. This makes sense, of course, but I would love for it to pull specific blocks that are tagged as well and leave out the rest of the card.
Closing Thoughts
I love when companies steal great ideas from other companies and make them better. This seems to be a better, more visual, way of viewing queries. I would love for other companies to have a feature like this.
Inline queries are pretty darn similar, but don’t looks as good.
This is a fantastic feature and is definitely a reason to give Walling another look.