"Tab+N" our new shortcut to create Sections

[ShunS]

I implemented the “Convert task to section and vice versa (Tab+:)” feature in my Chrome extension, Asana Navigator (linked to Chrome Web Store).

Motivation

I often create task lists and subtask lists by copying & pasting the lines from template text, and all lines ending with a colon used to be created as sections, but they no longer are. I felt just as much frustration as everyone else in this thread.
As an Asana Ambassador, I not only love Asana as the product. I love the philosophy behind Asana’s UI. “Asana Open House” is one of my favorite talk videos. Watch it from 19m00s to 19m50s. The beauty of Asana has been that it’s as easy and fast as using a text editor, while it has a strong data structure to support our work graph. It stayed true how many new features Asana has built, but I feel this is the first time that the speed was sacrificed for the structure.
I’m really sad, but reading this thread and Sections are dead! Long live sections! for developers, I found that this is a final decision and our complaints might not be able to reverse it. So I built the feature myself.

Conversion by Asana Navigator

Asana Navigator does exactly what is written in the below post by @Joe_Trollo. It creates a new section/task with the same name as the original task/section, and then deletes the original task/section.

Sections are dead! Long live sections!

@Matt_Trifiro: with the data model changes, tasks and sections are not the same objects anymore and are incompatible with each other. It is not possible to change the type of an existing object—only to create a new object and copy data over. Enabling this would mean that every time you convert back and forth between sections and tasks, new objects would be created, IDs would be different, links and references would break, notifications would be sent, and more undesired side-effects would be unav…

This is “Tab+:” in action:

[OLD] Asana Navigator - Convert to section (Tab+:) [no sound]

This works where Tab+N is supported. Specifically, either on a task in the middle pane of a project view or my task view, or on a subtask in the subtask list in the right pane.

My workflow has been changed to something like below:

• Before: I copy & paste lines of text into Asana, and all lines ending with a colon would be created as sections
• After: I copy & paste lines of text into Asana. After that, I manually do “Tab+:” > “Enter” against all lines ending with a colon to convert them to sections

Considerations

• Technically speaking, currently my extension only supports projects “not_migrated” to the new data model. I’ll continue developing the feature to support “migrated” projects, too.
• As you can see in the above video, it’s painfully slow compared to the original Asana feature. It’s proof of how good the original feature was. I’m still sad that the auto-conversion feature is now missing in Asana.
• As always, I welcome any feedback, feature requests, questions, or comments through the Chrome Web Store, GitHub, or the post in the community: Asana Navigator: Unofficial efficiency browser extension to enhance navigation for Asana tasks.