Introduce a merge thought feature
It would be useful to be able to two or more identical thoughts, hit merge, the two become one. The two thoughts are merged, the thoughts links, notes, are merged. The two thoughts do not even need to be identical.
If types are used and both thoughts are in the same family then the the most generic thought type will be used. If the thought types are dissimilar then the user can select either of the type for the merged thought, or accept the use a new system created hyphenated type, or they can enter their own type. I guess
that what I am suggesting is basically a join operation on thoughts.
For example suppose you have a thought three thoughts "Great
Expectations" and one is of type "novel", another is of type
"fiction", and a third is of type "movie" and you chose to merge them the merge of the "novel" and the "fiction" could yield "fiction" (the least generic super type), and the merge of "fiction" and "movie" will yield prompt the user to select either "fiction", or "movie" or "fiction-movie", or a user entered type say "fictional entertainment", which has subtypes of "fiction" and "movie". For this to be useful of course it should be possible for a thought to have multiple parents.

There is a new report in TheBrain 9 that locates thoughts with the same name so that they can be merged or otherwise adjusted. A “merge thoughts” capability is planned.
This command will be included in the next major release, version 12.
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Anonymous commented
I could really use this feature...I'm facing a massive problem combining two brains with many duplicate entries.
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Anonymous commented
There are times when I come to the same end thought through different lines of thinking. It would be nice to be able to run a search on these (find duplicates), and if necessary, merge them.
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david c, paris commented
I wonder why so few people vote for this proposal. It's so easy to create two thoughts that appear in time being one and the same, and so complex to manually "merge" them (link all child thoughts to one and suppress the other), that I would have thought much more people would have voted.
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JW commented
agree. maybe select two thoughts, click merge and then choose, like duplicate contacts in outlook etc, which fields you'd like to include in the merged thought. it'd also be nice to be given the same option when copying/dragging a link into the plex where that link/thought already exists.
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sunwei415 commented
When we find there are more than one Thoughts with the same name and mean the same, it will be nice to be able to combine them into one. That is to say, keep only one copy and combine their properties and relations.
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nickjhowe commented
This is a great way to eliminate duplicate thoughts. Over time it is easy to accidentally create very similar thoughts in different parts of the brain. Being able to merge one thought into another would be a great help.
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jostber commented