Grid + Side Panel vs Just Grid
I am creating a desktop app, one of whose functions is to display a list of notes, which can be short or long (the longest may span 100s of lines in a box that is of similar width to the box I am currently typing in).
I have thought of 2 different ways to do this:
Display in a grid a preview of each note. When a user clicks on a note in the grid, a panel to the right of the grid displays the full note (plus actions that the user can take against the note). The screenshot below is what it would look like:
Display in a grid everything. So each row in the grid would be a full note.
Which of the 2 is better, given that the notes can be rather long? Note that this is NOT a web app. It's a desktop app written in a legacy framework.