which view are you talking about?
If you are talking about Outline view, yes, you can view them all. Just expand them by clicking the Triangle sign on the left edge of the notes. If you are talking about the Map view, we are talking about the classic  (design) question. You might try to use Separators in place of Containers if you want the "children" notes to be visible beside the "children" of other Separators.

Quote:

yes, they always stay as you arrange them. Indeed, if you want to arrange them by creation date, you need to give some explicit extra command (action). by default, they will stay in place

[Assumption: we are working in map view]

If you drop a selection of notes into a container, Tinderbox will retain the relative layout of that selection when added to the child map.  However, when you 'blind' drop a selection to a child note, Tinderbox has to place the the dropped note(s) without overlapping existing content. If there are no child notes (i.e. the drop is creating a container from a note) then, usually (I believe!) one or more of the dropped selection will likely be visible in the viewport - how many will depend on the horizontal/vertical spread of the selected items being dropped.

If the child map already contains children (the drop target is already a container), the dropped selections are fitted into the child map in/around existing items in the viewport. I suspect the issue you're seeing occurs if the drop occurs into a container from a view other than map view. In that case the dropped (notes) map be located away from the parent map's container's viewport. IOW, when you switch back to map view the dropped items aren't in the container viewport as you expected.

There're isn't a built-in mechanism to do what you ask but an $OnAdd action in the container might help. Not tested (busy at a conference right now) but this suggestion works on the fact that when notes are dropped in a contain, they are added as the first sibling(s) child(ren) of the target container. Sidenote: in views like Outline you can manually drop to a particular place in the sibling order - I'm assuming you don't do this). Thus we set a action that on adding content we set the $MapScrollX and $MapScrollY to the $Xpos and $Ypos of the new first child note):

Action:  $MapScrollX(parent) = $Xpos+1; $MapScrollY(parent) = $Ypos-1;

A quick & dirty test with a 2 note selections with some X/Y map separation, dragged in Outline [sic] view onto a container result in the map view of the container showing one of the dropped notes. Oddly, the note in view is the last (second) item in the selection; not yet sure why, I'd expected the first to be in view. But, it gets close to what you want, or so I think. Hope that helps  

Mark B may well have a better answer!

Thanks for the work around.

Here's the scenario: I create a note, then drop another note onto it, thus making it a container. I double-click to open/focus the container. Now I do some work within:



When finished, I click the crumb trail or press up arrow and see:



Where is my work?

After using the program for a bit, I now "know" my work is still there, but initially that wasn't the case. I still have to remind myself that I probably didn't lose everything I've worked on, especially when none of the notes are partially visible. It's a usability issue.

Ideally, when I unfocused/exited the container, I would see a miniature version of what I was working on.



If not that, then at least some of the notes I was working on.

(not sure why the images are broken, are they disallowed?)
Admin edit: The img tag data was missing 'jpg' as the end of the URL  
Thanks, Admin!

I think there's another aspect here, implicit in @John99's last post, that of how much of the child map is visible. The child map actually has a scale, too: $InteriorScale. See also "Viewport detail in containers & agents". You may find altering the default for that may aid getting towards your intuited outcome. You'd edit the (doc-level) default for the app via the Document Inspector's, System tab. Select the desired attribute and then edit its default value - that will then work for all notes/containers in the current doc unless you have already set that attribute's value locally in a note.

One further possible source of confusion is it looks than when navigating 'up' from a map the viewport in the parent container (if you've not set the X/Y scroll - i.e. the default state) then the top left of the view port is roughly the middle of the child map as previously viewed. Thus the viewport is likely showing the lower right (only) quadrant of the map you were viewing. Personally I'd intuit it would be the top left quadrant or the centre section of the child map but I'm not sure of the underlying mechanics.