A Devonthink analog for a stack of index cards

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Devonthink already mimics index cards in fine style. Just write Markdown, RTF, or anything that will reveal what you wrote through quick look preview. There you go, a well organized deck of index cards.

There’s a workflow glitch, though. It’s not bad, and it could be cured with those most cherished words any developer ever hears. “All you have to do is…” :grin:

Imagine you’re researching some topic. You write a note about some aspect of your findings.

Later, you learn something related that you would like to add as a subordinate note. Of course, documents don’t have child documents.

Your options are to write your new note and group the new note and the old note, tag the new note and the old note with a common tag, or link the old note to the new note.

But what if notes could have child notes? It wouldn’t take much.

Right now, selecting a group causes the preview window to display, “No selection.”

What if a selected group displayed “No selection” unless it had an annotation?

If a group had an annotation, it could be available in the preview area for display and edit just like a regular document.

Right clicking a Markdown or RTF document could include “convert to annotated group” which would create a group of the same name as the document, building the new group’s annotation from the original document’s contents plus its annotation, if it had one.

This can already be done, of course, but annotations can be overlooked. Markdown rendering isn’t done in the Annotations inspector, for example, although RTF is nice.

Surfing through ideas, if annotated groups are used throughout, would be more seamless. Click on an idea, if it has subordinates you can drill down with a consistent presentation of notes through items and sub-items.

Now you can have documents with children. Best of all, “all you had to do” was support preview of annotations when selecting a group.

If this is a viable idea, please let me know. I’ll go lounge on the beach, play a few rounds of golf, and in general faithfully execute all the duties of an end user throughout the development cycle. No worries, I got your back on this one.

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I like this idea.

I organize my markdown notes by tags. Some of my tags are accessed more often than the others. I have one specific “companion” note for each of these tags. A “companion” note provides an overview of the topic, as well as a list of important documents with context. The URL metadata field of the tag is set to the item link of its “companion” note (followed by ?opentab=1). When I have selected a tag, and would like to view its “companion” note, I launch the URL of the tag.

My “companion” notes are not annotations, however. They are often created before the related tag was.

I want to have a similar option as well: To load the user-designated URL (if there is one) of a group or tag in the preview area by default, instead of display “No Selection”. The URL could be an item link (as is in my use case), a web link or anything else supported by DT. This would help to minimize friction in my workflow and perhaps someone else’s.

Thanks to the wonderful team for considering.

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I think I’m going to use Data->Group Items more. It’s a feature I don’t think I’ve ever used in the past.

If you want to add a sibling to an existing document, you can select the existing document and click Data->Group Items. With only one thing selected, Group Items will make a new group named the same as the selected item, moving the item into the new group.

A very minor convenience, but nice. It reduces the “friction” of creating a tree of notes.

And, of course, Group Items works on tags, too, either individually or in batches.

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The shortcuts of Data > Group Items and Data > Ungroup are probably among the most used over here :wink:

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Thanks for the suggestion. It’s an ingenious solution, although it does not fit into my current workflow.

I use tags and groups to represent “weak relations” only: A group of documents are all related to one project. Documents with the same tag are all in some ways related to the same topic. For “strong relations”, such as that between bananas are sweet and I like bananas, I prefer using an item link with context in either document. I like being able to (1) find every single “strong relation” of a document in one right-side pane, and (2) retrieve context either directly, or through a custom-made script.

Anyway, thanks again for mentioning this possibility. Learned something today :blush:

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One thing that’s pretty cool about tags is they don’t all have to serve the same role. I think of them as alternate hierarchies.

For instance, planning a book could be aided with tags for chapter 1, chapter 2, etc. Those tags group Devonthink documents by appearance in the book, not by subject. I would probably put those chapter tags under a parent tag like “book/chapter 1”.

Other tags could group by subject matter.

Yet another tag tree could group by the year an event happened.

For some databases, I enable groups as tags by disabling the negative option, “exclude groups from tagging” in File->Database properties. That is like streamlining the process of creating replicants.

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