It’s quite the thing, in these modern application days, to implement an old-fashioned keyboard find popup tool; Sublime has one, Atom too, even Omnifocus, and arguable Spotlight in Finder is one. A keyboard shortcut that pops up a simple search entry box, into which you can type something, and either a single or a list of matching candidates appears.
- BUT! It would be slightly different in my Ideal World in DEVONthink. It would not so much search documents, as search tags, folders, and smart searches, and display a little tree of matches as they appeared. You would be able to jump to those items, or switch the view to them (much like the ‘Show Groups & Tags’, which sadly becomes a little unwieldy when you have a large number of items in a hugely hierarchical list) - but I believe a hugely useful feature would be to make it possible to drag tags and folders - as you’re creating them on records - and drop them into an existing hierarchy, as you created them. You’d also be able to start typing the name of a tag or folder, and drag an icon from the appearing list (and hierarchy) and drop it straight onto the new record being created.
It would be adding nothing that’s not already possible, but would make keeping on top of the existing functionality much easier.
- Quickly drill down on a folder or tag, and switch views
- Make sure you’re looking at the right item when searching
- See the full hierarchy of a tag or folder to make sure you’re picking the right one
- Quickly search tags and find the correct one to then use as a destination for adding a new tag when adding to the ‘Show Tags’ panel for records
As my tags turn into a bigger and more complex taxonomy, it’s easy to lose sight of them and increasingly complex to manage the positioning of new terms (tags) in a hierarchy - as well as being sure of where I’d filed existing tags. I think this would be hugely useful in making that a much cleaner process.
Just my thoughts, anyway.