Aliases (info pane) help

[stanblues999]

Of all places I’ve looked (documentation, forum) I can only find reference style information on them. What is the main purpose of aliases? What other roles can aliases inherit? What items and in what scenario can aliases be applied to? What are some context driven examples? I’ve been using DEVONthink for quite some time and I simply can’t grasp this concept.

Best practice software documentation should start with a tutorial guide (context driven explanations) then a user guide (learning based feature examples) and finally a reference guide (which assumes the first two are in the “check”, so to speak). I find zero context driven explanations on the info pane Aliases and one vague example on the concept of group tagging. Of course nested tagging and the paradigm of “escaping” similar tags in different hierarchies…? The written style is solely focused on what you should do and almost never on how and why it should be done! DEVONthink terminology is unique compared to other products and a lack of context makes these features very difficult to grasp, at least in my case.

Can someone explain - with context - and give examples on how they use aliases in the info pane?

[korm]

Aliases are useful when one uses the so-called wiki-link feature when making documents in DEVONthink that contain links to other documents. For example the document named “Horse Inventory” also has an alias “Livestock”:

Then, in this document the links that appear when one types “Horse Inventory” and “Livestock” each resolve back to the “Horse Inventory” document when the link is clicked.

This is a simplistic example. A real-world example might be if your database had a document named “U.S. Supreme Court 385 U.S. 293” but you wanted to refer to that document by an alias “Hoffa v. United States” in your notes. Thus:

Documents can have multiple aliases.

[cgrunenberg]

Aliases can be also assigned to tags and are used by autocompletion.