The problem with user-selectable preferences is that Preferences choices grow — and can become more confusing to new users — with each one added.
DT Pro Office has 140 preference options, some of which; in turn, involve choices among multiple options. Over the years I’ve seen suggestions for hundreds of other possible user options that could be configured in Preferences.
In the DEVONthink 1.x applications ‘Delete’ was a ‘hard’ (non-recoverable) operation, and a warning was issued each time it was chosen. In the DEVONthink 2. applications ‘Delete’ is a ‘soft landing’ operation, with an Undo command to handle an Oops! mistake and with internal Trashes from which inadvertently deleted items can be viewed and recovered. When the ‘Empty Trash’ command is invoked in DEVONthink the internal Trashes are flushed to the System Trash (but with an appropriate warning in the case of Indexed content), allowing the user a final review to make certain that no important files have been deleted. And the default OS X settings for the System Trash involve a warning when ‘Empty Trash’ is invoked, and a non-secure deletion of the files contained in the Trash. So there’s no warning message in DEVONthink 2 when a group or document is deleted. And no user-configurable options for ‘Delete’ in Preferences.
To illustrate how rapidly user-selectable Preferences options could evolve for ‘Delete’, here are several suggestions that have been made. 1) A Preferences setting as to whether a warning message will or will not be triggered by ‘Delete’ (which would likely be turned off by most users). 2) Direct disk deletion when ‘Empty Trash’ is invoked in DEVONthink 2, by-passing movement to the System Trash, or not (and a suggestion to return to ‘hard’ action of ‘Delete’, by-passing the internal Trash and going directly to secure disk delete). 3) Secure deletion on disk, or not. (The user can easily adapt behavior to empty the System Trash when sensitive items in database Trashes are flushed, and there’s an OS X setting for secure deletion of the System Trash.)
Knowing Christian’s reluctance to add options to Preferences, I doubt the ‘Delete’ command will make it to a special area of Preferences.
I agree. The user should have an option, but no preferences box is required. The standard iTunes behaviour could be implemented as suggested: Delete brings up a dialog box to confirm deletion; Command-Delete bypasses the confirmation box.
The Delete key was requested by several users to move items fast & easily to the trash (like in Apple Mail). Adding a confirmation to this would be quite the opposite.
I agree with this, please no confirms or make it another option in preferences. Delete already doesn’t delete it moves it into the devonthink trash, then you have to empty the trash which doesn’t delete it either, it moves it into the Finder’s trash, then you have to empty the Finder’s trash to get rid of it.
How many confirms do you possibly need? I truly don’t understand why you want yet another step added.
That implies permanently deleting other items in System Trash in addition to DT items, which isn’t necessarily desirable.
And several people dislike that change.
A confirmation dialog for Delete (sans modifiers), with a “don’t show this again” checkbox (like in iTunes and other apps so it’s arguably familiar enough), would be a one-time event for people who prefer the current behavior while accommodating those who’d prefer the dialog (and may be choose to use Command-Delete to bypass it).
And is Delete so significantly “faster & easier” than Command-Delete anyway? Good grief.
I don’t know if anyone is still reading this thread but I have one experience to add:
Just now, while editing group names, I switched out of the file name box and into the group window while pressing the delete key several times. (EDIT: actually, I might have been hitting delete key to navigate backwards, as in a browser. Not sure.) It took several seconds after I found myself staring at an empty database to figure out what had happened.
In this case, I was able to undo the deletions, and I understand that I would have been able to find them in trash eventually. My worry is that I would do some other actions before having realized that I had deleted groups that would make recovery of the group hierarchy or files a problem. But maybe that can’t happen.
Personally, I would still like to have a preference selection for the delete key’s usage (or even a master shortcut key editor outside of preferences). As others have mentioned, the implementation in iTunes works well; there, I experimented with removing the warning message and quickly saw that I would inadvertently delete files, again, when editing names.
I am, and was recently thinking of this topic while being bothered yet again by DT Empty Trash…'s unwanted unconditional usage of System Trash that could be fixed by simply adding a modifier key as previously suggested.
