Thanks, suavity. The icon dropped easily onto the folder side. Also thanks for the note about Curiota. That does sound as handy as I had hoped.
You’re welcome.
If you have any troubles setting up Smart Rules for Curiota just start a new topic and I will gladly provide you with the solution I found.
Unless you’re going to be creating and not adding multiple notes, if you use the Sorter’s Take Note function, the note content remains there until you Add the file.
- Set a **Take Note **hotkey in Preferences > Sorter.
- Press the hotkey.
- Type some stuff.
- Click away from the Sorter.
- Later, press the hotkey again.
Note: This will not be saved if you quit and relaunch DEVONthink, but perhaps Development could assess if the unsaved note could be saved on quit.
Thanks, Jim. I didn’t expect your suggestion to work. When I get the screen you showed from the DT3 icon on the Safari toolbar, and then add either a note of my own or a “cut & paste” from an article I’m reading, or both, if I leave the page without the clicking the ADD button, the material in the comment also disappears. The “Hot Key” note you suggested, works better for my purposes; I can leave a note and come back to it later to add more material. Unfortunately, the note is firmly attached to DEVONthink in the menu bar, so any material, e.g., URL, under the note can’t be seen. Is there any way that it can be made to move elsewhere on the screen?
Under Preferences/Sorter there are three options for the Sorter appearance:
- None (free floating and therefore movable Sorter pane)
- Show as Menu Extra (icon in the menu bar and Sorter pane attached to it; what you have got now)
- Show as Dock Tab (tab on a side or corner of the screen; you can chose which)
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@suavito is correct and if the Sorter is set to None, you get a Take Note window when you use the hotkey.
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More importantly you get a ‘⌘ S’ hotkey instead of a mouse button to save it. So you can do one without lifting your fingers from the keyboard. Worth a fortune to me. I can’t get my productivity apps: Keyboard Maestro really to recognize the “Add” button in other sorter windows though? Any idea how this could be done without using the mouse to click “Add” button?
Wow! Thank you @suavito, @BLUEFROG, @tudoreynon. This is a huge boon–probably the closest thing to the “mindlessness” of taking paper notes and slipping them into a file or writing along in a notebook, with the added plus of putting it in the location you want. For my purposes, it does what I used the old sorter for, plus more. I must have had a visual and cognitive gap between old and new sorter. In any event, I found the help manual had more useful information now that you’ve pointed me in the right direction.
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You’re very welcome and I’m glad to hear the documentation was useful to you too!
Exactly. That was one reason why the Folder system which was de rigeur was so inimical to me and why it took me so long to go Paperless in any meaningful sense. It is important to use the AI on this app. Otherwise one is ignoring most of its power.
I am working towards a keyboard only approach to DEVONthink 3. There is more than one thinks at first sight that can be done that way. I am working on some Keyboard Maestro macros for this too.
Well, I joined this forum specifically to get some insight into why DT3 made such radical changes to the Sorter. Having read this whole thread, I still don’t know what the rationale was, but I did learn that I’m not alone in my disappointment and distaste for how it now works.
The Sorter used to be a vital part of my daily workflow, and now it’s turned off as it does nothing I need. The simplicity, speed, and utility of it has been discarded. I gather from the nearly 1 year of complaints found in this forum there there is no hope for it returning to usefulness.
I find the sorter vastly improved. That is maybe because of my own usage though maybe? I use the hotkeys to call up notes which are really useful and the clip funtion which I find as useful or more useful than it was. I do accept that this all works best if DEVONthink 3 is open and running in the background. I have it that way most of the time as I use it all the time. The changes were radical and it took me some time to get used to the new one I will admit.
Welcome @GordonMeyer
and now it’s turned off as it does nothing I need.
The Sorter still has the same functionality as the previous version… and it has even more functionality. The only requirement now is that DEVONthink is also running.
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As I said, it is no longer simple, fast, or configurable. If you consider this to be “the same functionality” then I have a hint about the source of the design problem. (Based on your badge, “Bluefrog,” I guess you speak in some sort of official capacity.) Nonetheless, it no longer works for me, a customer since v1.0 and I am entitled to feel and express my disappointment.
Everyone can speak their mind in here (provided they never become personal attacks) and you’re more than welcome to feel disappointed and express it.
I am not sure what’s complicated, slow, or unconfigurable, if you could clearly state these things.
(And yes, I work for DEVONtechnologies.)
Complicated - The visual complications are quite obvious, but the chief one that annoys me is that it displays the entire hierarchy of all of my databases. You cannot simply drop on the open tab, now you must precisely target the drop or it gets ignored with no feedback.
“Unconfigurable” - In addition to the inability to choose which databases are visible in the Sorter, you can no longer position it freely onscreen. It also, as noted, no longer runs independently (at the expense of adding features that I do not use).
Slow - it’s a usability problem that it now requires precise targeting, resizes itself (without rese) when exposing hierarchy, requires DT3 to be running, and visually intrudes over other windows. All of which slows me down and makes it less usable for me.
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Sounds as if what you may want is to simply add the Global Inbox as a Finder location so you can drag things in there whether or not DT3 is open. Then create smart rules to tag or move or otherwise process those files as you see fit.
You don’t have to show open databases in the Sorter as there is an option to Hide them.
Items added to the Favorites in DEVONthink’s Navigate sidebar are available to drop to in the Sorter, no differently than DEVONthink 2.x’s Sorter (other than visually).
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What I am missing too is that you cannot define your own drop folders like before.
Since DT3 I find myself just moving everything to the inbox to sort it later.
But even though I process them later within DT it is more time intensive to sort them until you not really add everything to you favorites.
My understanding of favorites is not to add unimportant folders just because I often need them to move daily paperwork in there. I use the favorites when I am working (on projects) and need lots of navigation.
My favorites are already overloaded due to other workarounds that have been discussed in this forum.
It would have been nice to have a separate drop folder definition for the sorter and not to mix everything with the favorites.
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Well, the new Sorter should have it’s own configuration, not rely on the side effect of having to remove a db from Favorites in order to suppress it somewhere else. (Which introduces just another set of inconveniences.)
This isn’t the equivalent of DT2 because the DT2 Sorter window could be resized to “hide” the other Favorites, and it would remember its size so they never got in your way.
Rkaplan’s suggestion is a work around, thank you, but underlines my mourning of the loss of simplicity and usability. (Putting the Global Inbox folder in the Dock is also a good hack, as someone expressed in this thread some time ago.)