Feature request DEVONthink Pro 3: 3 pane view & tabbed windows

There are two features of DEVONthink Pro Office 2 that don’t appear to be available in v3.x. I found using them in v2.x essential for efficient and productive workflows. They are:

  • 3 Pane View
  • Tabbed windows
    I would appreciate having access to these features in v3.x. Presently, I have to take a lot more steps to achieve what I want.
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Tabbed windows were never officially supported, only document tabs were & are. But a future release might support them.

@cgrunenberg: Thanks for your response.

Although, as you indicate, tabbed windows were never officially supported, I enjoyed the feature for years in v2.x. With v3.x, it is a challenge finding suitable work-arounds in my workflow to compensate for their absence. It would be great if, in the same vein, they weren’t officially supported in v3.x.

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A future release might actually fully support them.

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This is also my experience. You will find some useful tips for a workaround in this thread, though unfortunately none of them provide the same user experience:

:crossed_fingers:

And this too, with a bit of luck :grinning:

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Currently there are only plans to improve the sidebar (multiple selections, keyboard navigation, reordering of sections etc.).

And, please, horizontal scrolling! Because if you drill down enough - you just see first letters of groups and … No good

What if, in Widescreen mode, a 4th panel was added above the viewer panel that would show the list of files in the current group? :slightly_smiling_face:

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Ah no - that would look terrible!

“-1”

But extremely useful.

I don’t think so. In any case I’d beg for anything like that to be optional only.

It was just a tongue-in-cheek way of asking for a 3PV.

The three pane view is and has been my prefered UI. While I’d like to update to v.3, the lack of the 3PV is a deal breaker for me. Until it is implemented, hopefully soon, I’ll stay with v. 2.11.3.

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+1 for 3PV. It’s really harder now to navigate. Please take a screenshot of DTPO2 3PV and compare it with the navigation of DT3. Please keep having your focus on usability and not fancyness. :slight_smile:
Thanks a lot for prioritizing that :slight_smile:
Thomas

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Another +1 for 3PV.

I’ve been using DT for more than a decade, and am even quoted on the DEVONtechnologies website as a public professional user and advocate. After a few weeks with DT3 I find much to like – thank you to the team for all the hard and impressive work that went into this.

But for the detailed reasons that have been eloquently described by others in this community, the disappearance of 3-pane-view has made me miserable. There is no replacement, no substitute, that makes it as easy to quickly navigate and view as that was, for the deeply involved way that I use DT constantly throughout my day, with multiple databases. It’s now simply more annoyance, more clicks, more work, more time to get around and do what I need to do, and none of the proposed alternative approaches or fixes I’ve seen will change this for me.

I cannot hope enough that the voices here make a difference and that such a simple and elegant option can be reintegrated into DT3 going forward.

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I know there are several threads regarding (the lack of) 3 pane view. It also seems like the development team is open to suggestions in order to creatively solve the problem. I have not read through all the threads completely (one of the threads has 100-200 comments (wow!) so I apologize if my suggestion below has already been suggested by others. Since it seems like one of the benefits of removing the 3 pane view is to conserve real estate, maybe a “pseudo” 3-pane view can be created as describe below:

“pseudo” 3-pane view: the left sidebar could be divided in sections (e.g. panes) with the top section (e.g. pane) be dedicated to a list of databases and the bottom section (e.g. pane) be dedicated to the folder view of the database that is selected in the top pane. In theory, the user could toggle between sidebar types: e.g. the current DTv3 sidebar (where you can expand each database but then requires lots of scrolling) vs having a “pseudo:” 3-pan view as just described.

Additional panes could also be created (such as favorites, smart groups, etc). This allows the flexibility of configuration (and maybe even getting rid of panes such as “favorites” if you don’t care to display them.

One of my issues with the current side bar is that it is infinitely continuous whereas the solution I just describe provides “compartmentalization” of data groups.

Thanks for the interesting suggestion!

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A couple of other thoughts about the “pseudo” 3 pane view:

  1. It’s scaleable - as other concepts are added to DT over time, an additional pane can be addeded for that concept
  2. It’s flexibility - it allows the user to add/remove panes as needed and reoganize at will
  3. It can maintain state when choosing different databases as DT2
  4. One other suggestion regarding the sidebar itself - you could theoretically allow the sidebar and/or panes to detach and “float” (instead of just hiding as the current solution allows). For people who have two monitors, this is a great way to utilize real estate. And even for a single monitor, having a floating pane or side bar gives the user flexility.
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+1 for the old 3PV (not the “pseudo”) - let the user decide. :slight_smile:

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