These three commands require indeed a text selection, right/control-clicking on text might automatically select it if there’s no selection yet and that’s why it fails in case of a click on a blank area.
Thank you for clarifying that. It appears that a RightClick automatically tries to select text when I do that. I thought that was due to my hand motion.
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It seems strange to me that after all this time there is still not a many to many link feature. People have suggested custom metadata, but that doesn’t cut it. It does provide a custom link field but this only lets you link to one document. This would not scale well with multiple links.
All you would need is an expandable table of item links. It would also be good if these links could be bidirectional, but that is not required.
If anyone has any other solutions, please let me know. Keeping a separate file to link other files is not an option I would like to use.
A custom metadata multi-line text field would work based on what I understand of your use case.
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Thank you for the help. While this kind of works, I don’t think multi-line test is really a substitute for the real thing. Devonthink does not register any of those links like it would a URL or item link. I need to manually highlight each link, right click and open in a different window.
By the way, how did you get a new line? Whenever I press enter all it does is select all the text in the multiline box.
Many to many links should be a headlining feature. It is an amazing way to organise files and enables a very clean database as apposed to grouping with a replicant.
Popclip can execute the links in one click
Keyboard Maestro can convert Enter to Ctrl-Enter automatically
I can check the exact macros to do the above later if desired - it works well
In the next release you’ll be able just to click them as regular links: Recognize links in Markdown WYSIWYG editor - #8 by cgrunenberg
I can’t oversee what that would mean in terms of the underlying design of DT, but I can say that having a multi-select item (which would translate to a list) in custom meta data would enable a lot of interesting use cases. I’m suspecting though that metadata items which are basically lists are complex to implement, because e.g. you can’t just use simple search parameters like “contains” etc, so it would need different handling. But I think @cgrunenberg is the only one in a position to comment on that.
I would love to see an internal functionality that is something like Hook can do. e.g., dragging an item on another, perhaps invoking a modifier key, would link the documents and this would appear in link pane of each document (bidirectional). And create as many as needed. Is this feasible?
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I couldn’t get WYSIWYG/markdown to work in a rich text metadata field or text metadata field. It is switched on in the settings. If this could work though, it may solve my problem when they bring in the new feature.
That would require different metadata for each item, which may not be feasible or desired. However it could be as simple as one metadata field similar to a text field that Devonthink searches through for links and shows them on the linked to and linked from screen.
Thanks for the tip, considering that popclip can open multiple links in one selection, this definitely helps bridge the gap.
I’m not sure what you mean by Ctrl-Enter. That does nothing for me.
Thanks!
Interesting - I do not remember setting that up previously
Is it possible that the other Devonthink Popclip extensions automatically activate that hidden preference?
Don’t think so, I’ve used the DEVONthink extensions since I started to use PopClip and they didn’t receive an update since then, I think.
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That’s something that’s quite confusing: It seems english keyboard shortcuts (sometimes?) use CTRL where european (at least german) ones use ALT (=OPT).
ALT (=OPT) + Enter works over here.
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I think the post by @pete31 clarified that - does Alt-Enter work for you?
I am trying to figure out where it is documented but for me Ctrl-Enter allows me to create a new line in a custom metadata field. At times I have setup a keyboard Macro active only in certain situations to turn Enter or down arrow into Ctrl-Enter - but eventually Ctrl-Enter just became second nature in that situation.
Later → My mistake - It is Alt-Enter for me as well. I had set up a Macro long ago to convert that to Ctrl-Enter and had forgotten that is not the native keystroke to accomplish that.
Yeah, desperately need this feature! And it would be great if linking can be achieved based on selected texts and annotations considering DEVONthink 3.9 has added deep links to selected text and PDF annotations.
Currently, in order to link two or more documents within DEVONthink database, I copy the annotation link in doc 1, and paste the link into the annotation detail box (⌃ + 6) in doc 2 to link two related annotations across two different PDFs. However, the incoming and outgoing item links would not display in this way.
I think the linking of annotation-level or paragraph-level matters, which can simulate the block reference in Roam Research, Logseq or Obsidian, and is really useful for academic research.
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I’m adding my name to the list of people who would really like to see this implemented. Like others, I use DevonThink to store files that shouldn’t be edited, but the ability to make links between them seems like a basic feature. Similarly, I’d like to be able to make links among referenced files–I’m not even sure if that’s possible with the normal text-based linking mechanism, but definitely it doesn’t make sense to modify files that live outside the database to add links. I have Pro so the custom metadata workaround does work for me, but it’s very much a workaround and built-in support for creating links independent of document content is something I’d very much like to see.
Regarding @TomBen and links: Incoming and outgoing links are useful with annotations, which are just regular documents.
The Annotations pulldown menu in the Annotations & Reminders inspector includes an Open command.
That opens the annotation in its own window where all the usual document features are supported including incoming and outgoing links. Just open the inspector in the separate document window to see the links.
Here’s an interesting trick. Create an annotation on File A, including a backlink from the annotation to File A and a link to File B.
Use the Reveal option on the Annotations pulldown menu in the Annotations & Reminders inspector. Copy the item link of the annotation.
Now go to File B. Paste the link to File A’s annotation in File B’s URL. That’s in the Inspector’s Info view.
Now File A and File B have the same annotation and there will be links to both File A and File B in the shared annotation.
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That’s quite a cool trick, but it does require using the URL field in one of the documents, which is inconvenient when both documents originate on the web and the URL field is storing each document’s original address. Is there any other way to get them to share an annotation that doesn’t require giving up a metadata field that would otherwise carry content?
Interesting. I don’t think that’s possible, but you could put a link from each document’s annotation file to a common file that’s your shared “annotation”.
You might also use tags.
Let’s say you have two (or ten) files that need to share a common annotation. Tag them with something related to the annotation. For instance, tag ships with a tag for North Sails, a sail loft of some renown.
Put a common annotation on the North Sails tag, not on any document. Any new document needing to share that annotation can be tagged with North Sails.
By annotating tags instead of the document you could have multiple annotations per file, each potentially shared with other files.
Just a thought.
You could stash the original web URL in a custom URL property, or just in the Finder Comments field. It’s a small extra step, and you’d lose the additional advantages of the URL property (popup options, clickable link in the Preview window), but you’d probably only be doing this for a handful of documents anyway. If you go the custom URL property route (and with custom properties generally), it’s a good idea to have that property visible in List view via View => List Columns to remind you it’s populated.