It is a very serious design bug that there is no confirmation dialog when deleting a group or a folder under DEVONnote, DEVONthink and DEVONthink pro. It flies in the face of professional UI design guidelines and best practices, and it is prone to cause serious confusion and headaches for users.
If some users like the all-too-convenient feature of silently deleting a document with merely the touch of the delete key (with no modifier keys), let that be a preference setting option for them - e.g. to explicitly enable non-standard behavior; as the universal standard behavior for destructive user initiated actions is to confirm before doing.
People cite file/folder deletion in the Mac OS X Finder as the precedent which justifies DEVON’s silent file/folder deletion, and implicit safeguard of sending files to the Trash folder; but bear in mind, Mac OS X requires the Command Key to be pressed along the delete key before deleting a file or folder, which astronomically decreases the chance of inadvertent deletion! DEVONthink will delete a whole text file (or worse) with merely the touch of the delete key, which is particularly dangerous because delete is the same key used to merely and commonly delete characters in text files. If the UI focus is not where you think it is (e.g. the focus is in a file list or group list rather than in a text document), then boom - You’ve deleted a file (or maybe a group), and far too often,
without noticing. It has happened to me on several occasions. And I curse every time.
I’m a software engineer and have worked in the industry for decades and for some large corporations. I’ve worked with HIE (Human Interface Engineering) professions, and I can say for a fact that it is considered highly unacceptable to let a product ship with that design, and not treat it as a high priority bug or escalation to fix if it has been.
Please fix this.