Modified layout of Show details in icon and split views

DEVONthink Feedback
1

The only place where a not so short Spotlight comment can be fully read in DT is in Show details, with the zoom slider nearly to the maximum, in icon and split views.

Agruppated by tag (in my case, topic / publication), this could be the only and perfect view to read them. However, at this level of the zoom slider needed to show Spotlight comments there is so much info in between each comment (kind, label, size, added, created, modified, path, url) that the Show details option is also unusable for that purpose.

I would like to suggest three possible solutions:

a) The fields to display could be chosen in View > Columns, as for the other views.
b) A template to modify this view, so that the user can choose the fields to be displayed.
c) A three column sheet layout: one for the icon, one for the file details and the last one for the Spotlight comment. So that in the last column the user would be able to read only the Spotlight comments from top to bottom of the page.

I think the last suggestion is the easiest to implement.

Additionally, if the columns of the sheet are selectable (not only rows as it is now), the user would be able to copy all Spotlight comments (for the topic or publication, etc) in order to paste them in another file -for reference to write a review or whatever purpose.

The last paragraph is actually another request because as of now I think only file contents can be copied. Since the Spotlight comments and body of rtfs are used differently by users, I think it also makes sense to have the option to copy either.

At least for reading and for copyng all to another file, because the view is not editable, Show details could be the only place in DT with a comfortable contiguous view of files content.

I hope this makes sense!

2

Good suggestions!

You can also embiggen the Tools > Show Info panel and the Spotlight Comments portion of that panel. (It’s a little hard to grab the edge of the Spotlight Comments section of Show Info – takes persistence.) Show Info follows the selection in your main DEVONthink window – as you move from group to group or document to document. It can be useful to arrange windows so that Show Info is side by side with your document list.

Doesn’t get you to the same point you wrote about – but it’s something that can be done for now.

3

Thanks for the info, korm. I had not noticed the info pane changes according to the file selected. Although not quite what I need, it is some improvement.

Actually, I can think of a more immediate solution:

d) An organization of the zoom slider from a content viewpoint. That is to say, the first point in the slider would contain the file name, the second would add the spotlight comment, the third would add the number of words to the previous two, and so on from a content viewpoint, not prioritizing the technical details for the user as it does now. After all, DT is an app for information not digital management.

The suggestion for a sheet layout selectable by columns and rows still applies.

I’ve changed the title of this posting after I realized that the layout modificaton I’ve proposed is actually for Show details, which is available in two views, as icon and as split.

4

Some interesting suggestions. I would also like to see more flexible view options scriptable and to have folders inherit the view behaviour of their parents. Despite extensive experiments I have never been able to work out what determines what columns a new folder window will have.

Another suggestion that has been debated previously would be to have the text in the columns wrap like Scrivener - [url]Suggestion for change in UI behaviour of columns]

You have probably seen this, but in case you haven’t, this script will produce a sheet which includes all spotlight comments, which are easily exported as a csv. Would be easy to modify if you only wanted spotlight comments without any of the fields. korm has produced a similar script but I can’t locate it immediately.

Frederiko

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By the way, it would be great if DT’s pdf editor could behave similarly to the info panel: when viewing any rtf annotation linked in its URL field to a pdf page, dinamically show the latter in a separate window. This would get rid of so many clicks and of the difficulty of not being able to see both the linking and the linked-to files at the same time.

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So, a sidebar like in Preview’s View > Highlights & Notes"? But one that reads from the Annotation file too?

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Sorry, korm, I shouldn’t have written about pdfs in this discussion about “Show details”.
I’ve opened another forum entry for this other topic, PDF workflows with DT in macOS

8

While the DT Info Panel has all the info I want to see, I find myself constantly turning it on and off because it is competing in 3-pane view with the preview window. I think I would prefer a 3-pane view (“DT widescreen mode”) where EVERYTHING is in one window. I expect that it is more important in most cases to have a full-height preview on the right rather than a full-height file listing in the middle. So I’d like to see the middle column split (with a movable divider and easy to collapse lower section): upper part file browser, lower part info panel for selected file.

I’ve never liked the OS X floating panels, and feel validated by the fact that Apple pretty much got rid of them in Pages, Keynote, Photos etc.

In our lab we have some insanely wide Dell monitor for experiment control purposes. It must be 8:3 ratio or similar. On a screen like that you can just keep the floating panels open to the side of the main window. But not on a 4:3.