DEVONthink does recognize the setting of the default browser on a computer, and provides options to enable the user to open a URL link, an HTML or WebArchive in that default browser.
Likewise, DEVONthink recognizes the ‘parent’ application set for document filetypes in the Finder, and provides the user options to open a document under its parent application.
But DEVONthink’s UI presented to the user in database views, document windows, tabs, See Also lists and search results emphasizes presentation of the text content of documents in the database environment regardless of the document filetype. In DEVONthink’s environment, it’s the text content - the information content - that’s paramount and not the document filetype. When I browse through a list of search results, or the contents of a group, It’s the information content that’s important, not the accidental characteristic of the creating application - so I can see that content regardless of whether the selected document is an RTF, HTML, PDF, Word, Pages, Excel or other filetype.
Fairly often, a user requests that double-clicking a document in a group or other view should open that document under its parent application. What’s wrong with that?
In DEVONthink, a double-click opens the document in its own window within the DEVONthink environment. In that environment there are tools available, such as See Also (and many others) that would not be available were the document being viewed outside of DEVONthink.
When I’m doing research, I’ll often open a document in its own window and choose See Also. That provides a list of other documents, some of which may be conceptually related in interesting ways. I can choose to open in new tabs items from the See Also list and “collect” the useful ones as tabs in that document window. Those collected related items may well be of various filetypes including HTML and others. I find this enormously useful, and it wouldn’t be available if the open document and/or if items in the See Also list were outside the DEVONthink environment, as would be the case if HTML documents (or Word, or others) opened in the default browser or other parent app, outside DEVONthink.
So that’s why the default behavior of opening documents in DEVONthink, whether by a single or double click, is to open the documents within the DEVONthink environment and not outside it. I think this is the behavior the vast majority of users do in fact prefer.
Yes, it would be possible to add options to Preferences to alter that behavior, so that an option could be set to always open HTML documents in the default browser, rather than in DEVONthink. What’s wrong with that?
First, users who select that option may not even realize the lessening of the utility of HTML documents within their database - which would be a shame. For example, See Also wouldn’t be available to look for contextually related documents, if the page is viewed in the default browser.
I handle a lot of the Support queries about DEVONtechnologies applications. Hardly a day goes by when at least one user reports an issue that’s actually the result of changing an option in Preferences, which has been done and then forgotten. That’s part of Christian’s reluctance to add the many, many requests for special-purpose options that have been proposed. The more options, the more complications and user confusion.
Of course, I often do choose to open a Web link or page in an external browser, or to open an Excel spreadsheet under Excel. The facilities to do that are there in the Toolbar (when customized) and in contextual menu options as well as under the Data menu.
so far i lost all notes i tried to sync back to computer, but that a different story). I was using iNotepad for many years, and i loved it for it’s simplicity. All my notes (about 1300) are RTF or RTFD files, no exceptions. A link in a RTF document opens webpages in the default browser, like it would if i’d open it in TextEdit. I see that DTP is capable in many ways, but i don’t really need any of this. I’m not interested in See Also lists or in any other fancy search functions smarter than Spotlight. Getting rid of the Sorter was the first thing I did after importing my data (also not easy to figure out how to achieve this). I like tags and being able to set a password, but I hate the internal browser view as much as the Adobe Acrobat browser plugin. One wrong click costs me ages to get back and do it in the way DT wants me to do it. I know now that i shouldn’t hope for any support from DT and will continue my search for a decent note keeping app elsewhere…