I see a downside for making sets of columns by group rather than database.
Depending on what I’m doing, I’ll set up the columns I want to be visible. It takes only moments to do that, and my set of columns persists throughout the database.
But if the setup of columns were done group by group, it would be irritating if my task required looking at the contents of a number of groups and resetting the columns for each independently.
If there were a setting in Preferences to establish a set of columns, I would then go to that to select the columns to be displayed, and (I would hope) click the option to have that set displayed for all groups. But then I’ve had to do an extra step just to get back to the current status in DEVONthink.
I often have individual email messages scattered about in a database, because their content is relevant to a project or topic. As I’m interested in content, i wouldn’t need to view/sort by From or To (although that information is available by inspection of the message).
I have a database that contains more than ten thousand email messages. In that database I do find the From column useful. It allows me to sort by sender, so that I can quickly get to messages from a certain person or company. But even in that database, depending on what I’m doing, I may temporarily uncheck the From column to make screen room available for another column.
I don’t try to maintain a default set of columns. I check and/or uncheck them depending on my needs at the moment. When i’m making such changes, I prefer them to be database-wide. Often, I display only two, Date Modified and Kind. At other times it may be important to have file size, word count, Date Added or Spotlight Comments columns displayed.
Perhaps Christian can figure out how to satisfy both of us. 