Question about the future development of native DevonTHINK Knowledge-Base notation/documentation

Hello everyone and welcome to my first post here!

DT is by far the most advanced and intuitive tool for organizing and manipulating documents for meaningful use. I’m not here to go on about the feature list, I’m sure you’re all as glowing as I am to be able to use the program. I’m sure that many of you are in (or have been) in a similar position: in search of the Holy Grail of productivity and documentation. None quite cut it, but DT is the closest.

As I see it, the one feature that DT is missing that would catapult it to the status of the one-app-to-rule-them-all is native Knowledge-Base documentation or notation (wiki type document). Sure, there’s the usual list of documents that we’ve come to use in DT (rtf, txt, md, html, etc…), but for individuals looking to have a document processing schema, DT can’t compete with some of the other apps on the market (for wiki: docuwiki, Bookstack, Roam [from Roam Research], Tiddlywiki) (For atomic linked note visualization: Obsidian); to make matters worse, they’re all more or less functionally different in nearly every way, meaning there’s no ubiquity, and no way to suss out what features are really central to the function of the methodology. It’s almost a necessity to take on an entirely new organizational philosophy before even approaching how to use some of these above.

I’ve tried to wrap the two neurons I have left around figuring out how to incorporate elements of some of these above apps into DT, but it just breaks down, and there’s little support within DT for any kind of document processing from the likes of the above applications. Can it be done? Maybe, sometimes, and with limited feature support if any. It’s just not a long term solution.

My question to the development team is, what, if any, are the long term prospects of seeing DT including some form of integrated notation (be it in the form of an internal wiki, or some sort of other document processing paradigm)?

Of course, WikiLinks are fantastic and will continue to prove invaluable, but until they can be incorporated in a way which allows for a native knowledge-base document to be processed systematically, there will remain a gap in the workflow and another application will be required.

I’d hope that it’s a feature that is high on the list of things under evaluation for development, but that the team is working to make sure whatever feature is implemented that it can be ubiquitously used and integrated with as little overhaul to the program as possible.

Thanks everyone for feedback,

JW

We’re sorry but we don’t announce internal plans & schedules usually. But in the end the likelihood of requests getting implemented depends on various factors:

  1. What exactly is needed/requested? E.g. what is a “native knowledge-base document” in your opinion?
  2. How much work & time is required?
  3. How many users of our user base would actually benefit from it? Each user would of course like to see the one & only missing feature implemented, unfortunately it’s always a different one :slight_smile:
  4. Does it make sense at all? DEVONthink can’t do everything for everyone, we don’t want to create bloatware. In the end DEVONthink is a document and information manager.

Finally, there are lots of requests and therefore priorities are relative, especially as bug fixing, reliability & performance always have a very high priority.

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