Coming from Evernote I am trying to judge whether I can switch solely to DT and not cause too many pain points – my question here is surrounding quickly creating a new item and assigning it to a group and/or tags. In Evernote I can do this pretty easily because there are fields in the note header for both notebook and tag… you can begin typing and it will search on demand and fill in the most logical result for you.
I haven’t found something like this in DT. So, what is the fastest way to create a new item and classify it (not auto classify), and preferably using only the keyboard?
Best I have found:
Ctrl+Cmd+N to create new RTF note
Ctrl+Cmd+M to move this note (using the “Move” addon script)
Fiddle around with the arrow keys to navigate to the right Group
Enter
It really is pretty good except for all the arrow key use. If I was able to type the beginning of a group and have it auto-match in the pop-up Move window that would be fantastic. Does something like this exist?
PS: Remember that Evernote is a much simpler thing, with its “notebooks”. DEVONthink supports deep hierarchies, including the ability to have groups with the same names, in multiple databases. Not such a trivial thing to implement comparatively.
Or forget about groups and use only tags. Pop up a new note (put all notes into one general group, say), assign a tag (the process auto fills or suggests one or more existing tags matching your partial tag as you type). Done. Tags are special groups.
Hmmm interesting. So if tags and groups are technically the same on the back end… and you can also have nested tags and multiple tags of the same name, yet this autofill capability already exists for tags I guess I’m not clear why groups are so different and so much more complex… either way, looking forward to this in a future release.
While this is technically possible, it is also inadvisable. If you have a Tag that would be repeated in a hierarchy, you should put it at the root of the Tags, not in multiple hierarchies.
You can easily do what you want in DT, much quicker and more flexible than in Evernote. Just allow using Groups as Tags on the Database level, but I would advise you to limit the “Groups-Tags” to those you currently use (you can always change it on a per Group basis).
Then just fire up new note and when ready - type in all the groups you want in the tags field (using autofill). DT will automatically put replicants in all groups you indicated, when you hit CMD+S.
Easy enough?
When you turn on this feature, all your groups in this database will become tags. I doubt that you need all of them as tags, so you can batch-select unneeded groups, call info panel (cmd-shift-I), and check to exclude them from tagging. To keep tags uncluttered, leave only most usable “groups-tags”, you can change it at any time though.
