I suggest to give duplicates and replicants separate Show By Colour check boxes in the general settings.
The whole idea of groups is that an item can be in many groups—as opposed to a physical file that can only be in one place. So replicants are something you want to have.
On the other hand there might be reasons to have duplicates of files, but in most of the cases (I can think of) duplicates just let your database grow. So duplicates are something you don’t want to have.
That means when you highlight duplicates or replicants in the item lists you do this for very different reasons. And because of that I think it would be good if the user could chose to highlight them separately.
I’d be in favor of something along this suggestion. We had a similar discussion (Thoughts on a UI Change) on this back last September in the beta forum. The discussion was centered on the color choices, where I believe they are currently reversed. As is now, red-replicant, blue-duplicate, while I would expect that red shouts “Attention-Duplicate” and blue should be “Cool-Replicant”. In any event, bold for duplicates should be turned off as it that is the visual cue for unread.
I think @suavito’s suggestion is good. As far as I can tell, if a record has a duplicate and a replicant, then the bold facing is useful because it gives a clue that we have both kinds of related record (duplicate + replicant) somewhere in the database. This points up a rule to define: if I define my duplicates to be green and my replicants to be blue, and I have two replicants (you can’t have only one replicant) and one or more duplicates, then what’s the rule? Are the two replicants blue and the duplicate is green? I think so, but would be interested in what others think the rule would be.
Related to this, I’d like to see a reworking of the “Instances” portion of the Info panel. Every time I look at this I have to stop and work out in my mind what I’m being told about what’s a duplicate, what’s a replicant, and where they are.