# Suggestion for change in UI behaviour of columns

**URL:** <https://discourse.devontechnologies.com/t/suggestion-for-change-in-ui-behaviour-of-columns/18611>\
**Category:** Feedback\
**Created:** [May 6, 2015, 10:52pm UTC](https://discourse.devontechnologies.com/t/suggestion-for-change-in-ui-behaviour-of-columns/18611 "2015-05-06T22:52:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 1

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**Author:** ![Frederiko](https://discourse.devontechnologies.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/f/7bcc69/32.png) [@Frederiko](https://discourse.devontechnologies.com/u/Frederiko)\
**Post date:** [May 6, 2015, 10:52pm UTC](https://discourse.devontechnologies.com/t/suggestion-for-change-in-ui-behaviour-of-columns/18611/1 "2015-05-06T22:52:30Z")

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For the most part I have little quibble with DT’s UI and with familiarity I have found it to be extremely flexible in a wide variety of situations that require many groups or searches to be open at once and accessible quickly. I think that it fits in remarkably well with the Yosemite aesthetic given that we live in an age of dramatic UI change every few years on the mac. Its a testament to the original design.

There is however one feature which I have seen in a variety of other programs that display large amounts of textual information in columnar format which would be very beneficial for DT to adopt. I have seen it in LexisNexis casemap but more familiar to mac users would be Scrivener. Have a look at the following screen shot from DT:

![DT screenshot.jpg](https://devontech-discourse.s3.dualstack.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/original/2X/e/e3d2c512fa8c4a0cadea7c459e1c64d076675a17.jpeg)

Basically this compression of information only gets worse as the need grows to show more information such as tags or other meta-data. The compression of the name column is particularly problematic because its the number one way to identify a document within a group or after a search. With large number of documents it becomes an unreadable sea of broken up information.

Now, by way of contrast look how Scrivener displays information which is too long to fit in one column:

![Scrivener Screenshot.jpg](https://devontech-discourse.s3.dualstack.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/original/2X/b/b6d4b66291a8391547c04755b8e311470aab64de.jpeg)

This is much more readable. One is able to see both the full title and all the tags. The naturally introduced white space also helps readability.

I think the trade-off of loss of vertical density v unreadable horizontal density is certainly one that is worth having. Perhaps it could be a switchable option.

Thanks again to the DT dev team.

Frederiko

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