I find that the sorter comes up short in this area because I cannot set a title, I have to mouse click to add a tag (control-tab gets me there in Take Note), and the sorter option is slow, slow, slow to open.
I have found a way to get a global shortcut key for the “Take Note” floating panel. What I did was put together the following Applescript:
tell application “Dock”
activate
end tell
tell application “System Events”
tell process “Dock”
set frontmost to true
activate
tell list 1
perform action “AXShowMenu” of UI element “DEVONthink Pro”
delay .75 # necessary to give user time to release keys
repeat 5 times # count number of items to the one you want
key code 126 # up arrow
end repeat
delay 0.1
key code 36 # return key
end tell
end tell
end tell
What the script does is selects “Take Note” from DEVONthink’s dock menu.
I used Automator to create a new service and pasted the above script into the “Run Applescript” action in Automator. I set the “Service receives” to “no input” and saved it. Then I assigned it a shortcut key in System Preferences | Keyboard | Keyboard Shortcuts. That was the hardest part: finding a shortcut that wasn’t already taken! I settled on “Ctrl-Opt-Cmd-Shift =“
There are other ways to run the Applescript, you could use a launcher application like “Spark” (shadowlab.org/Software/spark.php) or save it as an application and put in in the Dock for one-click access.