Too Easy to Ungroup

Somehow, somewhere in DT is a shortcut to ungroup items. I don’t know what that shortcut is, but it’s some sort of trackpad gesture because I keep running into it by mistake.

The results are NOT nice. Suddenly a nicely organized group gets splattered all over the containing group … with no warning. Fortunately, there IS an undo, but that’s only if you notice the Ungroup happened. Three times now in the last 24 hours I’ve accidentally ungrouped something, not noticed at once, and then later had to manually clear up the mess. Not fun at all.

I think ungroup can be so potentially drastic that DT should ask for confirmation before doing it. Yes, I too hate all those “Are you sure?” dialogs, but in this case I think it’s justified. Perhaps it could be smart and ask if the number of items being ungrouped exceeds some threshold?

Incidentally, what IS that shortcut I keep stumbling on by mistake? It’s not obvious, and I’ve not been able to puzzle out just what it is I’m doing. All I know is it’s very frustrating.

Yes, it is sort of unobviously hidden down there at the bottom of the Data menu:

It’s not associated with a trackpad gesture, unless you’ve inadvertently done so with BetterTouchTool or some macro app. You can always change the shortcut to whatever you want (or nothing) with System Preferences. My personal take on “are you sure” warnings is that they become so much part of the background that we dismiss them without thinking – IOW, they make themselves useless.

I don’t have any 3rd party shortcut tools, nor have I changed any keyboard settings. I looked at all the obvious ways to get to the Ungroup command, and the standard shortcut (with two modifier keys) is certainly something I’m unlikely to hit by mistake. Yet it keeps happening.

I’m not saying this is DT’s fault, and I’m going to watch very carefully to see if I can figure out when it happens. My current suspicion is it’s some kind of drag+drop that overlaps with a select, but I need to watch more carefully. But it is not fun when it does happen :frowning:

–Tim

It is interesting indeed. The closest combinations are:
Option-Command-Y, which invokes a slideshow QuickLook view of the document.
Option-Command-I, which is Files > Import > Files and Folders

Well months later I finally figured out what is going on (after I hit the same problem several more times). It’s my fault of course, but interesting nonetheless.

Basically, what’s going on is I’m trying to drag the DT main window around on my desktop. And of course to do this I grab in an “empty” area of the window title bar and drag it. Now, what is the most empty part of the title bar? Why that big open gray area right next to the Ungroup Items button in the toolbar.

Ooops! And of course you know what happens: that nice empty gray right next to the Ungroup items button is really part of the button. So DT happily ungroups whatever group happens to be selected at that moment (I have text+icons displayed, which I think makes the button as wide as the text label, so making the “hot” area of the button waaay wider than the actual icon).

So, my fault, but clearly a downside to Apple’s Ui guidelines that essentially hide the button hot area.

The fix, of course, is to just remove the Ungroup Items button from the toolbar! :slight_smile: