Click on the little ‘Home’ icon (Top Level) button in the Toolbar, or Command-click on any selected group to revert to Top Level.
Note that DEVONthink allows me to open any group in its own view window. So I can open a group that’s nested several levels down, and that view window now doesn’t display information about where I am in the organization. The title of that view will display the database name and the name of the group I’ve opened.
Here’s where the Navigation set (Sidebar, Top Group, Enclosing Group) can come in handy.
Suppose I’ve been working in Three Panes view with a three-levels down group that’s open in its own view. Now I want to return to the enclosing group of that group. I click on the Enclosing Group icon.
What happens is quite logical. The title of the view displays the database name and the name of the enclosing group. I can see the group I had been working on, as well as other groups within the enclosing group.
If I click on Enclosing Group once more, I see a view of the group that encloses the group that enclosed the group on which I was working. OK. That makes sense.
At any time I can switch to a Top Group view of the database by clicking the Top Group icon. Or I can click the Sidebar icon and choose another open database, or a view of a group that I’ve placed in the Favorites list.
About classification: It’s recommended that documents should not be placed at the top level of a group that contains subgroups. So, by definition, “dangling” documents visible from the Top Group view should be classified by placing them into appropriate groups. Likewise, the ‘Incoming’ group should be regarded as a temporary holding place for new content, and not a group in your organizational scheme.
If those rules are followed, the Classify AI assistant can function better. I’ll confess that sometimes I get sloppy in my organization of databases. Fortunately, by using searches, See Also and smart groups DEVONthink will help me overcome that sloppiness to a considerable degree, and still locate needed information.
In fact, I often use those tools to help me tackle a backlog of unclassified items and make my database better organized.