My mom wanted me to let everyone in this forum know: We’ve been a CMD-2 and CMD-5 family since 2008. Our principle: file-listing windows should be dense to provide overview, and text windows should be untethered. To keep things neat, we have a script that tiles all text using key command.
Now, I have an anthropological question that maybe Jim and Christian might want to re-ask as a poll:
Question: Is our preference for a Finder-like experience just habit (since it continues our first imprint from the Lisa and Mac days), or is it intrinsically superior?
In my case, list view in widescreen, even in my 13" MBP with Inspectors hidden, but I mostly am a “document reader”, as that is the most-showing-document-real-estate option.
I have a strong doorway syndrome, like when you go into another room and can’t remember why you got up. It’s not from bad memory, it’s from context shifting.
The nicest thing about The Brain, to me, was constantly shifting contexts. That drove better focus in thinking.
Column view helps trigger that doorway effect, diving into different holding tanks, so to speak.
By the way, don’t feel sorry for the guy who can’t remember why he got up. Mourn for the guy who can.
If I want to remember to get the vegan adrenalhydrocholine monoclonal chiral mesolithic extract for the family gerbil the next time I go to Walmart, all I have to do is imagine walking into Walmart and seeing “vegan adrenalhydrocholine monoclonal chiral mesolithic extract” spray painted on the floor. It might be weeks before I go into a Walmart, but when I hit that context switch at the Walmart door, the family gerbil gets what he needs.
Try it. Imagine remembering something in a different physical context. It will pop into your head when you enter the context. Great memory trick.
I was today years old when I learned this. Thanks.
It puts DT slightly closer to the column management one has in AVID Media Composer, what I would consider a gold standard of metadata management, for both visualizing and modifying the metadata. There’s a long way to go to get there but I would rather have custom metadata in DTTG before any of that.
I use 'em all. List/Widescreen for reading, List/Standard for note taking in Markdown, Screenflow for browsing PDFs. I tend to use Icon View only to look at my indexed stock photo libraries.
I use colums and close the sidebar. This way with keys I can ‘walk’ through my database with the hierarchical tag structure I made. Apart from the list view with the results of a search I spent most of my time in this column setup.
Below the columsview is a view of the selected note.
Still would love a good icon view option. For me, I have a lot of images. Navigating using Lists makes sense. But… if I click on a folder while in List view… I still somehow expect an icon view of contents of the folder in the view pane. I don’t know what triggers that in me, but in any case I would like it…
Almost exclusively Navigate, List, Widescreen, with the inspectors column also open on the right (so a “4-column” format). One of the advantages of having a 27" screen is plenty of real estate. But then I always tend to use a “list-type” view, such as in the Finder, Music, TV, etc., probably as a result of being left-brained.
If I use icon view, which I would like really, I can’t see what I have because of the truncation of the names. I don’t know if there is a solution for that? I am used to list view and I sometimes put up the preview panel. I have a 16 inch now and frankly probably in a year or so will go AirBook so it would be handy to stretch the views a bit.
I have always used List with Widescreen. I turn off the sidebar because I like to see groups and items intermixed. I also like navigating into groups by expanding them in the list view (using the open/close triangle) – this way I have have multiple groups open at once.
@BLUEFROG I wish this was not a HIDDEN preference – I stumbled on this completely by accident and had no idea the option existed. The DT manual is very large, and you don’t always know what you are looking for until you find it. It is my personal view, of course, but this would seem like a sufficiently useful option to make it a standard part of the preferences. There must be some rationale for keeping the preference hidden, and I find myself wondering what that might be.
