Been traveling with my iPad instead of Macbook again and had to do a bit of work in DEVONthink while on the Airplane. Had a couple of hours to organize through my inbox and documents, and here are are few things that I noticed or would like to see (got nothing better to do than writing this right now anyway :D)
First of all, compared to previous versions I am much more happy with the current DTTGO. The shortcuts improved and everything is a bit more keyboard centric.
The work I did was shoveling through my inbox, giving everything a proper name, applying OCR where needed, and then moving things into where they belong or creating new groups along the way.
Now what I was looking for the most while doing that work:
General quality of life
- A keyboard shortcut for âset name asâ. Itâs so important in my workflow: My inbox fills with a bunch of documents from different places: OCR scans, PDF imports, automations. I regularly go through all of those and rename them accordingly. For papers and PDFs where it is clear what the document is, I select the heading and hit âSet Name asâ. On macOS there is a shortcut (CMD-alt-i?) for it, on DTTGO there isnât
- Moving documents around is still very painful. Itâs a lot of clicking around. If I have a document selected in the sidebar, Iâd like to hit some shortcut (Ctrl-Cmd-m? Forgot what the Mac version was) to bring up the move dialog. Even better if this can be a fuzzy finder similar to the mac. The best way I could find to move stuff around was to open DTTGO in split view, then move files from one split to the other. Some suggestions to that
- How about a cut and paste function similar to what Files does? Select a bunch of documents, cut them, go to target folder and hit paste (or âmove hereâ)
- When dealing with multiple DTTGO windows (not splits), it doesnât seem to be possible to move the file into the other window
- Same for creating replicas instead of moving, which is the same process as moving (clicking, selecting target, hit some confirm button)
- Navigation: Same as above, itâs a lot of clicking around and navigating with arrow keys is buggy (see below)
- Even stranger when navigating up when the current selected thing is a item, and the one above it is a folder. The folder gets a different selected appearance (blue outline instead of the entire thing being blue) and now 2 things look âselectedâ. So now which one is actually selected? I thought the folder because I navigated to it. But when I hit CMD-delete, it deleted the file, not the folder.
- When selecting and unselecting with shift+up/down, after unselecting items again, the latest select element stays selected with that blue outline. What does this mean now when I do an action? I guess Iâm just confused by this state when there are multiple indicators that something is selected.
- Keyboard shortcut for more metadata actions. CMD-Shift-I opens the Item Info screen with name preselected (nice!), but it is not possible to add tags without clicking with the mouse cursor on the âtagsâ bubble. Would be nice to have a way to open that dialog and have something else preselected, like tags
A good example is Things on iPad. It has keyboard shortcut parity with the mac version and you never need to use the mouse / tap on things. Just fuzzy selectors for groups when navigating around or moving would already be a big time improvement (probably my most used DT macOS shortcuts)
Siri Shortcuts: DTTGO shortcut integration is really good! Now a few wishlist points
- A way to trigger shortcuts from within DEVONthink. I know there is the âShare âŚâ dialog, but that canât be triggered through a keyboard shortcut, and isnât possible on folders. I am not sure if iOS allows triggering shortcuts from other apps, but it would be very nice and get around the issue that DTTGO doesnât have automation features like the desktop version.
- I mean more general shortcuts that donât act on individual files, like: âAdd tags to all items in a specific folderâ. Right now I have to go out of DTTGO, go to shortcuts, run it, and then come back.
- The âUpdate Metadataâ shortcut action canât mark files as locked yet
Confusion with right-click and 3 dots window when using a keyboard + trackpad:
- Selecting multiple documents and right-clicking will always only act on one document instead of all selected documents. But using the 3 dots menu will act on all of them. For example:
- Right-clicking share (or top right share button) will share only one document. The share for the entire group is hidden behind the 3 dots menu
- Right-clicking group after selecting a bunch of things will create a group with one document
Bugs:
- Go into a folder with 2 documents, have one selected, then hit arrow up and arrow down quickly a couple times. DTTGO starts bugging and keeps going up and down between the 2 documents even when nothing is pressed. Guessing it has something to do with events and it trying to load the file immediately when the item got focus?
- When giving a Tag a label itâs not displayed anywhere, not even in âInfoâ. Wasnât sure if it is a bug that tags can have labels, or that itâs not displayed
Lastly wanted to say, I have no idea when it got added, but the automatic replica creation when an item already exists in a Database is very good and caught me by surprise. I wanted to move some stuff into a database but didnât know it was already there (due to a sync issue). Instead of having duplicates without me knowing, DTTGO gave me a warning about it and created a replica instead. Thatâs awesome!