Stupid Devonthink tricks

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Posted by Amontillado
Jun 3, 2019 at 02:25 AM

I use Devonthink for two purposes - the one it was designed for, correlating and archiving mass quantities of documents, and as a sync tool, particularly with USB sync stores. DT syncs with full visibility, unlike iCloud, and Time Machine backs up my local copy. I don’t bother to back up the USB drive.

I have a DT database with a bunch of creative writing projects. They aren’t related. DT helps me haul them around between desktop and laptop.

I often wish I could set up a custom view in Devonthink, similar to Scrivener’s work spaces, so I could hoist into a subset of groups and tags.

You can replicate a tag, but it becomes a group until you delete the replicant (and I think you have to re-enter DT). There’s a workaround I started using today. It’s a silly thing, hence the title of this topic.

Tags in my 50 or so creative writing projects are grouped under top level tags that are named for the project. So, there’s a group called Blunders for my ill-fated novel, and there’s a tag called Blunders.

A smart group inside the Blunders group puts the tags where I can focus in on just that folder and see everything I need.

It’s not perfect, but it helps. Kind of an obvious idea, but it didn’t occur to me until today. I had thought of smart groups more as search tools than organizational shortcuts.

Posted by Paul Korm
Jun 3, 2019 at 09:47 AM

Since tags are just a type of group in DEVONthink, why not just use groups for your projects? When the database is “enabled for tagging”, child groups and documents inherit the parent(s)’ names as group tags.

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