Devontthink/Curio/Nisus tip

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Posted by Amontillado
Jan 20, 2020 at 03:48 PM

I think Devonthink and Curio are both fine tools and I’m glad I have both.

Nisus suits my tastes for word processing, but there’s a minor problem with Nisus and either Devonthink or Curio.

Both DT and Curio use OS features for handling rich text files, and that means if either DT or Curio touch a Nisus file, all the styles will be rewritten. Not optimal.

This issue isn’t unique to RTF files, DT, and Curio. Any application that opens RTF files using OS support will alter Nisus styles.

The problem strikes when you let DT or Curio preview a Nisus file, click in it, and touch a key. Hit “space-backspace” and all your styles are zapped, as you will see the next time you open the file in Nisus.

This isn’t quite the tragedy it could be. It’s a trivial thing to reload the styles in a Nisus document. Annoying, perhaps, but recovery is possible if something eats your styles.

Plus, there are workarounds. In general, I don’t tend to touch RTF files in either DT or Curio, so they stay safe. Look, don’t touch, and they keep their Nisus styles. There are stricter safeguards, too.

In Devonthink, use the “get info” feature on a Nisus document in your database and click the padlock icon to lock the file. That doesn’t set the file’s read-only attribute in the operating system, it just locks it within DT. I added the “open externally” shortcut to my DT toolbar. That makes it quick to go from the harmless preview in DT to Nisus for editing.

The only place I’ve found the issue in Curio is if you add a Nisus document directly to the organizer. All is well until you do something to trigger a re-write by Curio. As long as you remember to right-click and use “open in finder,” no problem. The “open in finder” command will open the document in the default application. As a Nisus patriot, my default RTF app is Nisus.

Any other method of adding an RTF file to Curio will launch the OS’s default application for editing. My current favorite is to add documents as entries in a “stack,” which is a Kanban-ish sort of thing. It makes sort of a menu for my documents, and I can have another stack for discarded versions. Elements (whatever you call the things in a stack) can be dragged between stacks and rearranged. Works fine for me.

Just thought I’d share. All opinions guaranteed to equal asking price.

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