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Quick links: |  | View/Edit Pane Item List Toolbar Sidebars Inspectors Search Pane Path bar Information bar

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The main window is split into simple sections, some of which will be familiar from other applications. In fact, as we introduce the components of the window you'll see DEVONthink has many familiar elements in it. We start off with the fundamental panes you'll use. View/Edit Pane When You launch DEVONthink you will see an empty pane at the bottom of the window reading Nothing Selected. This is the View/Edit pane, a preview pane displaying the currently selected document. This pane gives you a view of the content of compatible documents. It also allows you to work on compatible files directly in the main window when the pane is shown. Or you can hide the preview, perhaps if you want to concentrate on information about a group of documents. You can can toggle the pane's visibility in the View > Preview menu or via a toolbar button. Layouts: Widescreen: The View/Edit pane is displayed to the right of the item list, an option common in many Mac applications. Standard: The View/Edit pane is displayed under the item list. This is a bit more traditional but very useful on smaller screens, e.g., MacBooks. None: Hides the View/Edit pane. Note you can still select any file and press the space bar to preview it in a Quick Look pane, as needed. As noted above, DEVONthink allows displaying and editing, and even creating, some file types. Please refer to the Documents chapter for more information on this and other components related to the View/Edit pane. Item List When you open a Finder window, you are presented with a list of files in a certain location. The view may be icons or a list, etc. but you are still just viewing the contents of a folder, hard drive, etc. DEVONthink is no different in this respect. When you open a main window, you will see a list of groups and documents in the current location. Clicking on or opening other groups shows their contents. Smart groups, just like the Finder's smart folders, also display their contents in an item list. The item list also supports familiar operations like drag-and-drop between groups, copy and paste, group and ungroup, contextual menu items when you Control-click, etc., just as you've done in the Finder. Views: Again, taking a cue from the Finder, the item list allows you to display your documents in some familiar views: Icon: For the more visual folks, we have the Icon view. This displays the thumbnails of the documents with just their name. You can choose Show Details to display some additional metadata in a widescreen view. Change the size of the thumbnails with the slider in the information bar, noting this will affect the amount of metadata shown as well when details are shown. Double-clicking groups behaves just as double-clicking a Finder folder, displaying the contents in the current or a new window, depending on the Double-click opens groups in a new window checkbox in Preferences > General. Note this view is best used without a preview or in standard layout. List: Behaving much like Finder's List view, the List view shows a list view of the items with metadata columns. Drag the columns left and right to reorder them to your liking. Sort them by clicking the column headers, switching between ascending and descending each time you click. Control-click the headers to add or remove columns. Or make these choices from the Tools menu. Columns: The Mac OS X Finder received the Columns view from its NextStep counterpart, then iTunes adopted it for browsing music. DEVONthink's Column view functions in the same way. This option works best with a preview in standard layout, for quickly viewing selected files, but you can also use Show Details to display metadata and the file's thumbnail. Expanding the width of the column by dragging the separator will scale the thumbnail, if desired. Cover Flow: An iTunes feature that found its way to the Finder and DEVONthink is Cover Flow. Similar to the Icon view but with dynamically created thumbnails, i.e., the displayed image is generated from the contents of the file. This side-scrolling item list can be useful when making visual assessments of documents. It is best used with a standard layout or without a preview displayed. All these views can be easily changed in the View > View options, as well as the quartet of icons on the right-hand side of the Information bar. Sort: In addition to sorting the item list by clicking column headers or using the View > Sort menu, you can also choose a sort method in the Sort dropdown menu in the information bar. By default it reads by Name. Also, notice there is a Customize Metadata command in the Tools > Columns menu, the contextual menu, and this menu. Select it to fine tune what columns are available to display, including any custom sets you've created yourself. Visual Cues: DEVONthink provides a few visual cues applied to items in an item list. Duplicates: Duplicate files display their name in blue or the icon, depending on your setting in Preferences > General > Mark duplicates and replicants in color. Replicants: Replicant files display their name in red or the icon, again depending on the preference setting. Unread: Unread items, including groups with unread items in them, display their name in bold. The Flag column shows the state, flagged or unflagged, or the unread status of items. Clicking in the flag column toggles the flagged state. If an item is unread, a circle will appear in this column. If you have a group containing a mix of flagged and unflagged items, a dash will appear in this column, showing an indeterminate state. Additionally, DEVONthink displays special icons to the right of item names for attributes like Spotlight comments, reminders, etc. A key of the item icons can be found in the Iconology section of the appendix Contextual menu items: When you Control-click in a Finder window, a contextual menu appears with a host of commands for you to choose from. DEVONthink's item list also has a contextual menu available. The commands shown depend on what is selected and in what pane you're using. A list of the commands can be found in the Contextual Menu Items section of the appendix.
Note: To keep visual consistency and make some functions more broadly accessible, item lists are used throughout DEVONthink's interface, so you'll see them in some other panes. But note some functions, like specific contextual menu items, may change, depending on the specific pane you're using.
Toolbar At the top of most Mac applications you encounter, including the Finder, you will see the toolbar. For people who prefer working with tracking devices, e.g., mice, trackpads, etc., the toolbar allows you to have quick access to some functions without having to go through the menus. DEVONthink also provides a toolbar in main and document windows. The toolbar comes pre-installed with a handy default set of buttons, including the search field (see below). It can be customized via the Tools > Customize Toolbar command. You can also Control-click the toolbar and choose this command from the contextual menu. Add, remove, and reorder these items to suit your particular needs. On a side note, if you want to quickly reorganize items on the toolbar, hold the ⌘ Command key and drag the item to its desired location, or off the toolbar to remove it. If you're looking for a little more space for your toolbar, or even a little less, you can choose to display the toolbar as Icon and Text, Icons Only, or Text Only. Do bear in mind, the Icon Only view will not show the current document's title or icon. A list of the available toolbar items is available in the Toolbar section of the appendix. Sidebars Seen in scores of applications for many years, a sidebar is a top level organizational structure, typically found on the left side of an application window. The Finder or Apple Mail sidebars are perfect examples of this. Looking at them, you should see the immediate similarities with DEVONthink. However, unlike most other apps, DEVONthink has multiple sidebars, each with their own special functions covered a bit later in this chapter. Inspectors In some applications, extra information about files is shown in a pane on the right side of a window. DEVONthink also provides such a pane in its main windows with individual sub-panes called Inspectors. For example, data about the name, tags, type, etc. of a selected file are available in the Info Inspector. Unlike other applications, it gives you multiple inspectors presenting more information and functions, all docked in the inspectors panes. This gives you quick access to all the inspectors in one unified window, especially helpful on smaller screens. The inspectors are individually discussed in the Inspectors chapter. Search Pane Storing information is a useful thing, but it's more useful when you can find things too. DEVONthink offers a strong search function for finding items in your databases, all integrated into a main window. In the toolbar is a search field for entering your search terms. Type in a word and the search pane appears showing any matched items — and yes, it's another item list supporting the different views and sort methods discussed above. Additionally, the View/Edit pane can be shown to display selected results. For contents-based searches, the search terms will be highlighted in the preview, whenever possible. Search options: In the search field, you will notice a magnifying glass icon. Click this icon to see where to search, list the ten most recent search queries, one choose among the following options: Live while typing: Enable this option to search while typing or disable it to search only when you press ↩ Return. Partial matches while typing: This option assumes an asterisk wildcard at the end of the last search term. Ignore Diacritics: This allows you to ignore special marks on letters, like umlauts or accents. Fuzzy: This uses fuzzy-logic to expand the possible matches DEVONthink makes. For example, `hello` and `hullo` would be matched. Search prefixes: Anything you type into the search field will be treated as searching in all possible attributes. However, if you want to focus on specific attributes, e.g., file types or tags, the search field supports prefix operator searches, similar to Spotlight. Common examples are searches like `name:DEVON` or `tags:tech;sync`, separating multi-valued attributes like tags with a comma. There are a wide variety of prefixes available, as well as different prefix operators. A complete list of these items is included in the Search Prefixes section of the appendix. In addition to search prefixes, DEVONthink supports Boolean operators, parenthesis for grouping terms, and quotes to match specific terms. Read more about operators and how to use them in the Search Operators section of the appendix. Search scopes: After you've done a search, you will also see a bar above the search results allowing you to choose the scope of the search. The scope is the "where" you're searching. You will be shown All Databases, Inboxes, the name of the current database, and the name of the current group, if you're currently viewing one. Choose one to expand or limit where DEVONthink is searching. Advanced and save: To the right of the search scopes, you will see two buttons. Clicking the Advanced button displays the criteria of the current search. You can modify the search with the same kind of controls used in the Finder's smart folders, as well as some other applications with advanced search methods. Note these controls are also used in creating smart groups and smart rules. If you have done a search you'd like to use again, press the Save button. Enter a name and DEVONthink will create a smart group for you. If your search scope is in a group, the smart group will be created there. If you are searching a specific database, the smart group is created in the root of the database. Searching inboxes or all databases creates a global smart group, shown in the Smart Groups section of the Navigate sidebar.
Note: The search index contains alphanumeric characters as well as the following symbols: `$€£¥%§`
Path bar On the left side of the main window, just below the toolbar, is the Path Bar. This is a specialized bar displaying a crumb trail of your current location in a database. For example, if you are in a nested group, it will show something like `Coding > AppleScript > WWDC > 416`, beginning with the current database. Each item in the crumb trail is a live link, so you can click it to jump to any parent folder or back to the top level of the database. This bar also has < and > buttons so you can navigate back and forth between locations you've visited in this window. As an added feature, click and hold one of these buttons to be shown a list of previous locations you've visited, just like in a web browser. Information bar Another specialized bar, the Information Bar displays the number of items selected and the total number of items in the current location. As mentioned previously, this bar also hosts the Sort dropdown and the view icons.