I’ve been moving to a tag-based system for organizing content in DEVONthink. All of my content for each database goes into a single group called “reference.” If I want to find something, I search the hierarchical tag structure instead of diving into some arbitrary list of groups.
But I still have groups that I’d like to collapse into the reference group. So I wrote an AppleScript to perform this action. Notably, most of the action is in the processGroup() handler which is recursive because we do not know how deep the group hierarchy goes.
My main organizational tool DEVONthink Pro Office, a tool I’ve used for many years. I’ve written previously about it and how I use it to find things and how I synchronize databases across machines.
I’m a relative newcomer to Hazel though. Hazel’s tagline is “automated organization for your Mac.” Hazel works as an agent to keep folders organized on the Mac. It’s an engine that applies per-folder rules to take actions on files and folders.
I’ve been a DEVONthink user for many years; it’s an amazing piece of software. Currently I’m using DEVONthink Pro Office because I use all of the higher level capabilities. Over the years, my database structure and workflow have gone through many changes. In this post I’ll describe my approach to finding things in DEVONthink.
Databases At first, I dumped everything into a single database. Over time, however, I realized that finding things was difficult because of the number of false positives when searching.
This is how I do it. YMMV. I’ve used DEVONthink since its early days. If you’re unfamiliar with DEVONthink, it’s a knowledge management tool that allows you to save information, tag it, cross-reference it and classify it. Since I use both a laptop and a desktop Mac Pro, I need to synchronize databases across machines. There are several ways to go about synchronization:
Direct connection This is not a bad option when both machines are turned on simultaneously and are connected to the same network.