So why is it so complicated, to write “exam AND composition AND weight fraction AND … NOT bonding” into the search field?
And by the way, DT is even remembering your last search terms, so you can use them again, or alter them on base of the last searches.
It seems you want to make it rather complicated, then that you are really interested in getting quick and easy result, you can work with.
You are not really searching for a solution, but you are angry that DT is not jumping on your (unnecessary) request, right?!
Devonthink is a private company, and the way, there App is working, has nothing to do with the citizen rights of anybody!
This is just ridiculous!
While it’s plain that you’re trying to help, you’re misunderstanding the fundamental problem here. JJW is saying that Smart Searches are not a “full citizen” inside DEVONthink. As in, they can’t be used the same way other groups and records can be. That’s what prevents them from being used in the simple way you describe.
@DrJJWMac: I think I have an answer to this. Are you comfortable with AppleScript?
Might as well explain the possible solution I mention above.
cgrunenberg recently published a way to create a group that mirrors a smart group’s contents:
It should be possible to augment this script to ask the user to select from existing smart groups and use each of those in order to populate an AND, OR, or NOT search scope.
It wouldn’t be arbitrarily nestable, but might get you 80% of the searches you want with this workflow…
I have a vision. What I want to achieve in this vision seems still to be a mystery certainly to you and perhaps to others even as this vision seems rather clear to me. I have full respect for the developers at DT even as I am frustrated that DT does not have a way to realize my vision at least at this point as I see wanting to implement it.
You may presume what you want beyond this. In your response above though, your presumptions are stepping toward personal insult. With all due respect, I appreciate when you stop going down that path.
I was also thinking that this other script by cgrunenberg could be useful:
It provides a fast way of tagging only from existing tags by creating a little multi-select user input modal. It could be modified to pull from smart groups instead, such that you can quickly select multiple smart groups to use in the query.
