Reveal in Group (feature request?)

[Joel Anderson]

After years of using Bookends, I'm finaling starting to use Static Groups more heavily for organizing my research I now have 100, in 10 folders. But I find myself hunting a lot of groups. What I would love to be able to do is this: I'm in the main view, showing my full library. I select an item and right-click (or, better yet, use a keyboard shortcut) and select "Reveal in Group", at which the view switches to the (primary) group of which the item is a member, with the item highlighted. Is that possible? I already have the highlighting turned on, which helps somewhat, but I usually have the folders collapsed, so I don't really see them. A workaround with an AppleScript would also be great.

[Jon]

I'm not sure I see the purpose of this request. You can already see the reference and its contents, and you can quickly see which groups it is in (or the folder that groups is in). It's easy enough to select the highlighted folder. I suppose you might request that you want closed folders containing a group to automatically spring open, which would save you two clicks. It might save another click if you want the same reference to be selected when it's opened (not sure why you'd want that, either). Parenthetically, I don't know how you'd define a "primary" group. So I'm not saying it's something that can't be done, but I question if the utility is worth the effort as well as adding yet another option the contextual menu -- the larger it is, the more daunting and less useful it is.

I can imagine an AppleScript that would select a group containing the selected reference (maybe in conjunction with Keyboard Maestro or similar app).

Jon
Sonny Software

[Joel Anderson]

Thanks for the reply, Jon. I value your commitment to avoiding feature-bloat. Perhaps this is too niche, and better solved with an AppleScript or KM macro. But I do think there's a case to be made, at least for anyone who has more than a dozen groups. Because the highlighting is not visible in the sidebar, either because I have to scroll to find it, or because the groups are stored in folders. So, having a way of opening the (alphanumerically first?) "owning group" would really help. Also, when using folders, it's sometimes hard to remember in which folder a group is located. So, seeing the name of the group in a "group" column still leaves me guessing where to look for it in the Groups pane.

In addition – with apologies for inserting a bug report here – I've just discovered that the intense (2 minutes) and frequent beachballing I've been getting the last few days started at the point when I turned on the setting to have the highlighting of groups "always on". Moreover, the beachballing also starts when I use option-shift-click on an item that is part of a group.

UPDATE: I've now confirmed the same behavior on my laptop (an M1 MacBook Pro). If I Opt-Shift-click on a group item, there is 1m 15 seconds of beachballing.

[Jon]

Before addressing the second point, it should be made clear for others that if a reference belongs to a group in a closed folder, the folder will highlight in yellow (if the folder is open, the group will be highlighted).

In addition, if you open the Summary pane you can see all of the groups a reference belongs to (this is a modifiable option in Settings).

You can also add a group column to the reference list.

As for the beachballing...know that the list is generated on-the-fly, it is not cached, because the makeup of groups can change dynamically. And Bookends shows not just static groups that match, but smart groups. This means that Bookends must actually perform the search for each smart group each time you select a new reference. Do any of your smart groups rely on Finder tags or Spotlight searches? Those are much slower database searches (they use macOS APIs for files and Spotlight indexes). And do your smart searches use criteria such as the reference should/should not belong to the specified groups? Add all of these together and you can get unwieldy searches. I could add the option in Settings to exclude smart groups, in which case I think you would find it is always "instantaneous".

For now, if you want smart groups that have these powerful but slower search features (which are very, very quick when used in isolation, but can bog down when you invoke all of the searches at once), turn off continuous highlighting of groups and use the ad hoc Shift-Option action to show them.

If you want, you can compress and send me your Bookends library so I can take a look at it and perhaps use it as a benchmark.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Jon]

I've added the option to highlight only static groups to which the reference belongs. If you'd like to test this and see if the beachball issue is resolved, please contact support@sonnysoftware.com.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Joel Anderson]

Thanks for the reply. That sounds like the explanation: I do indeed have smart groups that are based on PDF tags. I'll be in touch directly about a version that allows me to turn that off.

A couple things to note, however:
1. When an item is selected that is part of a group, and the folder is closed in the Group Pane, it's not the case for me that the folder shows highlighting.
2. I'm not able to seen any information about groups in the Summary pane. Maybe I'm missing the setting where this gets turned on?

I still think it would be really useful to have an additional function in the contextual menu that allow for "Reveal Item in Group" – perhaps the alphanumerically first one.

[Jon]

A couple things to note, however:
1. When an item is selected that is part of a group, and the folder is closed in the Group Pane, it's not the case for me that the folder shows highlighting.
2. I'm not able to seen any information about groups in the Summary pane. Maybe I'm missing the setting where this gets turned on?

1. I'll show you what it should look like when you write.
2. Go to Settings -> Summary tab. You can set how the Summary looks for Books and "Others". Switch to Others and check Groups. Drag the groups where you want them to appear (in the order). You might type in the Before box: "¬¬Groups: " and in the After box "¬¬". The ¬ will be output as a newline, giving you some formatting control.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Joel Anderson]

Thanks for your help, Jon! I'm not quite getting the Summary settings to work, but the beachballing is now taken care of: smart groups containing Spotlight searches were clearly the culprit here!

[Joel Anderson]

Perhaps another question/request that others may have: Above the Groups pane, there is a possibility for search. In my experience, it doesn't autocomplete, which would be very useful. Also, am I right that if you type in the first letters that are shared by several groups, and then hit RETURN, you only get the first hit selected? In my use case, for example, my teaching folders all start with TCH, so I would like to type that in and then be able to select the autocompleted group name that I'm looking for. Am I missing something here?

[Jon]

Please refer to p. 321 of the User Guide (Help menu) for how to configure the Summary View. Then read my last post again.

I wouldn't add autocomplete to the group search, but I might make it a live search, which filters the results as you type.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Joel Anderson]

Live search would be terrific, especially if there were a keyboard shortcut (or menubar item) that would allow users to go to a group without the fingers leaving the keyboard.

Thanks so much for your explanations and for all these improvements!