[reesd]

Originally posted by srdiamond
One test for needing a certain new feature is how easily can the operation be accomplished using the existing features.

With tree columns you can expose all the values you need at the same time, without needing to manipulate anything. But mere exposure doesn't usually get you passed the jumble, so you would also need to filter on the columns. Thus the two suggestions complement and promote each other.

With columns in the child pane, you can see all the values you want, neatly lined up, by selecting the relevant infoitems, copying them, creating a new empty topic, and then pasting the items, thereby creating clones of those and only those you need under a given topic. Select the new parent topic, and you have your metadata columns in the Child pane, for those infoitems of interest and only those.

'Tree columns and filtering' comprise a messy and inefficient procedure when compared to 'cloning and displaying.' Best of all, the feature is available now.

Sorry, that isn't the same thing as seeing the items in their tree structure with the columns. You are still creating a flat view and therefore losing the containment information - which is often (but not always) a critical part of what the user wants.

And personally I think a clean, consistent model for describing how to filter/show the data (tree or no tree, which columns) regardless of display location (left pane, detail pane) is a much cleaner, usable model than specialized panes that act different from each other.

Bonsai supports both filtering to a tree or to flat list. I often use both for different views of the same data. In fact, the lack of a filtered tree view is why I have moved to Bonsai (even though it is missing other things) from UR and from MyLifeOrganized (another place you and I have spent time). And I am very happy I spent the time, because I have confirmed my belief that filtering and multi-column tree views are critical to most of my use cases.

One question: Why do some people want to insert their pet feature into every program they encounter?

I don't know. Why do people assume their own use case is somehow representative of the the entire user base while assuming at the same time that other's are not ?