bin-sorting

[wordmuse]

I used a product long ago called MaxThink - back in the days when people thought DOS 3.3 was slick. There is a Windows version, but it doesn't come close to the power of the old version, and I gave up on it when I moved over to Windows.

But I never stopped missing it. It had all kinds of brainstorming tools. One of the best was something called Bin Sorting.

You would select several items in a list of siblings; issue the bin sort command, and the selected items became numbered "bins." You would then select an item that was not a bin, and press a number. That item then was moved as a sub-item of the bin of the same number. This enabled you to construct a list, set up your bins, and consider items one by one and have them moved just by working your keyboard. Using this method, I could make short work of a 5 bin system containing 50+ items to be binned.

If something like this could be put on the roadmap - that would be fantastic.

- Bal

[TimP]

Hi wordmuse,

I was just looking through people's ideas and I like your bin idea. This same feature is used in photo management software, such as Lightroom.

I have a suggestion for you in the mean time: if you don't use them for any other reason, try using flags. You can set them with a single keystroke and then report on them to see the groupings.

[wordmuse]

It's a good idea but I make extensive use of flags for status indicators.

But my work-around is to kind of emulate what MaxThink used to do, which was to put a few equal signs in front of the bin name.

=== bin 1
=== bin 2
=== bin 3

etc.

Then I just drag the items I want to the various bins to then be processed.

It's not as elegant as what I had in the now long-defunct DOS version of MaxThink (the Windows version is so clunky by comparison IMO), but it gets the job done.

- Bal