DEVONthink Pro — henceforth DTP — is one of those Swiss Army Knife applications that is different things to different people. [Note: At one point or another DTP has also been my app for journaling, structured note-taking (even bought a book about it), managing journal references, reading RSS feeds, archiving podcast episodes, batch renaming and automated file wrangling à la Hazel. Phew. ] After a dozen or so years of dabbling, I have pared down its use cases to a single one: managing documents both electronic (office files and emails, mostly) and physical (thanks to the now discontinued but still phenomenal ScanSnap iX500). The only reason I used DTP and not say Finder was its “intelligent” file sorting, or rather sorting recommendations paired with fast search. So, that was the only thing I had to replicate to get my DTP replacement on Linux now that I am making the slow jump.
And with quite a bit from Google Gemini — again — I think I have this one licked:
- Recoll provides full-text search, with consult-recoll for integration with Emacs (yes, it’s Emacs all the way down).
- Dirvish gives a nice 3-pane view of the file structure.
- A custom python script [Note: Note: this is a completely Gemini-generated piece of code. Use at your own risk or better yet ask your favorite LLM to make one for you ] which a) trains itself on the folder and file structure of my “Documents” folder to b) predict correct classification for a single (via Emacs) or a group of files (via command line). Yes, it’s the old-fashioned AI, a.k.a. Machine Learning, which now runs as a once-hourly cron job on my laptop.
- A custom Emacs function that binds the “c” key while in Dirvish — usually while in my “Inbox” folder — to classify a file and move it by TAB-completion; in the case I am not happy with the few folders it recommended I can start typing and it will fuzzy-find what I wanted.
Rube Goldberg-y? Yes. Does it work? By golly, it does. For 95% of things I need it for it works even better and faster than DTP, which required mouse-dragging to move a file whenever I wasn’t happy with the recommended classification. The only wrinkle left to address is naming conflicts: DTP didn’t care if two completely different files had the same name as it had its own way to track them. Trying to copy a file to a folder that already has it right now doesn’t work, but that should be a quick weekend fix.