It would be nice to have some kind of special “front page” or workspace folder, e.g. with articles you are currently working on. More specifically, it should ideally be the first thing to pop up since the “All Articles” tab quickly becomes useless. It would also be nice to have a place where you can e.g. collect articles temporarily before sending a sharing link, without having to mess up your folder structure with temporary files or folders.
A simpler ad hoc solution with much of the same functionality would be to make your starting folder a modifiable setting.
We are very careful not to introduce any new features that impose a specific workflow. Having a label or folder “Workspace” or “Current project” should cover your use case, right?
If the only problem is the default selection and the extra click when you start up Paperpile, a workaround would be to bookmark the URL of your workspace folder or label and use that link when you open Paperpile.
It’s a tradeoff between an extra click and added complexity in the program. But it could be that I missed your actual pain point here. If that’s the case let me know.
It would also be nice to have a place where you can e.g. collect articles temporarily before sending a sharing link, without having to mess up your folder structure with temporary files or folders.
We actually have one dedicated temporary folder for things like that and that’s the ‘Starred’ feature. Could that work for your use case?
One more thing. In case you missed it you can select multiple labels/folder with Shift-click.
So you could change once to your workspace folder and then filter with additional labels/folder in there. Also searching does not remove the selected folder/label.
I’d prefer not to use ‘Starred’ for that since I use that folder for syncing with my tablet.
It’s nice to know that selections are not removed when searching, and you are right I could probably just bookmark the right URL, although that seems a bit clunky. But that should be enough to solve the task I had in mind.
Either way though, I think the current default front page is a bit useless and a step back from the otherwise clean design as there is really no case where showing the entirety of your library is useful or in any way legible, once it grows to be sufficiently large. Although I can see how not having that particular “All Articles” front page would make the design inconsistent with how search/folders/tags otherwise work since it’s a definite must that you should be able to search your library from the front page. I’ll freely admit it’s predominantly a subjective and aesthetic issue.
Well actually the default view shows always those papers you have added last. That’s not by chance and we definitely discussed other options but I still think it’s a good default. But it’s always good to hear other opinions. Because often we stop thinking about possible improvements if nobody complains.